totalitarianism today

Writing outside the mother tongue.

Surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington wrote with both hands, rummaged a foreign langauge to describe the feelings so foreign to her-- the traumas of the second World War. Parul Seghal's essay inspired me to consider the commitments of exophonic writers.

An exophonic writer works outside her mother tongue-- orphaned, somehow. Her first husband, Max Ernst, was sent to concentration camps.

Though the list of exophonic writers is long, reasons for exophonic writing vary by writer. For Nabokov, it was driven by trauma, dislocation, wandering. For Lahiri, it signified and enabled a rebirth. For Cioran, it served as an annihilation of the past. For Beckett, it weakened the affect and purified language. 

I tried to address the instability of exophonic language in "The Story Line", a recent piece for Mutha Magazine:

My parents defected from Ceausescu’s Romania. The defectors never stop concocting huge, impossible dreams, what they would do if they had time and money.

Somehow, they make both. You grow on sailboats and ski slopes wearing hand-me-down gloves with adult turtlenecks tucked into four pairs of leggings. In the lift line, skiers gawk at your unsportsmanlike clothing. Some point and stare.

The defectors pretend not to notice. They speak in Romanian, their hands fisting around ski poles. “It’s not polite to point,” my mother whispers. Pointing is a way to get attention; to decide who is strange and who stands out. You notice most pointers were born in America. They are free to raise a finger, free to flock and coalesce into cliques. They turn into hordes of toothy mammals, choired crowds, feathered giggle.

The girls giggle in unison.

How many times, how many places, do the girls giggle in unison?

The girls: everything they feel exists in one common, public language. Your feelings, on the other hand, are hard, kerneled secrets.

In a sense, writing in Romanian is my ongoing "coliva". I bake draft after draft, knowing the cake need not rise.

A collage conversation on autofiction and writers using writers.

Good recommendations for #autofiction reading?

— alina stefanescu (@aliner) May 15, 2017

Joe Bunting: 

Autofiction is a term used in literary criticism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography. That’s the strict meaning of the word. It can also refer to fictionalizing a real event of the writer’s life.

Alina: 

In attempting to write the physical condition of pregnancy, I keep running into the epistemological limitations imposed by masculine bodies. Perhaps prose poetry is a form equipped to manage these epistemic challenges. 

Barbara Browning on Ben Lerner:

    We both had an approach to autofiction that drew attention to its own devices.

Barbara Browning:

I’ve found that most people like being fictionalized. More often, the anxiety they express is that after they’ve been written into a novel, I’ll somehow be “done” with them—but for me, writing someone into a novel is never about forgetting them. If anything, it’s a way for me to hold on to people I love.

Rebecca Miller:

I think perhaps the idea of the writer as someone who "uses" people is itself suspect. It makes the writer into a sort of predator—maybe even an abuser—whereas what you seem to be saying is that writing about someone or incorporating aspects of them into fiction is very often an expression of love, as it surely is when I write about you or aspects of you. But I think that a kind of love can be expressed even when the person is not painted in a totally flattering light. Under the umbrella of "love" in this case I'm including attention, focus, fascination, and the warmer aspects of the emotion. Writing is a way of connecting to people, and the writer sculpts in flesh. We only have other people, the sensual world, to clothe our ideas in.

Samuel R. Delany:

You have to remember there’s always what’s said and then there’s what happens. And there’s always a discrepancy between them.

Karl Ove Knausgaard:

…the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined my efforts.

Alina:

The gap between the male body and the female body is, in many ways, unbridgeable. I understand male resentment on they front-- to bear a body that bears only possibility, reliant on permission. The performative aspect of pregnancy fascinates me-- the difference between a wanted pregnancy and an unwanted approximates the value of the female body as desired or undesired. That's why the Women's March read like an auto-fiction. There were so many male bodies standing in for pregnant female bodies, filling in the imaginative gaps, performing resistance (and-- somehow) pregnancy.

Juliet Jacques:

There’s a really long history of trans people writing memoir that goes back as far as the earliest sex-reassignment surgeries, like Lili Elbe, who died in the course of an operation in 1931. A couple of years after her death an autobiography came out, called Man into Woman. That’s quite an interesting text in itself because the central character has a male pseudonym and a female pseudonym that weren’t the names Lili Elbe used either pre- or post-transition. Then it’s edited by someone called Niels Hoyer, which is in itself a pseudonym. So you have this text that’s gone through several layers of authorship and editorship, and no-one will put their name to it.

Alina: 

Twice he asked her to cancel the gym membership because he’d read a story in which a hallway of mirrors stole a girl’s image from her body and gave it to others. He wanted her image to be something between them. He didn’t want others to imagine the wench.

Jeff Jackson:

In fiction, I believe that the only truth and reality that matter are the words on the page. Events may or may not have transpired from real life, but the words themselves represent the only authenticity. So it’s not about shame and honesty—in fact, honesty is a word whose usefulness starts to vaporize in the context of a novel. In the realm of the imagination, the facts hold no currency. 

Alina:

I don't think Christ ever mentioned a fetus. The fictionalizing of an anti-abortion Jesus is the greatest heresy of the age. A blockbuster. 

Barbara Browning:

All you have to do is walk into a bar and have somebody start telling you the story of their life to realize that everybody, to some degree, is an unreliable narrator—especially of him or herself. I try very hard to be honest in my fiction, again not because I find that morally superior but because it interests me, what that means, to try to be honest in fiction. I talk about that in this book—that is, the narrator explains to someone who’s lied to her, “Even in my fiction, if I say, ‘This really happened,’ then it’s true. It really happened.” If she tells you something that didn’t happen, she says, “This is fiction.”

Alina:

On the porch, her husband flaps his hands and mimicks bird calls as a substitute for the emoticon she might have glimpsed of him on screen. She is not allowed to see his emoticons, as a man's emoticons must remain private.

Notebook, 4-14-2017: empathy for assholes.

 

Mark Greif is writing a book about pornography. I can't wait to run my highlighter through its syntax. That's the ray of light right now as we attempt to subject the Objectivist's alternate reality. 

To stand in a gas station line in Alabama is to be confronted with a plethora of smug assholes-- in the flesh, behind the counter, in newspaper print.

Recently, I read an explication of assholes rooted in Kantian ethics and game theory. Aaron James was the author. He said things like:

Our theory is simply this: a person counts as an asshole when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people. 

The asshole "feels indignant when questions about his conduct are raised." He might rationalize or excuse the conduct but never apologize for it because he does not believe he should have acted differently. What he believes is that others should respond in a way that doesn't question his entitlement.

If reflection is for most people an important source of moral learning, the asshole puts reflection mainly in the service of assuring himself. This leaves him quite impervious to reform.

Assholes tend to be handled with the personal pronoun, "he"-- though James makes an exception for Ann Coulter. James' book was published in 2012. At the time, he made reference to multiple assholes characterized by their unrepentant sense of entitlement, including Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, and the louche formerly known as Donald Trump.

If someone treats you disrespectfully or speaks unkindly about you, remember that he or she does so from [his or her] impression that it is right to do so. It is unrealistic to expect that this person sees you as you see yourself. If another person reaches conclusions based on false impressions, he or she is the one hurt rather than you, because it is that person who is misguided.

The true asshole is culturally tone-deaf. Contra the Aspie, the asshole frequently insists on his right and rightness in tone-deaf statements. Think Jerry Falwell after September 11th or Trump about anything. It's late. We have a lousy president supported by Republican cowards. We have friends who have begun to call themselves "Western Chauvinists." Honestly, I can only consider assholes for so long before the maternal urge kicks in. As any mother knows, the maternal urge is an exercise in futility engendered by a lack of control over details. 

"The desire for this kind of freedom subsumed every other...."

The crime of sex was like guilt by association-- not visible to the eye of the outsider, but an act that could be rather easily conjectured. Consequences would make it manifest...

He was the concrete embodiment on my more abstract desire to be "free". By which I meant-- if I'd been pressed to admit it-- sexually free. The desire for this kind of freedom subsumed every other. 

Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

 

I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.

Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

 

And "Why I Like Complicated Positions", courtesy of [b]oink.

Insomnia: Authors and artists for whom the moon is a harsh mistress.

Insomnia by Kristie Holiday

"Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with
posters advertising faraway places." 
Charles Simic

Since adolescence, insomnia has been a dear friend to me. While questioning its utility in making me a successful member of our so-called world, it certainly makes for unexpected reveries and unlikely mental pairings. 

I've often wondered how other people cope with their insomnia- those who don't take sleeping pills to medicate their way through it. Like Jon Stewart, I've often felt "insomnia is my greatest inspiration". But there are other voices to consider.

For Louis-Ferdinand Celine, insomnia plays the role of mentor:

"My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line." 

David Benioff expresses the tinge of envy that insomniacs feel for those who find success in counting sheep:

"I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed." 

The Sloping Midnight Line by Carson Ellis

Jonathan Lethem points towards the pathos and pathology of insomnia, the way it feels self-defeating:

"Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off." 

Stephen Goodwin  finds opportunities nestled within his sleepness nights:

"So I just live with my insomnia. I do crossword puzzles, or wander out to the music room and fool around on the piano, or read. Those late hours when the world is completely still, when the only sound is the rustle of the air in the vents and the wind visiting the trees outside, when the darkness is tucked tight around the house and you feel as life itself the movements of your own consciousness-these are wonderful hours to read. There is no interruption."

Leonard Cohen admits the unspoken elitism, the extent to which many of us feel we have been chosen for better things than mere sleep:

"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."

Insomnia by Jeff Wall

In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov applies his usual elitism to his lifelong insomnia, deciding that sleeping is for the simple-minded:

“All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanour, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest euthanasium; but I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.”

Chuck Palahniuk's fictional description of insomnia carries a whiff of the autobiographical:

"With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy." 

Cathy Ostlere fondles the extent to which insomina deprives us of the assumption of sanity:

"Women can go mad with insomnia.The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird -- a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home.

Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one." 

Michaux and his wife on Mont Joly by Brassai

Emil Cioran ponders the extent to which insomnia may result in an entitlement complex of sorts, one which depends on tending and overlooking nonfunctional behaviors:

"Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself." 

Perhaps Barbara Kingsolver is the one who describes it best. Her analogy encapsulates what insomnia does to my head, and how it carries within it the potential for a more destructive restlessness:

"Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on." 

Alas, the insomniac is guilty of unspeakable infidelities. How can I ever declare having lost sleep for love of a man when my sleeplessness is unrelated to events in the world? And how can I explain the wild thoughts that come to me at 2:45 am without implicating myself in the fact of having thought them? 

Maybe this shared guilt- this sneaking suspicion of self- is what makes meeting a fellow insomniac such a soothing pleasure. "Do you medicate?" being the question that begs asking. Kindred spirits of the secret midnight cabal, we are guilty of things beyond blurred vision and bloodshot eyes. We are guilty of things you will never be so sleep-deprived as to imagine. 

"Call me a sinner,
Mock me maliciously:
I was your insomnia,
I was your grief." 
Anna Akhmatova

Jon Cloud explores whether science
can prevent nightmares.

Insomnia as a route to existential
meaning and early death.

Steven Rose's skepticism about neuro-education models.

According to neuro-enthusiasts, Steven Rose is "neuroeducation skeptic". Being a skeptic just means that you have formulated a set of well-considered reasons for declining to drink the Kool-Aid just yet. One of Rose's most interesting arguments is not even an argument so much as it is a semantic quibble.

To a girl who believes semantic quibbles lie at the heart of everything from peace in the Middle East to craft beer preferences, Rose's description of the mereological fallacy is rather exciting and fraught with possibility. After dismantling the left/right brain "neuromyth", Rose writes:

Children from poorer families (or as the literature more demurely puts it, of low socioeconomic status) may generally have a more restricted vocabulary than their wealthier peers – although this has been vigorously contested – but subjecting them to imaging or measuring their electrical event-related potentials (ERPs) to demonstrate that this difference may be reflected in brain processes might seem to add insult to injury. And when cognitive neuroscientists claim that poverty impedes cognitive function (the title of a recent paper in Science) or that one way to lift people out of poverty is to use cognitive behavioural therapy to improve their “mental capital” (“conceived metaphorically”, according to psychologist Cary Cooper, “as the bank account of the mind, which is debited or credited throughout the life course, from childhood to old age”), it shows a certain disconnect with the economic forces currently driving people into poverty.

There’s another problem here, a manifestation of the common tendency among neuroscientists to commit what philosophers call the mereological fallacy, which broadly means ascribing the properties of the whole – in neuroscience terms, the living, conscious human being – to a part of that whole, ie, the brain. Thus, an accessible and widely read introduction to the brain and its study by two leading researchers, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Uta Frith, is called The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education (2005), and its chapter heads include “the mathematical brain” and “the literate brain”. Common usage, but as I am sure both authors would agree, it isn’t brains that learn, are mathematical or literate; it is their owners who use their brains to learn, do maths or whatever. (I know I am putting my own head on the block here – many years ago, in the early 1970s, I wrote a book called, in my youthful certainty, The Conscious Brain. But I have reformed.) This is, I think, more than a semantic quibble, because such titles reflect the way that we neuroscientists tend to think and encourage others to think likewise.

Professor Rose is clearly out of fashion. Acknowledging the extent to which the reigning pet scientific theory drives the selection of questions and research results is not common practice among scientists hoping to score research grant funding.

Ultimately, I agree with Rose's skepticism. But it's more than intellectual accord. You see, I admire the way Rose wears the chartreuse mottled tie tucked into his dress-shirt pocket in a room filled with elegant men and women modeling various shades of gray. I like the way he stands out and keeps it shameless.

Judith Herman's insights on PTSD, revisited.

Artist Frida Kahlo dealt with chronic pain from a train accident and childhood polio. For her, art provided a form of liberation from her physical body. (Source)

First published in 1990, Judith Lewis Herman's Trauma and Recovery is a cornerstone publication in the field of post-trauma studies. Her appreciation for the extent to which reality is socially constructed enabled Herman to step outside the presumptions of her own academic field and examine the similarities in post-trauma experience for war veterans and rape victims- groups usually standing on other sides of the fence. 

“Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.” 

Though Herman's experiencea as a physician and therapist led her to coin "Complex PTSD" in 1992, the diagnosis is not one that insurance companies are likely embrace. This is because Complex PTSD acknowledges the ongoing, lifelong impact of trauma on victims of repetitive trauma. When your trauma is as constant and reliable as a paycheck, it takes more than a few months to treat its symptoms and overcome its crippling effects.

Currently, the APA includes a diagnosis of PTSD recently updated to include a subdiagnosis of complex trauma. Perhaps the drastic increase in treatment and therapy needs for recent veterans has drawn a bright arrow between more frequent, prolonged tours of duty and a more complex, intractable form of PTSD. I refuse to thank the Bush administration for their silence and complicity in this matter.

Nicolas Lampert's contribution to "Operation Exposure- War Is Trauma". (From Justseeds)

An Australian veteran and co-founder of the MyPTSD website addresses the issues of including dissociative and borderline personality disorders in the updated PTSD diagnosis:

The reason a dissociative and/or personality disorder is often present in those with complex trauma is that the perceptions of reality after enduring prolonged trauma are radically altered. This perception is much different than the reality perceived without prolonged trauma. Reality becomes torn, molded, and shaped to fit within a traumatic atmosphere. Due to longevity and exposure, this distorted picture of reality becomes normalized for the patient who experiences complex trauma.

Given the stigma associated with BPD, few psychiatrists are willing to touch patients tarred and feathered by this diagnostic brush. I've even spoken to a few psychiatrists who refuse to take on patients with bordeline-related diagnoses because "those patients are always very manipulative and dangerous". [The MyPTSD website suggests the "fail-safe for CPTSD is Disorders of Extreme Stress, Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS)", since it enlarges treatment opportunities and reduces the negative associations which our brains tend to turn into facts (per Daniel Kahneman's "Type I thinking" rubric). 

What Herman calls "the social ecology of prolonged and repeated interpersonal trauma" is central in grasping the intricacies of complex trauma. As distinguised from other forms of trauma, complex trauma is "always embedded in a social structure that permits the abuse and exploitation of a subordinate group". In addition, Herman suggests that complex trauma "is always relational". This means that the trauma takes place while the victim is "in a state of captivity, under the control and domination of the perpetrator". 

Complex trauma is more likely to result from spousal rape than stranger rape due to the entangling, continuous nature of the relationships involved. Trauma experienced at the hands of those who are most perceived to control a social unit (family, community, etc.)- trauma that recurs and repeats, weaving itself into the fabric of distorted relationships- is likely to fall under the Complex PTSD description.

For Herman, treating victims of complex trauma has been complicated by professional, political, and social limitations. In an interview with Harry Kreisler more than twenty years ago, Herman expressed, again, her frustration and wariness of the usual "boxes":

....psychology is a very soft science. That's putting it at its most charitable light. What one observes about human behavior, human consciousness, human relationships is so embedded ... what we observe and how we conceptualize what we observe is so embedded in the context of what we're looking for. And how we name it. This isn't physics. So that even the paying of attention, the selection of what it is that we're going to consider interesting and significant in human behavior is formed by the social and political context that we're embedded in. And I think that's particularly true about the emotions related to power and control, the emotions related to one's place in society, one's place in the family, the emotions of shame, of resentment, of pride, of a sense of legitimacy or illegitimacy. So, even to pay attention to what women say about sex, motherhood, relationships, depends so much on what one thinks a woman ought to be saying, ought to be feeling, on what is legitimate to express. Unless you have a political movement that says, "Forget what everybody else thinks you ought to be feeling, what you ought to be saying. Get down to it. Tell the truth. What did you actually think and feel and notice in your body." You need a safe space to be able to do that. You need a political context to be able to do that.

Herman's wariness comes not from personal inclinations but from the way in which silence and secrecy conspire against the recovery from trauma. Silence is collusion- it is the obvious social mechanism of compliance and the cause of what we call "complicity".

When the cost for telling the truth is socially hazardous, the majority of people will convince themselves there is "nothing" they can "do". Think of the "ordinary men" when became Nazis; the collaborators under Ceausescu's brutal regime; the consumers of American war porn; the frightened wife of the child molester- all those who prefer to deny the truth they know so they can secure the security inherent in keeping things as they are. 

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.” (Judith Herman)

"To study psychological trauma," Herman writes, "means bearing witness to horrible events." Psychologists devoted to helping patients with PTSD find their hands tied. They can't gain or expect "respect" for studying a subject that most people would rather deny. In addition, the dominant social fear of being labelled a "victim"- and they way in which this fear undercuts a trauma victim's ability to acknowledge their own experiences- keeps both victims and perpetrators in the dark about the consequences of their actions. 

There is no escape from the event/s- or from the convoluted forms in which its memories are encoded. There is no part of life that it leaves untouched. In Herman's words:

"The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma."

Since "the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness", speaking the truth- naming the experience- is part of regaining control of one's life. But the cost of rocking the boat often involves being thrown into the water.

"Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word "unspeakable".... Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried....Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.... When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom...."

"In the telling, the trauma becomes a testimony,"  writes Herman. But this testimony is not of the sort best articulated in the context of the adversarial court system. Herman's insight on rape, sexual violence, and the courts:

“The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.” 

If you know a victim of trauma who refuses to acknowledge it's hold on their lives (possibly by self-medicating with alcohol), don't kid yourself about the benefits of letting the past lie dormant. Seeking help and reclaiming the narrative thread of their lives will not restore their innocence of faith in the world. The most it can do is allow them to speak without shame- to acknowledge and honor themselves, to inhabit a world that long threatened to annihilate them. Herman's story offers hope without promising restoration.

Because "traumatized people suffer damage to the basic structures of the self', they find it almost impossible to truth themselves, their lovers, their family, their friends, their co-drinkers at the tailgating party, and their God. The pre-trauma trust and ease is an impossible wish. Given that "the identity they have formed prior to the trauma is irrevocably destroyed," they must learn to live in a world they KNOW is hostile and humiliating. The manner in which this struggle works itself out for each individual deserves our respect and encouragement. Likewise, the extent to which we complain about "women who wanted it" or glorify the beauty of war to recent veterans makes us complicit in their continued oppression. 

HUMANE RESOURCES FOR COMPLEX PTSD

Real Warriors (geared towards veterans & families)
National Center for PTSD (US Veterans Administration)
National Child Traumatic Stress Network
The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (the South African experience)
When a loved one has been traumatized (ISTSS)
Trauma and relationships (ISTSS)
Children and trauma (ISTSS)
Gift From Within (a nonprofit for victims of trauma)
Trauma Center (Justice Resource Institute)