As I feel less overwhelmed, my fear softens and begins to subside. I feel a flicker of hope, then a rolling wave of fiery rage. My body continues to shake and tremble. It is alternately icy cold and feverishly hot. A burning red fury erupts from deep within my belly: How could that stupid kid hit me in a crosswalk? Wasn’t she paying attention? Damn her!
A blast of shrill sirens and flashing red lights block out everything.
My belly tightens, and my eyes again reach to find the woman’s kind gaze. We squeeze hands, and the knot in my gut loosens. I hear my shirt ripping. I am startled and again jump to the vantage
of an observer hovering above my sprawling body. I watch uniformed
strangers methodically attach electrodes to my chest. The Good Samaritan
paramedic reports to someone that my pulse was 170. I hear my shirt ripping even more. I see the emergency team slip a collar onto my neck and then cautiously slide me onto a board. While they strap me down, I hear some garbled radio communication. The paramedics are
requesting a full trauma team. Alarm jolts me. I ask to be taken to the
nearest hospital only a mile away, but they tell me that my injuries may
require the major trauma center in La Jolla, some thirty miles farther.
My heart sinks.

The door suddenly jerks open. A wideeyed
teenager bursts out. She stares at me in dazed horror. In a strange
way, I both know and don’t know what has just happened. As the fragments
begin to converge, they convey a horrible reality: I must have
been hit by this car as I entered the crosswalk. In confused disbelief, I sink
back into a hazy twilight. I find that I am unable to think clearly or to
will myself awake from this nightmare.
A man rushes to my side and drops to his knees. He announces himself
as an off-duty paramedic. When I try to see where the voice is coming
from, he sternly orders, “Don’t move your head.” The contradiction
between his sharp command and what my body naturally wants—to
turn toward his voice—frightens and stuns me into a sort of paralysis.
My awareness strangely splits, and I experience an uncanny “dislocation.”
It’s as if I’m floating above my body, looking down on the unfolding
scene.
I am snapped back when he roughly grabs my wrist and takes my
pulse. He then shifts his position, directly above me. Awkwardly, he
grasps my head with both of his hands, trapping it and keeping it from
moving. His abrupt actions and the stinging ring of his command panic
me; they immobilize me further. Dread seeps into my dazed, foggy consciousness:
Maybe I have a broken neck, I think. I have a compelling
impulse to find someone else to focus on. Simply, I need to have someone’s
comforting gaze, a lifeline to hold onto. But I’m too terrified to
move and feel helplessly frozen.

This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love. (292)

Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.

Triggers are like little psychic explosions that crash through avoidance and bring the dissociated, avoided trauma suddenly, unexpectedly, back into consciousness.

Dissociation is adaptive: it allows relatively normal functioning for the duration of the traumatic event and then leaves a large part of the personality unaffected by the trauma.