"Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.
"Unlike commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. {Breaking though our usual ways of coping and violating out taken-for-granted mental/emotional boundaries] they confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe."
Traumatic reactions occur when, at the moment of occurrence, action is of no avail: when neither resistance or escape is possible. Our human systems become overwhelmed and disorganized. Traumatic events produce profound and lasting changes in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition and memory. The traumatized person may experience intense emotion without a clear memory of the event.
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Traumatized people often feel and act as though their nervous systems have been disconnected from the present. The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder include "hyperarousal," "intrusion," and "constriction."
Hyperarousal reflects expectation of danger after the event has already occurred. After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert and overdrive, as if the danger might return at any moment.
Intrusion involves the mental/emotional/physiological repetition of traumatic memories in the present.
Constriction involves a detached state of consciousness similar to hypnotic-trance states. The helpless person escapes from his or her situation not by action in the real world (which at the moment of trauma is impossible), but rather by altering and narrowing their state of awareness - and this state can continue long after the actual trauma has passed. Constriction can include dissociation, depersonalization, and radical change in the sense of time.
Herman also distinguishes between single-incident traumas, which she terms Type I traumas - and complex or repeated traumas (Type II).
Type I trauma, according to the United States Veterans Administration's Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, "accurately describes the symptoms that result when a person experiences a short-lived psychological trauma". Type II - the concept of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) - includes "the syndrome that follows upon prolonged, repeated trauma." This can include intense dysfunctional family dynamics that, for a child, go on for 18+ years, or prolonged imprisonment or hostage situations.
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The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the [assumed social covenant] are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word "unspeakable."
As Herman states:
"The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.
"The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it.
"This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event.
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