Words of Welcome to Readers:

The purpose of this section is to help anyone who believes that he or she may have been the victim of trauma perpetrated by another individual, group, or government.

The trauma might have occurred once (Simple trauma) or over a prolonged period of time (Complex trauma).

Some victims know the traumatizing event and recall it in fragments. Others have symptoms or, more significantly, are impaired in their interpersonal relationships.

In many instances, an atrocity was committed against the individual as a result of caretaker negligence or participation.

I hope to identify the symptoms of both Simple and Complex trauma in a non-technical way, so that victims can understand what occurs in their inner and outer worlds following a sentinel event or series of traumatic events that derail their normal ego-functions.

In order to best serve this educational challenge, I have no allegiance to any particular school of thought. In fact, I would like the reader to view what I say through various trauma paradigms. The educational goal is to take cutting-edge knowledge in the field and bring it to an intelligent reader. Although my personal experience is with a particular population, its relevance has been engaged by the academic world because of its significance cross-culturally.

On this site, I will regularly be introducing major concepts in trauma literature and their relevance to healing. In general, if you were the victim of abuse, neglect, or abandonment by a designated caretaker (e.g., a parent, spouse, community, or law-enforcement agency), you may be able to resonate with each new lesson that appears on this site over the coming weeks and months.

I will begin by identifying the symptoms of trauma. Then I plan to explain the dynamics of the victim-caretaker-predator triad that contributed to, facilitated, or permitted the trauma to occur.

Trauma therapies draw from divergent schools of psychology, and even from Eastern methods of meditation. I plan to bring these various schools and methods to the reader in such a way that they enrich rather than conflict with each other. At times I will attempt to reconcile apparent differences, since the Complex trauma school is new and earlier treatments did not consider that some individuals have been more shattered than others, and need a period of recovery before they can address the trauma.

In other words, trauma is a spectrum and recovery has to be guided to some extent by the victim. I have seen both trainees and non-trauma specialists aggravate symptoms with premature trauma-exposure. In other words victims should not be encouraged to revisit the “crime scene” before they are ready.

The newer therapies recognize that the patient has to narrate the trauma in order to process the material but, at the same time, feel sufficiently safe to do so.