Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your human population, love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God (Jehovah, Allah). The ideal light that you kindle is flame in my mind, which is more brilliant than rosy dawn, stronger than sunshine, more interesting than norther lights.  The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera (the internal organs in the body), in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/body/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions. Not being seen, not being known, and having nowhere to turn to feel safe is devastating at any age, but it is particularly destructive for young children, who are still trying to find their place in the World. This is a difficult concept for many people to understand. The common response to distress is to seek out people we like and trust to help us and give us the courage to go on. We may also calm down by engaging in a physical activity like walking or going for a swim. We start learning these ways of regulating our feelings from the moment someone feeds us when we are hungry, covers us when are cold, or gently holds us when we are hurt or scared.

However, if no one has ever looked at you with loving eyes or broken out in a smile when they see you; if no one has rushed to help you (but instead said: Stop crying, or I will give you something to cry about), then you need to discover other ways of taking care of yourself. You are likely to experiment with anything—drugs, alcohol, binge eating, or cutting—that offers some kind of relief.  People who suffer from trauma and neglect experience an extreme disconnection from the body. Some people cannot feel whole areas of their bodies. Their sensory perceptions simply were not working. People with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often have trouble putting the picture together. When our senses become muffled, we no longer feel fully alive. Some people are surrounded by all that can render life happy and agreeable, still the faculty of enjoyment and of feeling is wanting…Each sense, each part of their proper self, is as it were separated from them and can no longer afford any feeling; this impossibility seems to depend upon a void which the victimized person feels in the front of their head, and due to the diminution of the sensibility over the whole surface of their body, it seems that they never actually reach for objects which they touch. All of this would be a small matter enough, but for its frightful result, which is that of the impossibility of any other kind of feeling and of any sort of enjoyment, although they experience a requirement and desire of them that renders their lives an incomprehensible torture. Many find themselves feeling increasingly encumbered and limited by the interpretations and labels they have accumulated over the years. Rather than feeling more connected with other people and all of life, people who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) feel more fragmented and self-absorbed. These people require space and freedom so they can recognize their fantasies, wishes, requirements, and so forth. The existence and inherent value of this subjective individuality is often taken for granted.