Onno van der Hart > Quotes

“As EP, survivors have been unable to create a complete personal story and are unable to share the original experience verbally and socially. They are stuck in the traumatic experience where they relive rather than retell their terror.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Structural dissociation occurs during confrontations with overwhelming events when mental efficiency is too low.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“observations suggest that the survivor as ANP typically engages in tasks of daily life such as reproduction, attachment, caretaking, and other social action tendencies, and avoidance of traumatic memories, which support a focus on daily life issues. In contrast, the survivor as EP primarily displays evolutionary defensive and emotional reactions to the (perceived) threat on which he or she seems to be fixated. Third, survivors should be very susceptible to classical conditioning, because, as we discuss below, EP and ANP strongly respond to unconditioned and conditioned threat cues.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“The core issue in traumatization is that survivors have been unable to realize fully what has happened to them and how it affects their lives and who they are. In other words, the inability to realize involves many ways of not knowing massive psychic trauma”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“traumatized individuals (as EP) “are continuing the action, or rather the attempt at action, which began when the thing happened; and they exhaust themselves in these everlasting recommencements” (p. 663).”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Early traumatization is a major risk factor for more severe symptoms that persist over time. Thus childhood traumatization plays a central role in the development of trauma-related disorders in children and adults.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“I have another self … weltering in tears … I carry it deep inside me like a wound.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“consciousness (hypoarousal). When individuals are extremely hypoaroused they may not encode much of what is happening, may feel the event is not real, and may experience emotional and bodily anesthesia. To the extent that individuals nonetheless recall the events, all of these experiences make it more difficult for them to eventually fully integrate the experience.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“However, if the perpetrator is a parent who is always there, it is possible for these defensive action systems to be evoked simultaneously with normal life action systems in chronically abused children.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Neglect is a form of traumatization in which there is an absence of essential physical or emotional care, soothing, and restorative experiences from significant others. In children these experiences are developmentally requisite, and in adults they may be needed under certain circumstances, such as the aftermath of potentially traumatizing events.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Their suffering essentially relates to a terrifying and painful past that haunts them.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“A major problem for survivors is that their sense of self is too restricted and rigid within dissociative parts, because it has been derived from a range of experiences and action systems that is too limited, and excludes too much of the survivor’s history. When survivors are unable to bind actions adequately with a sense of self in the moment, they experience symptoms of depersonalization.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Trauma-related structural dissociation should be distinguished from more ubiquitous phenomena that are often termed dissociation, but likely have a different underlying process. Over the past several decades the original meaning of dissociation has been quite extended by the addition of other phenomena not typically considered to be dissociative. These include alterations in consciousness such as absorption, daydreaming, imaginative involvement, altered time sense, trance-like behavior, and “highway hypnosis” (e.g., Bernstein & Putnam, 1986).”
― Onno van der Hart

“First, there is the separation cry, which is a young mammal’s distressed vocalization when separated from a caretaker. This cry is actually an attempt to regain attachment upon separation, and thus we call it the attachment cry. Other defensive subsystems include hypervigilance and scanning the environment, flight, freeze with analgesia, fight, total submission with anesthesia, and recuperative states of rest, wound care, isolation from the group, and gradual return to daily activities”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Attachment is central to the context in which all other action systems mature. If attachment is disrupted early in life, it may lead to maladaptive functioning in various areas of life because the most basic action systems do not function well. Attachment relationships assist individuals in regulating their emotions and physiology, providing basic internal and relational stability.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“social isolation and lack of self awareness can occur partly because there are simply no words to tell the story.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“When such reactivation takes place, the traumatized individual often is unable to suppress the intrusion of EP with its traumatic experiences.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“On the other hand, EPs experience these traumatic memories far too intensely, as “too real” (Heim & Buhler, 2003; Janet, 1928a, 1932a; Van der Hart & Steele, 1997). This is certainly not normal memory.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Without realizing it, I fought to keep my two worlds separated. Without ever knowing why, I made sure, whenever possible, that nothing passed between the compartmentalization I had created between the day child and the night child.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Action systems define to a large degree what we find attractive or aversive, and then generate tendencies to approach or avoid, accordingly (Timberlake, 1994).”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“The core issue in traumatization is that survivors have been unable to realize fully what has happened to them and how it affects their lives and who they are. In other words, the inability to realize involves many ways of not knowing massive psychic trauma (Laub & Auerhahn, 1993). Actually, chronically traumatized individuals often have difficulties with realization not only in regard to their traumatic experiences, but also in daily life.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Survivors become more adaptive when they can invest their energy in realizing that the traumatizing event has happened. This goal requires the realization that nothing can be done to change what happened, that the event has deeply affected their existence, and that it is not now happening.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Every realization implies promises of action, either promises of accounts of past action or promises of future actions. In certain individuals, the thought of the execution of these actions provokes such anxieties that this representation become impossible. —Pierre Janet (1945, pp. 181–182)”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Comfort, support, and care are essential in maintaining and improving an individual’s mental efficiency (e.g., Runtz & Schallow, 1997), in part because they have important physiological calming effects (Schore, 1994; 2003b), and favorable effects on the immune system (Uchino, Cacioppi, & Kieclot-Glaser, 1996).”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“The criteria of agency and ownership distinguish structural dissociation from other manifestations of insufficient integration such as intruding panic attacks in panic disorder or intrusions of negative cognitions in major depression.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“Who was my other self? Though we had split one personality between us, I was the majority shareholder. I went to school, made friends, gained experience, developing my part of the personality, while she remained morally and emotionally a child, functioning on instinct rather than on intelligence. —Sylvia Fraser (1987, p. 24)”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“adequate integrative capacity and the mental skills to fully realize their horrific experiences and memories. But they must go on with a daily life that sometimes continues to include the very people who abused and neglected them. Their most expedient option is to mentally avoid their unresolved and painful past and present, and as much as possible maintain a façade of normality. Yet their apparent normality, their life at the surface of consciousness (Appelfeld, 1994), is fragile. Dreaded memories that are awakened by strong reminders haunt survivors, especially when they have exhausted their emotional and physical resources.”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“The psychological impact of trauma in both the military and civilian arenas has been documented for well over 100 years [1], but the validity of the traumatic neuroses and their key symptoms have been continuously questioned. This is particularly true for posttraumatic amnesia and therapeutically recovered traumatic memories. Freud’s [2] abandonment of his seduction theory was followed by decades of denial of sexual trauma in the psychoanalytic and broader sociocultural realms [3]. Concomitant negation of posttraumatic symptomatology was noted in regard to the war neuroses, emanating equally from military, medical and social spheres [4]. Thus, Karon and Widener [5] drew attention to professional abandonment of the literature on posttraumatic amnesia in World War II combatants. They considered this to be due to a collective forgetting, comparable to the repression of soldiers, but instead occurring on account of social prejudices. He further noted that the validity of memories was never challenged at the time since there was ample corroborating evidence. Recent research confirms the findings of earlier investigators such as Janet [6], validating posttraumatic amnesia of both civilian and military origin. Van der Hart and Nijenhuis [7] cited clinical studies reporting total amnesia for combat trauma, experiences in Nazi concentration camps, torture and robbery. There is also increasing evidence for the existence of amnesia for child sexual abuse. Thus, Scheflen and Brown [8] concluded from their analysis of 25 empirical studies that such amnesia is a robust finding. Since then, new studies, for example those of Elliott [9], have appeared supporting their conclusion. This paper examines posttraumatic amnesia in World War I (WWI) combatants. The findings are offered as an historical cross-validation of posttraumatic amnesia in all populations, including those subjected to childhood sexual abuse.”
― Onno van der Hart

“unable to realize she was grown and the incest was no longer about to happen. When traumatic memories are reactivated, access to other memories is more or less obstructed. EP often seems unaware of much, if anything, about the present, and does not necessarily have access to skills and factual knowledge that are available to ANP (Van der Hart & Nijenhuis, 2001).”
― Onno van der Hart, The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

“La soledad es la sensación de estar absolutamente solo en el momento en el que más necesita a alguien que le ame y le apoye,”
― Onno van der Hart, Vivir con disociación traumática (Biblioteca de Psicología)