I discovered Trauma and Recovery for the first time in 2020, when I was deep in the throes of the midlife crisis that was making me remember having been abused as a child. Desperate for insight, I was trembling my way through one of the very first books to be written about Internal Family Systems theory, Regina Goulding and Richard Schwartz’s 1992 The Mosaic Mind: Empowering the Tormented Selves of Child Abuse Survivors. It’s a book-length account of how IFS therapy goes for one woman, whom they call Lorene, who was molested by her father starting at the age of three. “The main characters of this book,” the authors write, “are Lorene’s parts.” It’s a difficult book to read — particularly for folks who also survived incest, as I did myself.

As you might know from experience, children who are abused usually end up believing that they are to blame for what happened to them — that, in one way or another, some evil part of them must have deserved the abuse. While I was reading The Mosaic Mind, those parts of me were very loud in my mind! Lorene, for whom we all felt deep compassion, was clearly and obviously an innocent child. But I, my inner voices insisted, had really deserved the abuse.

And then we read this sentence, about parts of people who feel exactly the same way:

They often feel that nothing could possibly erase their badness because it permeates the fiber of their entire being. … A simple declaration that a part is not evil represents “a refusal to engage with the survivor in the lacerating moral complexities of the extreme situation” (Herman, 1992, p. 69)

I must have read the phrase “lacerating moral complexities” a hundred times: it’s still burned into my brain. Yes. No matter how many times therapists and counselors had told me “it wasn’t your fault,” no matter how many times I’d told myself the same thing, parts of me insisted that I had never been innocent in the first place. Here, for the very first time, was someone who understood that it was complicated: “Herman, 1992.”

The book Goulding and Schwartz were citing (I have a hunch that it was Goulding who had the page dog-eared) was Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, then brand new. Herman’s work advanced the idea of “complex PTSD” as an identifiable form of suffering worthy of treatment —

The syndrome that follows upon prolonged, repeated trauma needs its own name. I propose to call it “complex post-traumatic stress disorder.” (119)

— which is now so widely accepted that it’s listed in the World Health Organization’s compendium of diagnoses.

Re-published with a new epilogue in 2015, Trauma and Recovery has become one of my sacred texts – one of the places I return for wisdom, again and again, to understand myself, my clients, and the world around me. If you have any interest at all in how people get hurt and heal, there’s no book I recommend more.

Places to get Trauma and Recovery

You can Herman’s masterpiece on paper, as an ebook, or as an audiobook wherever you usually get books. Here are some links:

• Find Trauma and Recovery in a library near you
• Find a used copy
• Buy a new copy

If you read the book, I’d love to talk about it with you! Just get in touch. Meanwhile, here are some of the passages from the book I return to again and again.

My favorite passages

All from Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 2d edn. (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

The social history of thinking about trauma

The study of psychological trauma has an “underground” history. Like traumatized people, we have been cut off from the knowledge of our past. Like traumatized people, we need to understand the past in order to reclaim the present and the future. Therefore, an understanding of psychological trauma begins with rediscovering history. (2)

Soldiers in every war … complain bitterly that no one wants to know the real truth about war. When the victim is already devalued (a woman, a child), she may find that the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially validated reality. Her experience becomes unspeakable. (8)

The systematic study of psychological trauma … depends on the support of a political movement. Indeed, whether such a study can be pursued or discussed in public is itself a political question. (9)

Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness. (9)

Trauma is contagious. (140)

How Freud repressed what his patients were telling him

Hysteria was so common among women that if [Freud’s] patients’ stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called “perverted acts against children” were endemic … . This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility. Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients. (14)

Out of the ruins of the traumatic theory of hysteria, Freud created psychoanalysis. The dominant psychological theory of the next century was founded on the denial of women’s reality. (14)

With a stubborn persistence that drove him into ever greater convolutions of theory, [Freud] insisted that women imagined and longed for the abusive sexual encounters of which they complained. (19)

From PTSD among soldiers to trauma among women

The moral legitimacy of the antiwar movement and the national experience of defeat in a discredited war had made it possible to recognize psychological trauma as a lasting and inevitable legacy of war. In 1980, for the first time, the characteristic syndrome of psychological trauma became a “real” diagnosis. (27)

Not until the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s was it recognized that the most common post-traumatic disorders are not those of men in war but of women in civilian life. (28)

My own initial descriptions of the psychology of incest survivors essentially recapitulated the nineteenth-century observations of hysteria. … Hysteria is the combat neurosis of the sex war. (32)

The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. (60)

What trauma does to people

Sometimes situations of inescapable danger may evoke not only terror and rage but also, paradoxically, a state of detached calm, in which terror, rage, and pain dissolve. (42)

In situations of terror, people spontaneously seek their first source of comfort and protection. Wounded soldiers and raped women cry for their mothers, or for God. When this cry is not answered, the sense of basic trust is shattered. (52)

Traumatic events, by definition, thwart initiative and overwhelm individual competence. … In the aftermath of traumatic events, as survivors review and judge their own conduct, feelings of guilt and inferiority are practically universal. … It is the victims, not the perpetrators, who feel guilty. (53)

Fairness and justice

The survivor’s shame and guilt may be exacerbated by the harsh judgment of others, but it is not fully assuaged by simple pronouncements absolving her from responsibility, because simple pronouncements, even favorable ones, represent a refusal to engage with the survivor in the lacerating moral complexities of the extreme situation. For those who bear witness, the survivor seeks not absolution but fairness … . (69)

No custom or common ritual recognizes the mourning that follows traumatic life events. (70)

Women quickly learn that rape is a crime only in theory; in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women’s experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men. That level turns out to be high indeed. (72)

The women who recover most successfully are those who discover some meaning in their experience that transcends the limits of personal tragedy. Most commonly, women find this meaning by joining with others in social action. (73)

Trauma and the reality of evil

The victim cannot assume her former identity. … Her moral ideals must coexist with knowledge of the capacity for evil, but within others and within herself. (93)

The majority of people experience the bitterness of being forsaken by God. (94)

The child feels that she has been abandoned to her fate, and this abandonment is often resented more keenly than the abuse itself. (101)

The traumatic event challenges an ordinary person to become a theologian, a philosopher, and a jurist. The survivor is called upon to articulate the values and beliefs that she once held and that the trauma destroyed. She stands mute before the emptiness of evil, feeling the insufficiency of any known system of explanation. (178)

How children adapt to trauma

The pathological environment of childhood abuse forces the development of extraordinary capacities, both creative and destructive. It fosters the development of abnormal states of consciousness in which the ordinary relations of body and mind, reality and imagination, knowledge and memory, no longer hold. These altered states of consciousness permit the elaboration of a prodigious array of symptoms, both somatic and psychological. And these symptoms simultaneously conceal and reveal their origins; they speak in a disguised language of secrets to terrible for words. (96)

All of the abused child’s psychological adaptations serve the fundamental purpose of preserving her primary attachment to her parents in the face of daily evidence of their malice, helplessness, or indifference. (102)

When it is impossible to avoid the reality of the abuse, the child must construct some system of meaning that justifies it. Inevitably the child concludes that her innate badness is the cause. The child seizes upon this explanation early and clings to it tenaciously, for it enables her to preserve a sense of meaning, hope, and power. (103)

Simply by virtue of her existence on earth, she believes she has driven the most powerful people in the world to do terrible things. Surely, then, her nature must be thoroughly evil. The language of the self becomes a language of abomination. (105)

Adult survivors who have escaped from the abusive situation continue to view themselves with contempt and to take upon themselves the shame and guilt of their abusers. The profound sense of inner badness becomes the core around which the abused child’s identity is formed, and it persists into adult life. (105)

Most abused children reach adulthood with their secrets intact. (110)

Power and recovery

The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. … No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest. (133)

Working with victimized people requires a committed moral stance. … She must affirm a position of solidarity with the victim. This does not mean a simplistic notion that the victim can do no wrong; rather, it involves an understanding of the fundamental injustice of the traumatic experience and the need for a resolution that restores some sense of justice. (135)

It cannot be reiterated too often: no one can face trauma alone. (153)

Without freedom, there can be no safety and no recovery, but freedom is often achieved at great cost. In order to gain their freedom, survivors may have to give up almost everything else. (172)

Testimony and mourning

In the absence of a socially meaningful form of testimony, many traumatized people choose to keep their symptoms. (184)

Traumatic losses rupture the ordinary sequence of generations and defy the ordinary social conventions of bereavement. The telling of the trauma story thus inevitably plagues the survivor into profound grief. (188)

Only through mourning everything that she has lost can the patient discover her indestructible inner life. (188)

Resistance to mourning can take on numerous disguises. Most frequently it appears as a fantasy of magical resolution through revenge, forgiveness, or compensation. … During the possibility of mourning, the survivor must come to terms with the impossibility of getting even. (189)

Mourning is the only way to give due honor to loss; there is no adequate compensation. (190)

The reconstruction of the trauma requires immersion in a past experience of frozen time; the descent into mourning feels like a surrender to tears that are endless. … It will almost surely take longer than the patient wishes, but it will not go on forever. (195)

Trauma, injustice, and society

Though the survivor is not responsible for the injury that was done to her, she is responsible for her recovery. Paradoxically, acceptance of this apparent injustice is the beginning of empowerment. (192)

While there is no way to compensate for an atrocity, there is a way to transcend it, by making it a gift to others. (207)

The study of psychological trauma is an inherently political enterprise because it calls attention to the experience of oppressed people. (237)

Like traumatized individuals, traumatized countries need to remember grieve, and atone for their wrongs in order to avoid reliving them. (242)

Perpetrators will do anything in their power to preserve the principle of impunity. They demand amnesty, a political form of amnesia. (242)

If full justice cannot be achieved, public acknowledgment of the truth is more important than punishment of the perpetrators. (243)

Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator’s unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. (247)