"The normal regulation of emotional states is similarly disrupted by traumatic experiences that repeatedly evoke terror, rage, and grief. These emotions ultimately coalesce in a dreadful feeling that psychiatrists call "dysphoria" and patients find almost impossible to describe. It is a state of confusion, agitation, emptiness, and utter aloneness."
~Judith Herman, M.D. - Trauma and Recovery

I read this this morning. I read it, and read it again, and tried to read further... but then I ran upstairs to find B and share it with her.

What?

What? There's a name for it? There are other people who feel this, who express this, enough that there's a NAME for it? It's not just in my head, not just something I made up?

Jesus christ, that's scary and wonderful and horrifying and empowering all at once. There's a certain heady terror in recognizing, in the written words of another person, the same things I've struggled to verbalize and explain to other people. The same things I've struggled to explain to MYSELF. My head feels like it's going to explode and I want to weep. I want to run and cry and just sit here and write it all out, let it pour out of my brain.

I know that, in the greater scheme of things, I got off lucky. I see people who have survived so much worse than I. As ever, this doesn't negate anything I feel or see or experience. It doesn't negate the struggles I have. Why do I feel the need to issue that disclaimer? Why do I feel this overwhelming need to pull myself back and minimize what I think and feel?

I wanted to write this post in the second person... I started to use "you" instead of "I" several times. I realized this at some point and went back to change it. I need to NOT distance myself from this, I need to understand it and pull it into me, figure it out. I need to find a path. I can't find a path if I'm floating above everything... I need to have my feet on the ground.

I have had this book for nearly five years. It's a book we were expected to read at some point in our advocacy training, and Vickie mentioned it during our focus groups last year as being the "bible of advocacy." That piqued my interest enough to find my copy, but I only started reading it recently when I started doing counseling with outreach clients. I figured it would at least give me some practical tools to deal with all the issues that I instinctively understood but intellectually wasn't sure how to work with.

What I didn't realize was how it would impact me, Gretchen.