Wake Of Trauma Research Articles

Archive, Architecture, and the Politics of Memory in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities 12 and Antiochus III’s Edicts for Jerusalem

Abstract The essay analyzes the edicts of Antiochus III concerning Jerusalem (Ant. 12.138–46) within two contextual horizons: Ant. 12 and Jerusalem after the Fifth Syrian War. A dichotomous understanding of resistance and collaboration is inadequate to explain the dossier’s functions. Between these poles were mediation, survival, reassembly, and redrawing of boundaries. A key to each was reshaping of political memory. In Ant. 12 the dossier contributed to an archival record of benefaction, loyalty, and respect that provided precedent and warrant for imperial grant of honor, status, and privileges to Judeans in the Roman empire. In the context of Jerusalem after the Fifth Syrian War, the edicts aimed to assert material evidence of imperial beneficence and glory in place of imperial aggression and the ravages of war. They also helped position Jerusalem within the empire’s provincial urban network and furnished a script for local agency and resilience in the wake of trauma.

"He Has Rescued Me from Danger"

The Ethio-South Sudanese border is characterized by instability and conflict. Most populations in this area have experienced violence and displacement and face ongoing insecurity and political inequality. During my fieldwork in the region, several composers gave accounts of how composing and singing Christian songs provided them with comfort and hope in times of hardship, particularly following episodes of violence. Using ethnographic research and interviews as primary methodologies, this article explores how these individuals use religious music-making as a means of coping and resilience in the wake of trauma. The primary goal of this article is to provide a platform for their stories. The secondary goal is to explore resonances between their accounts and scholarly observations about potential roles of music-making in trauma resilience across disciplines. I focus particularly on themes of embodied music-making, community connection, and spirituality. All point to the same phenomenon: that music can play a role in human resilience and meaning-making. Finally, I make suggestions on how to enhance mental health care in culturally-relevant ways in a religious society such as in Ethiopia, as well as draw out cross-cultural implications for mental health care in the western system.

The genetic and somatic expressions of trauma: A review of pathology and treatment

Traumatic experiences change one’s orientation to self, others, and the environment. In the wake of trauma, survivors are besieged by powerful emotions, sensations, and memories as they adapt to a new and unwanted reality. Chronic recall of disorganized traumatic memory engenders a myriad of unpleasant psychological and somatic responses. Confrontation with an overwhelming experience from which escape is not possible will challenge and change the way the brain communicates- both with itself and other parts of the body. While quickly adapting to environment and experience, what the brain is designed to do, in the presence of trauma, the brain is concurrently trying to find a way to internally escape the external environment. The symptoms that present secondary to PTSD are compulsory and biological, making traditional psychotherapy practices limiting as they do not resolve neurological conflicts in brain synapses or brain communication. This work explores the implications of trauma, innovative treatment modalities, and the genetic expression of PTSD.

Dating in the Wake of Trauma and Abuse: Relationship Experiences of Individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

ABSTRACT The present qualitative study examined social media posts about dating from individuals who identify as living with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). The research examined 96 posts from public online communities on Reddit from 93 adults who self-identify as having PTSD. The content of examined posts related to romantic relationships. Characteristics of community responses to these posts were also examined to gain insight into the potential benefits of online communities for individuals with PTSD and dating concerns. Thematic analysis of posts from these trauma survivors identified eight overarching themes (Closeness and Intimacy, Survivor Perspective on Partner Attributes, Communication, Space for Partner Emotions and Experiences, Perceived Barriers in Relationships, Feeling Triggered by Current Partner, Seeking Information and Community, and Relationship Dynamics and Patterns) relevant to PTSD and dating. Implications of present findings for future research and practice are discussed.

Alternative Patterns of Literary Progress: Writing about Rwanda in the Wake of Trauma

This article discusses three books about the 1994 genocide against Rwandan Tutsis, all of which belong to the “Writing as a Duty to Memory” project: two novels by Boubacar Boris Diop and Abdourahman Waberi respectively, and a travel journal by Véronique Tadjo. It looks at the performance of a new sense of community after a traumatic event which invalidated traditional notions of ethnicity, national unity and historical continuity, contrasting the social and ethical function assigned to storytelling in the wake of genocide with the description of politically engaged, marginal literatures in the work of Pascale Casanova, as well as Franco Moretti’s distinction between premodern and modern literature. More precisely, the Rwandan case presents an alternative to the teleological patterns of literary evolution drawn by some World Literature scholars, as this moment in literary history was shaped by collective trauma and ethical imperatives rather than Rwanda’s peripheral status in the literary world-system or its so-called “delay” in terms of written culture.

Moving Forward Through the Pandemic With Strength, Resilience, and Adaptation in Academic Medicine.

Moving Forward Through the Pandemic With Strength, Resilience, and Adaptation in Academic Medicine.

Dreams, Doors, and Death: Exploring Liminal Space and Mortality in Exit West and The Farming of Bones

Oftentimes, the most complicated narratives challenge the permanence of death by emphasizing the impermanence of the human experience. This is frequently accomplished through the creation of liminal spaces in text, which become almost purgatorial in their function. Here, characters choose to confront and embrace the inevitability of death or to reemerge into life. In Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, the linear historical narrative her main character Amabelle creates is interspersed with bolded sequences that draw from both her memories and her dreams. In order to come to terms with the trauma of the Haitian Massacre, these chapters communicate Amabelle’s physical and psychological turmoil. Similarly, Moshin Hamid’s Exit West centers on refugees Nadia and Saeed's multiple passages through doors blackened by the sudden, spontaneous creation of international portals. As the couple moves through several doors and across several borders, their relationship to each other and themselves constantly evolves. Amabelle’s dreams are manifestations of her acceptance of death and embrace of her mortality, while the portal-doors function as avenues for rebirth. Thus, Hamid and Danticat explore the complicated relationship human beings have with death and mortality in the wake of trauma through their rich descriptions of liminal space.

Treating eating disorders in the wake of trauma

Eating disorders (eg, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder) are serious psychiatric conditions, which are characterised by the overconsumption or underconsumption of food and are commonly accompanied by disturbances in body image. In addition to their impact on patients' quality of life, eating disorders are associated with substantial medical and psychiatric comorbidity and carry one of the highest mortality rates of any mental illness, in part due to the increased risk for suicide. Unfortunately, existing treatments for eating disorders often fail to achieve lasting remission or recovery, highlighting the need for improved intervention approaches to address identified risk and maintenance factors. Furthermore, as adolescence represents a key risk period for the development of these disorders, interventions that target or might be adapted for this age range are critically important.

Religious and spiritual struggles and coping amidst the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative study.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect countless individuals. Traumatic events like COVID-19 can often lead to significant resource loss and negatively affect mental health. As a result, people often go through various types of struggles, including those that are religious or spiritual (e.g., existential doubt). Also, in the wake of trauma, people often try to engage in coping strategies, including drawing on religious or spiritual resources, to work through negative emotions in the face of adversity. The current qualitative study explored religious and spiritual struggles and coping strategies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants (N = 172) described the types of religious and spiritual struggles they experienced, as well as the types of coping strategies they engaged in. Four themes of religious and spiritual struggles emerged: interpersonal struggles, moral struggles, doubt struggles, and ultimate meaning struggles. Four themes of coping strategies emerged: psychological coping, health-related coping, religious/spiritual (R/S) coping, and interpersonal/social coping. These themes suggested a wide range of R/S struggles and coping strategies and provided implications for the intersection between R/S and trauma as well as patterns of coping in a pandemic context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

Heterosexual Plots and Ill Narratives in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Heterosexual Plots and Ill Narratives in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Hannah Chaskin (bio) Angry at Fitzwilliam Darcy for his role in disrupting her sister's courtship, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice (1813) looks on his alleged intended with a sarcastic bite in her voice: "I like her appearance. … She looks sickly and cross.—Yes, she will do for him very well. She will make him a proper wife."1 The "sickly and cross" woman is Anne de Bourgh, cousin of Darcy and daughter of the overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In the context of Pride and Prejudice's primary marriage plot, Anne is Elizabeth's most direct structural foil: both are imagined as potential future wives for Darcy. Yet Anne is not a real obstacle to Elizabeth's ultimate success; she exists in the narrative primarily to delineate the difference between the marriage of interest (in which Darcy marries Anne to consolidate his wealth) and the companionate marriage, or marriage for love (in which Darcy and Elizabeth enter into a partnership based on mutual esteem and compatible personalities). The novel's critique of aristocratic greed and the marriage of interest is figured through Anne's under-defined illness; her elitism and her illness are conflated, as though "sickly" and "cross" are synonymous. This essay concerns the roles of sickness and health in the construction of Pride and Prejudice's heterosexual marriage plot. My title pays homage to Marilyn Farwell's work of queer feminist narratology, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, in which Farwell argues that normative narrative [End Page 313] structure "encode[s] heterosexuality … in its very mechanics."2 I will suggest that the mechanics of Austen's most influential marriage plot operate by deploying an idealized femininity that is essentially healthy and by defining ill femininity as narratively unviable. We are generally accustomed to a gendered ideology that understands dependency, passivity, and femininity to be interlocking terms that are set against self-sufficiency, agency, and masculinity. It is not, therefore, surprising that a propensity towards illness has often been conceived of as a feminine trait. Symptoms of specific illnesses, like consumption, intersect with norms of feminine beauty, and sentimental literature often represents acute or fatal illness in the wake of trauma as indicative of feminine virtue.3 However, by the end of the eighteenth century, feminist critiques of sentimental femininity were becoming prevalent, and these critiques were often framed in terms of illness and illness's effect on companionate heterosexuality. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, indicted a system of sentimental education designed to keep upper-class white women weak, beautiful, and essentially ill. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argues that due to "inattention to health during infancy … dependence of body naturally produces dependence of mind; and how can she be a good wife or mother, the greater part of whose time is employed to guard against or endure sickliness?"4 Wollstonecraft and Austen are often cast as political foils, but Pride and Prejudice manifests Vindication's pathologizing strategy to critique sentimental, aristocratic femininity, with the result that it paints healthy and resilient femininity as essential to the companionate marriage plot. All of Austen's novels are invested in exploring the lines between health and illness, and between illness and character flaw.5 I focus on Pride and Prejudice in this essay because the relationship between the healthy heroine and the ill foil is so stark and so central to the plot itself and because it is perhaps the most influential of Austen's novels, insofar as it provided both plot and character types that have become ubiquitous in Anglo-American culture. If we accept that Pride and Prejudice has had an outsized role in the replication of what we now call the romantic comedy, the fact that Austen understood narrative structure through the lens of health and illness matters. While Austen's novels do not evince uncomplicated relationships to their own marriage plots, it is the narrative and characterological structures—often flattened out or simplified—that have made their way through the centuries in many forms. These structures have impacted our modern assumptions about the role of health and wellness in happy...

Origen’s Story: Heresy, Book Production, and Monastic Reform at Saint-Laurent de Liège

Origen’s Story: Heresy, Book Production, and Monastic Reform at Saint-Laurent de Liège

Religious change after a traumatic event within a Christian population

ABSTRACT An emerging area of research on religion and trauma has documented religious change in the wake of trauma, with some individuals casting doubt on their faith and others renewing their investment. However, the cognitive processes involved in faith change remain unclear. This study addresses this gap in the literature through in-depth interviews with 11 participants who experienced changes in their religiosity as a result of a traumatic experience. Data was analysed thematically using the grounded theory approach. Findings indicated that participants engaged in the cognitive process of faith change that generally followed one of three paths: weakening of faith, strengthening of faith, and developing an individual spirituality.

Tattoos in the Wake of Trauma: Transforming Personal Stories of Suffering into Public Stories of Coping

ABSTRACT Growing numbers of trauma survivors have chosen to cope with their ongoing invisible wounds through tattooing their bodies. This phenomenon includes individuals as well as organized and documented projects held in public spaces. The topic of body modification through tattoos has benefited from an explosion in academic interest; however, there has been little scholarly attention directed at examining how tattoo practices may be understood as a means of coping with trauma within a contemporary cultural context. While drawing on psychological and cultural studies’ perspectives we explored the meanings attributed to tattoos by trauma survivors. Analyzing documented personal accounts of tattooed survivors in different countries, we illustrated how being tattooed appears to be a personal way of coping with trauma as well as a cultural practice of meaning making. The meanings attributed by trauma survivors’ included: exposing their trauma for recognition, witnessing, meaningfulness of the tattoo, connection, control, and transformation. The meaning-making process appears to be continuous and dynamic, shaped by psychological responses, social interactions, and cultural narratives.

The truth about cognitive impairment in functional motor symptoms: An experimental deception study with the Guilty Knowledge Task

BackgroundA century ago, Janet was the first to conceptualize conversion reactions as having a neurocognitive component, as disorders of memory processing that arise in the wake of trauma. The available evidence suggests that this impairment might arise from dysfunction in the fronto-subcortical circuits. Our aim was to examine the cognitive functions regulating deception in patients with functional motor symptoms (FMS), using a computerised task, the Guilty Knowledge Task (GKT). We also tested a group of healthy subjects (HS) as a control group. Materials and methodsThirteen patients affected by FMS and 14 HS underwent a modified version of the GKT, a computer-controlled procedure used to detect truthful and deceptive responses. All participants were also screened for depression, anxiety, alexithymia and for moral sense (moral judgment task). ResultsThe reaction times (RTs) were significantly longer for lie responses than for true responses (F(1,26) = 50.47; p < 0.001) in the two groups. Total RTs were significantly longer for patients with FMS than for HS, in true responses (F(1,25) = 4,36; p = 0.047) and lie responses (F(1,25) = 4.26; p = 0.05). No differences were found between the two groups for accuracy in producing true responses (F(1,25) = 0.09, p = 0.77), and lie responses (F(1,25) = 0,12, p = 0.73. ConclusionsWhen tested with the GKT, patients with FMS were slower than HS in producing truthful and lying responses. Current knowledge along with our new findings in patients with FMS – possibly arising from individually unrecognised extremely mild, cognitive difficulties – should help in designing specific rehabilitative programmes to improve cognitive and behavioural disturbances in these patients.

In the Wake of Trauma

In the Wake of Trauma Ashley Hope Pérez (bio) The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir Thi Bui Harry N. Abrams https://www.abramsbooks.com 336 pages; Print $26.99 The Best We Could Do draws readers into the often unspoken pain of growing up in the wake of the traumas that Thi Bui and her family endured during and after the Vietnam War. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography and already translated into Spanish and Italian, Bui’s haunting memoir contributes a visually complex graphic narrative to the emerging genre of refugee literature. Click for larger view View full resolution In 1978, after fleeing from Vietnam to Malaysia, the Bui family was relocated to Chicago in a matter of months thanks to the help of a sponsoring family. This historical depiction of a refugee experience stands in stark contrast to the reality of the world’s more than 22 million refugees seeking asylum today, the vast majority of whom will not achieve resettlement in their lifetimes. In the face of this staggering reality, the events depicted in The Best We Can Do seem to offer the consolation of particularity: in it, we track how one family persists, contorts, and reconstitutes itself despite experiences of abandonment, hunger, displacement, and crippling uncertainty. But Bui complicates this consolation by confronting readers with the human cost of war and the long shadow that it casts in the lives of the “lucky” ones who, like her family, escaped Vietnam and avoided decades of languishing in refugee camps and other spaces of detainment. The memoir begins with a full-page image of a pregnant belly seen from above. Meeting our narrator in childbirth is apt, given that becoming a mother is what triggers Bui’s quest to understand her parents—or at least to encounter them in their complexity and in the context of their histories rather than as “two sides of a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.” From here, the narrative is organized around Bui’s longing for “an origin story that will set everything right,” and we track her efforts to amass historical knowledge and extensive family testimony. But as Bui struggles to achieve reconciliation with the pain that has been suffered and transmitted, that reconciliation comes from loosening her hold on the particulars of the past and instead unspooling their emotional content. In contrast to the understated text, the panels of the memoir ache with such verbs as withholding, denying, stifling, longing, drifting, dreading, hoping, with nouns like birth, water, blood, milk, fear, and hunger. Bui excels at depicting suppressed physical pain and afflictive emotion in the human figures she draws. If we return to the opening scene of Bui’s own labor, we encounter the description of pain that “comes in twenty-foot waves,” but the visual narrative makes clear that the most potent source of hurt for Bui is her mother’s sudden departure from the hospital room. Bui depicts her mother in the hallway just outside, her eyes cast down, eyebrows gathered, one hand pressed across her mouth and the other braced across her stomach as if contracting around the remembered pain of her six childbirths and the periods of grave unrest and danger that accompanied them. Like many gestures of suffering in the narrative, we will see this posture repeated in other bodies, as in an image of Bui as a small girl terrified by her father’s menacing presence. Postural echoes like these abound in the memoir, subtly signaling the embodied character of intergenerational trauma. The opening labor scene also initiates a painstaking process by which Bui will chronicle all six of her mother’s experiences in childbirth at various points in the narrative, including those siblings who did not survive. To remember and record these births in a ritual act by giving each scene of pain and possibility its due offers one metaphor for the work as a whole. Bui’s own birth comes just three months before the surrender of South Vietnam, which means that she has no memories of this period in her family’s suffering. In the...

Clinical Practice Guidelines for Child Sexual Abuse.

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is the involvement of children and adolescents in sexual activities (usually for adult sexual stimulation or gratification) that they cannot fully comprehend and to which they cannot consent as a fully equal, self-determining participant, because of their early stage of development [Box 1]. Open in a separate window Box 1 Defining child sexual abuse

Books briefly noted: Review of A new narrative for psychology, The phenomenology of learning and becoming, In the wake of trauma: Psychology and philosophy for the suffering other, and Varieties of virtue ethics.

Books briefly noted: Review of A new narrative for psychology, The phenomenology of learning and becoming, In the wake of trauma: Psychology and philosophy for the suffering other, and Varieties of virtue ethics.

Do acceptance and mindfulness moderate the relationship between maladaptive beliefs and posttraumatic distress?

Maladaptive pre- and posttraumatic beliefs are reliable predictors of distress in the wake of trauma. Acceptance and mindfulness skills may be associated with less distress in the presence of these beliefs, but few studies have explored these relationships. This study examined whether individual differences in acceptance and mindfulness moderate the relationship between maladaptive thoughts and distress in postdeployment soldiers. We explored the relationships between posttraumatic maladaptive beliefs, acceptance, mindfulness, and posttraumatic distress (posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and general psychological symptoms) in a sample of recently postdeployed active duty U.S. Army Soldiers (N = 1,524). Maladaptive thoughts, acceptance, and mindfulness predicted posttraumatic distress, adjusted for combat exposure. In addition, mindfulness partially moderated the relationship between maladaptive thoughts and PTSD symptoms, and acceptance partially moderated the relationship between maladaptive thoughts and general psychological symptoms. Moderation effects were small. These findings suggest that individual differences in acceptance and mindfulness may weakly mitigate the relationship between maladaptive thinking and posttraumatic distress, but additional skills may be necessary to fully address maladaptive beliefs in Soldier postdeployment. (PsycINFO Database Record

Is Shame Hallucinogenic?

Research into the causes of “hearing voices,” formally termed auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH), has primarily focused on cognitive mechanisms. A potentially causative role for emotion has been relatively neglected. This paper uses historical and contemporary case studies of AVH to tentatively generate the hypothesis that shame can be a causal factor in the onset of AVH. Other sources of support for the generation of this hypothesis are then sought. First, evidence is examined for a role of shame in the etiology of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that is characterized by phenomena related to AVH (intrusions and dissociation) and in which a substantial minority of sufferers report AVH. Second, the effect on AVH of a psychological therapy specifically designed to counteract shame (Compassion Focused Therapy) is noted. The hypothesis generation process is then expanded to propose mechanisms that could mediate a relation between shame and AVH. It is proposed that employing absorbed or avoidant strategies to deal with shame may lead to AVH through mediating mechanisms such as rumination, suppression, and dissociation. Evolutionary reasons for a relation between shame and AVH are also proposed, including that AVH may be an evolved mechanism to encourage self-protective behaviors in the wake of trauma. It is concluded that existing research supports the generation of this paper's hypothesis, which is now worthy of dedicated empirical testing.

Sense of coherence in Palestinian helpers operating in emergency settings: a mediation study

BackgroundPalestinian helpers—such as medics, paramedics, and mental health personnel—operating in emergency settings are commonly recognised as being at risk of developing trauma symptoms. Research has assessed the role of sense of coherence (SOC) as a key determinant of reactions to psychological distress in these emergency workers. SOC is a global tendency to view one's environment as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. In this study, we aimed to assess the functioning of SOC as a determinant of the interaction between individual helper's primary responses to traumatic events (assessed via intrusion and avoidance measures) and the secondary effects in terms of general psychological distress (as shown in levels of anxiety, social dysfunction, and loss of self-confidence). Three hypotheses were tested: first, that SOC would mediate the association between effects of traumatic events with anxiety, social dysfunction, and loss of confidence. MethodsThe research project included physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, and volunteers at public hospitals in three different areas of the occupied Palestinian territory. We administered the General Health Questionnaire, SOC scale, and Impact of Event Scale. We did multivariate regression and mediation analysis to assess whether and to what extent SOC affected the effects of trauma on helpers. All analyses were done with SPSS 22. The participants gave written informed consent. The research was approved by the ethics committee of Milano-Bicocca University. FindingsWe recruited 218 people to our study. Of those recruited, 122 were men (56%) and 96 were women (44%). Mean age of participants was 30·4 years (SD 8·68, range 18–59). SOC was found to be a determinant of the association between effects of traumatic events and anxiety (F=5·44, p=0·03) and loss of confidence (F=15·67, p=0·0028). Analysis suggested that SOC partly mediated the effects of trauma on both anxiety (β=0·287, p=0·0018) and social dysfunction (β=0·282, p=0·0022), whereas it fully mediated the relationship between trauma and loss of confidence (β=0·055, p=0·627). InterpretationOur findings suggest that SOC helps individuals to manage and overcome traumatic experiences, reduce anxiety and sense of bereavement, and maintain a functioning system of relationships in the wake of trauma. Thus, SOC displays protective abilities that might be assessed and targeted for training or clinical treatment in this specific group of professionals. FundingNone.