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)

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

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.

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.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly led into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.