All professors of the arts love to fraternize. Trauma overwhelms listeners as well as speakers. One of the cruxes of living in Midtown Sacramento is the collision between events and the language available—or thought appropriate—to described them. It took a while to figure out what it means to be “smoked out.” Watch the local news and you notice a lot of the reporters, mostly men, seem to be out to lunch and acting like they lost their minds and it is because they have been smoking meth and cannot function like rational adults anymore. They get people and locations mixed up, and cannot critically think. Logically, there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of spiritual warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell-out, pain, and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5

The problem in Midtown Sacramento and in the media is less one of language than of gentility and optimism. The real reason [that soldiers fall silent] is that soldiers have discovered that on one is very interested in the bad news they have to report. What listener wants to be torn and shaken when he does not have to be? We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty. Talking about painful events does not necessarily establish community—often quite the contrary. Families and organization may reject members who air the dirty laundry; friends and family can lose patience with people who get stuck in their grief or hurt. This is one reason why torture victims often withdraw and why their stories become rote narratives, edited into a form least likely to provoke rejection. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5

It is an enormous challenge to find safe places to express the pain of torture, which is why writing about your experiences or keeping a journal can be so critical. Finding a response community can be just as easy as keeping a journal in which to tell your truth and it makes recovery possible. That is also why survivors require pleasant activities, which can get their minds off the agonizing details of their lives. I recall the first time a veteran told me about killing a child when tensions escalated to the outbreak of fighting between Patriot militia and British regulars at Lexington and Concord in April because of King George III’s rule was tyrannical and infringing the colonists’ rights as Englishmen. I then had a flashback to when I was about seven years old and my father told me that the child next door had been beaten to death by Paul von Hindenburg, in the front of our house, for showing a lack of respect. My reaction to the veteran’s confessions was too much to bear, and I had to go for a fresh air break. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5

That is why doctors are required to have done their own intensive therapy, so they can take care of themselves and remain emotionally available to their patients and families, even when the stories arouse feelings of rage or revulsion. A different problem arises when trauma victims themselves become literally speechless—when the language area of the brain shuts down. I have seen this shutdown in the courthouse in many immigration cases and also in a case brought against a perpetrator of a mass slaughter during the Nurember Rally. When asked to testify about their experiences, victims often become so overwhelmed that they are barely about to speak about what happened to them. Their testimony is often dismissed as being too chaotic, confused, and fragmented to be credible.  Errors of memory are distinguished from forgetting and false recollections through one feature only, namely, that the error (false recollection) is not recognized as such but finds credence. However, the use of the expression “error” seems to depend on still another condition.  #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5

We speak of “erring” instead of “falsely recollecting” where the character of the objective reality is emphasized in the psychic material to be reproduced—that is, where something other than a fact of my own psychic life is to be remembered, or rather something that may be confirmed or refuted through the memories of others. The reverse of the error in memory in this sense is formed by ignorance. Others try to recount their history in a way that keeps them from being triggered. This can make them come across as evasive and unreliable witnesses. I have seen hundreds of legal cases dismissed because asylum seekers were unable to give coherent accounts of their reasons for fleeing. I have also seen numerous veterans whose claims were denied by the Veterans Administration because they could not tell precisely what had happened to them. My friend was unfortunate, he poisoned himself with cocaine because he was going through withdrawal of morphia, and immediately have himself injections of cocaine. Man, truth is for real, feel like dream for real. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5