Severe trauma makes one want to crawl under a blanket and lie there, trembling and terrified. If, however, you manage to overcome this understandable impulse, you might find that the trauma has radicalized you, given you a powerful impulse, transformed you into an arrow shot into the skies.
It is fashionable to try to deaden the pain of trauma with psychotropic drugs. This approach denies that tragedy is part of human experience. It castrates survivors, turning them into zombies who reject a big part of their humanity for fear of feeling, living, and being.
There is no life without pain, and hiding from pain in artificial contentment equals a refusal to live.
Tragedy can be transformative, if we allow ourselves to face it.
Clarissa's Blog 
…which was the major frustration in communicating understanding I had whilst writing my thesis. The conventional view is that trauma ALWAYS makes you sick and less perceptive. I kept being taken by surprise by this conventional position to the point that I started to doubt my own perceptions and even my own experiences. It was a weird form of academic gaslighting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8pMpyqpsOs
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