May 15, 2018 | Articles, Culture, Emotional/Spiritual, Trauma
Dr. Gabor Maté: Before the election, leading psychiatrists wrote a letter to President Obama advising him that Trump should undergo a psychological evaluation to see if he would be a danger to the country and the world if he were elected. What’s not talked about is what is behind Trump’s obvious pathology. This pathology includes grandiosity, which he’s clearly got; ADHD, which he’s clearly got; and narcissistic personality disorder, which cannot be diagnosed without a first-hand evaluation, but he does seem to have as well. However, what I have not seen discussed publicly is that underlying these categories of psychiatric diagnosis is actually trauma. Trump is an example of a traumatized child who refuses help.
Apr 21, 2018 | Articles, Emotional/Spiritual, Resilience, Trauma
Reposted from Daily Good Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. is the founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, a professor in the department of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School, and the director of the National Child Traumatic...
Oct 2, 2013 | Emotional/Spiritual
We say that we want to become resilient, but we continue to shut off the heart as if resilience is something that gets engineered in the head. In fact, if resilience doesn’t begin with the heart, we can never become authentically resilient.
Jul 7, 2013 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
Infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide. Industrialization is destroying the world. Resource depletion, pollution, and climate change will make industrial civilization impossible much sooner than is generally admitted. It is traumatic to realize this, and the process involves an intense need to discuss the issue. But the predicament of everyone, the squirrels, the trees, the elephants, all of humankind, the acid oceans caked with plastic — how to discuss all that with oneself or anyone else? Daily there are more people consciously concerned with it, yet most of the discussion happens online, not face to face; in person, with a few exceptions, one simply does not discuss it. To do so reminds people of the terrible danger in which they are already living their everyday lives; it also delivers them over to difficult feelings of helplessness (they cannot stop climate change), humiliation (the “legal person” called Exxon-Mobil is more powerful than mortals can imagine), and anomie (what matters on a doomed world?). Activating those difficult feelings is, at the very least, rude — even if the values of both parties to the conversation are largely in accord. So it costs something to go ahead and disrupt the game and hold forth about the state of our world, so people generally don’t do it.
Apr 15, 2011 | Carolyn's Articles, Emotional/Spiritual
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Mar 17, 2011 | Trauma
While much has been written in the field of psychology about resilience, the disaster environment provides an active and ongoing opportunity to reframe, reorganize and construct new meaning in a compressed timeline. In Japan, the disruption they face challenges, as a society, their capacities to respond to widespread loss of human life, environmental devastation and infrastructure. The sheer magnitude of the natural and man-made catastrophe boggles the mind for those of us who are, for the present, frozen bystanders. While we may share some of the intense anxiety and fear, we cannot grasp the full impact, both physiologically and psychologically to this country.
