Understanding Trauma

Janina Fisher, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors

“If the brain and body are inherently adaptive, then the legacy of trauma response must also reflect an attempt at adaptation, rather than evidence of pathology. Through that neurobiological lens, what appears clinically as stuckness and resistance, untreatable diagnoses, or character-disordered behavior simply represent how an individual’s mind and body adapted to a dangerous world in which the only “protection” was the very same caretaker who endangered him or her. Each symptom was an ingenious solution by the body to create some semblance of safety for the developing child or endangered adult. The trauma-related issues with which the client present for help, I now believe, are in truth a “red badge of courage” that tells the story of what happened even more eloquently than the events each individual consciously remembers.”