Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a French survivor, wrote the book as a letter to her father, who died in the camps. The way she recounts what Auschwitz did to her, and how the pain never ceased even after liberation, moved me to such a degree that I've read the paperback three times.
Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our earliest experiences of co-regulation in the infant-parent dyad, ruptures in that co-regulation — whether by abuse or neglect — condition the dorsal vagus to become dominant and make a neuroception of danger the default response, storying reality away from safety, nowhere more perilously than in intimate relationships.
Our brains sometimes get stuck in a loop that replays the moment like a broken record. And because we want that simplicity, one moment can dominate our entire life — for the rest of our life.
Our brains sometimes get stuck in a loop that replays the moment like a broken record. In a recent New York Times feature, writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner says this about trauma: "Happy, well-adjusted people are all different. The traumatized are exactly alike."
Our bodies and brains have not evolved to reliably differentiate a rape at knife point from a job loss that threatens us with financial ruin or from the dismantling of our world by our parents' divorce. It's wrong, but explain that to your poor, battered autonomic nervous system.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
