There are a great many things done and said in company which a person of virtue will neither see nor hear. There are, however, far more subtle loneliness traps in our society. Not every lonely person is trapped in a career, pursuit of independence, or a love-seeking belief system. Many lonely people are not particularly hung up about these issues. If they only could find the right person with whom they could share their lives, many readily admit that they would give anything. And yet they still find themselves in isolation. My dad is on the telephone. Instead of just talking about work and the weather, as usual, he says: As you get older, you start to wonder about things—why are we here or why there is anything at all. He might be hurt by the thought, though I was intending him no harm at all. He also might get hung up on the logic of there being no isolation in his youth—a fact that is absolutely irrelevant to my fantasy.

Many people find that their fantasies and imaginations have a direct effect on their more rational behaviors, upon problem-solving, upon their creative efforts. One of the most significant characteristics of creative people is an active and fully accepted imagination, one that has full play in their lives. Many discoveries and inventions began as playful gestures, casual and fanciful experiments, fantasy imaginings, which caused the more logical or rational processes to later get into gear. Many people claim to have no waking fantasy life, but most of us admit that we do dream at night. I dream of living in a Victorian house and having my dad as a roommate so I feel safe and do not get caught up on in the wrong things. There is a difference between narrative memory—the stories people tell about trauma—and traumatic memory itself.

Traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much. However, some people have no conscious memory of the trauma they experienced—they cannot tell the story of what had happened. Yet, they are compelled to physically act out the event of a tragic event they suffered. This is known as automatism and it conveys the involuntary, unconscious nature of their actions. For example, a young man was held from behind and then hit in the back of the head once or twice by another person. And sometimes when he was stressed out he would his head and body would move as if the trauma had just happened and he would lose balance. Many people saw this, but when he tried to explain it to the medical doctor, they could not understand what he was talking about and the therapist probably did not have the education to understand.

There is a significant difference between ordinary and traumatic memories. Traumatic memories are precipitated by specific triggers. The traumatic enactment serves no function. It contrast, ordinary memory is adaptive; our stories are flexible and can be modified to fit the circumstances. Ordinary memory is essentially social; it is a story that we tell for a purpose. Perhaps it was the body’s was of begging for justice and revenge. However, there is nothing social about traumatic memory. The rage people have against this young man serves no useful purpose. Reenactments are frozen in time, unchanging, and they are always lonely, humiliating, and alienating experiences. Nothing to make jokes about. It is a form of dissociation to describe the splitting off and isolation of memory imprints, it is the cost of keeping traumatic memories at bay. Some people become attached to an insurmountable obstacle.

Some are unable to integrate their traumatic memories; they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well. It is as if their personality has definitely stopped at a certain point, and cannot enlarge any more by the addition or assimilation of new elements. Unless people become aware of the split-off elements and integrate them into a story that had happened in the past, but was now over, they would experience a slow decline in their personal and professional functioning. This phenomenon has now been well documented in contemporary research. While it is normal to change and distort one’s memories, people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are unable to put the actual event, the source of those memories behind them. Dissociation prevents the trauma from becoming integrated within the conglomerated, ever-shifting store of autobiographical memory, in essence creating a dual memory system.

Normal memory integrates the elements of each experience into the continuous flow of self-experience by a complex process of association; think of a dense but flexible network where each element exerts a subtle influence on many others. However, in the case of this young man, the sensations, thoughts, and emotions of the trauma were stored separately as frozen, barely comprehensible fragments. If the problem with PTSD is dissociation, the goal of treatment would be association: integrating the cut-off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize that that was then, and this is now. However, in this case, it is complex because the media keeps making fun of the young man and even reenacting what happened during his blow to the head and will not stop, pay, nor let him move on, so he keeps going through it. There is a dignity in conscious virtue.