He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by the angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the World, was taken up in glory. All trauma is preverbal. Do you not remember when I was with you I used to tell you these things? And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work. Shakespeare captures this state of speechless terror in Macbeth, after the murder of king’s body is discovered: “Oh horror! Horror! Horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee! Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!” Under extreme conditions people scream obscenities, call for their mothers, howl in terror, or simply shut down. Victims of assaults and accident sit mute and frozen in emergency rooms; traumatized children lose their tongues and refuse to speak. Photographs of combat soldiers show hollow-eyed men staring mutely into a void. 

The most important imaginative impact that physical nature has on us is a sense of alienation. There is nothing in it that seems intelligent, moral, or specifically responsive to human needs. Man imposes his own way of life on nature, and transforms it into something with a human shape. Even years later, traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies re-experience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past. 

There are in consequence two levels of nature: an upper level of human nature and a lower level of physical nature. We are born into the latter World, but do not really belong to it. It is natural to man to be moral, civilized, and socially disciplined; it is unnatural to him to live like the animals. Man’s present relation to nature can hardly be expressed except by paradox. Certain human qualities, such as the chastity, are natural, on the human level of nature; the innocence with which animals copulate is natural to them, but impossible for human beings. The nature God had originally planned for man was that of the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden: this was lost at the Fall, but in some measure is recreated by the disciplines of civilization, morality, religion, and the arts.

Man is subject to death, and on the physical level of nature there can be no more natural event than death. Yet death was not a part of the order originally planned for man, and in that context death is unnatural, sin is even more so. This does not mean that people cannot talk about tragedy that has befallen them. Sooner or later most survivors, like veterans, come up with what many of them call their cover story that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one’s traumatic experiences into a coherent account—a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  #RyanPhillippe 4 of 6

When words fail, haunting images capture the experience and return as nightmares and flashbacks. In contrast to the deactivation of Broca’s area, in the frontal cortex the brain that plays a critical part in putting our thoughts into words, another region, Broadmann’s area 19 li up in our participants. Brodmann’s area 19 of the brain is a region in the visual cortex that registers images when they first enter the brain. We were surprised to see brain activation in this area so long after the original experience of trauma. Under ordinary conditions, raw images registered in area 19 are rapidly diffused to other brain areas that interpret the meaning of what has been seen. Once again, we were witnessing a brain region rekindled as if the trauma were actually occurring. 

Other unprocessed sense fragments of trauma, like sounds and smells and physical sensations, are also registered separately from the story itself. Similar sensations often trigger a flashback that brings them back into consciousness, apparently unmodified by the passage of time. However, we ought to always thank God for our lives and the people in them because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. Now, may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with you all. How tranquil! How quiet! What silvery moonlight! Where are you, my dear? When can we sit together by the window enjoying this quiet tranquil evening? In my heart there is a secret. It is contained in only four words—I miss you sorely.