Die britische Forscherin und Autorin für paranormale Phänomene Renée Haynes (1906-1994) hat den Begriff Akzeptanz-
schwelle (engl. boggle threshold) geprägt. Die Schwelle ist dort angesiedelt, wo Konsens-Orientierte es vorziehen, für sie unerklärliche Tatsachen – wie die Weiterexistenz des Bewusstseins nach dem physischen Tod – zu leugnen und im moder-
nen rationalen Skeptizismus Zuflucht suchen.

Da die IADC-Therapie die Akzeptanzschwelle der allermeisten rational orientierten Wissenschaftler überschreitet und derje-
nigen, die Themen erst als Wahrheit akzeptieren, wenn sie streng naturwissenschaftlichen Kriterien genügen, wird in der Fachwelt kaum über Botkins revolutionären Trauertherapieansatz diskutiert, der seit 2003 auch der nichtmilitärischen Öffentlichkeit zur Verfügung steht.

Crookes, Sir William Barrett, Dr. Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. James H. Hyslop und andere Forscher erbrachten überwältigende Nachweise für das Weiterleben von Verstorbenen in ihren Untersuchungen. Sie bestätigen auch die Existenz einer jenseitigen Welt, worin sich körperlose Geistwesen auf unterschiedlichen Entwicklungsstufen aufhalten. Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, der zusammen mit Charles Darwin die Evolutionstheorie als Folge eines naturimmanenten Ausleseverfahrens entwickelt hat, gab an, dass die Nachweise für die Kommunikation mit Verstorbenen ebenso überzeugend seien wie die in an-
deren wissenschaftlichen Sektoren. Auch in jüngster Zeit ignorieren etablierte Wissenschaftler aktuelle Studienergebnisse hin-
sichtlich der Wirkung von Gebeten und Vergebung. Skeptikerorganisationen attackieren obendrein die Nahtodforschung, Jen-
seits- und Medien-Forschung, die beispielsweise Prof. Gary E. Schwartz im Rahmen des VERITAS Research Projektes an
der Universität Tucson, Arizona, durchführt. Sie wenden ein, dass Phänomene dieser Art nicht wiederholbar und zu beweisen seien, weswegen sie ihre wissenschaftliche Untersuchung nicht befürworten.

Graphic by Jim C. Hines¹

Personal avowals

• Denying the reality of my experience – that was the most harmful. Not being able to trust anyone was the most serious effect. [...] I know I acted in ways that were despicable. But I wasn't crazy. Some people go around acting like that because they feel hopeless. Finally I found a few people along the way who have been able to feel OK about me even though I had severe problems. Good therapists were those who really validated my experience.

• I have tried to communicate my ideas in a language that preserves connections, a language that is faithful both to the dispassionate, reasoned traditions of my profession and to the passionate claims of people who have been violated and outraged. I have tried to find a language that can withstand the imperatives of doublethink and allows all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable.

Why? question

• Survivors of atrocity of every age and every culture come to a point in their testimony where all questions are reduced to one, spoken more in bewilderment than in outrage: Why? The answer is beyond human understanding.

Historic role models

• The only one of the early investigators who carried the exploration of hysteria [See Studies on Hysteria (1895)] to its logical conclusion was Breuer's patient Anna O.. After Breuer (1842-1925) abandoned her, she apparently remained ill for several years. And then she recovered. The mute hysteric who had invented the "talking cure" found her voice and her sanity, in the women's liberation movement. Under a pseudonym, Paul Berthold, she translated into German the classic treatise by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and authored a play, Women's Rights. Under her own name, Bertha Papenheim became a prominent feminist social worker, intellectual, and organizer. In the course of a long and fruitful career she directed an orphanage for girls, founded a feminist organization for Jewish women and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East to campaign against the sexual exploitation of women and children. Her dedication, energy and commitment were legendary. In the words of a colleague, 'A volcano lived in this woman [...]. Her fight against the abuse of women and children was almost a physically felt pain for her.' At her death, the philosopher Martin Buber commemorated her: 'I not only admired her but loved her, and will love her until the day I die. There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionate spirit. Bertha Pappenheim was a woman with just such a spirit.

• Further evidence for the pathogenic role of dissociation has come from a largescale clinical and community study of traumatized people conducted by a task force of the American Psychiatric Association. In this study, people who reported having dissociative symptoms were also quite likely to develop persistent somatic symptoms for which no physical cause could be found. They also frequently engaged in self-destructive attacks on their own bodies. The results of these investigations validate the century-old insight that traumatized people relive in their bodies the moments of terror that they can not describe in words. Dissociation appears to be the mechanism by which intense sensory and emotional experiences are disconnected from the social domain of language and memory, the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced.

• It has become clear that, as Janet (1859-1947) observed one hundred years ago [1889], dissociation lies at the heart of the traumatic stress disorders. Studies of survivors of disasters, terrorist attacks, and combat have demonstrated that people who enter a dissociative state at the time of the traumatic event are among most likely to develop long-lasting PTSD.

• [S]ome patients resist the diagnosis of a posttraumatic disorder. They may feel stigmatized by any psychiatric diagnosis or wish to deny their condition out of a sense of pride. Some people feel that acknowledging psychological harm grants a moral victory to the perpetrator, in a way that acknowledging physical harm does not.

• After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment. Physiological arousal continues unabated. In this state of hyperarousal, which is the first cardinal symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder, the traumatized person startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly. Kardiner (1891-1981) proposed that "the nucleus of the [traumatic] neurosis is physioneurosis." He believed that many of the symptoms observed in combat veterans of the First World War – startle reactions, hyperalertness, vigilance for the return of danger, nightmares, and psychosomatic complaints – could be understood as resulting from chronic arousal of the autonomic nervous system. He also interpreted the irritability and explosively aggressive behavior of traumatized men as disorganized fragments of a shattered "fight or flight" response to overwhelming danger.

• Denial, repression and dissociation operate on a social, as well as an individual level.

• Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force.
  ➤ When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters.
  ➤ When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities.
  Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning. […]
  Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. […] They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.

• In avoiding any situations reminiscent of the past trauma, or any initiative that might involve future planning and risk, traumatized people deprive themselves of those new opportunities for successful coping that might mitigate the effect of the traumatic experience. Thus, constrictive symptoms, though they may represent an attempt to defend against overwhelming emotional states, exact a high price for whatever protection they afford. They narrow and deplete the quality of life and ultimately perpetuate the effects of the traumatic event.

• Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.
  But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood – establishing independence and intimacy – burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.
  She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.

• By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.

• [R]epeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to
  ➤ preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy,
  ➤ safety in a situation that is unsafe,
  ➤ control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness.
  Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.

• The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so on their own. While only a small minority of survivors, usually those with the most severe abuse histories, eventually become psychiatric patients, many or even most psychiatric patients are survivors of childhood abuse. The data on this point are beyond contention. On careful questioning, 50-60 percent of psychiatric inpatients and 40-60 percent of outpatients report childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse or both. In one study of psychiatric emergency room patients, 70 percent had abuse histories. Thus abuse in childhood appears to be one of the main factors that lead a person to seek psychiatric treatment as an adult.

• The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

• The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

• Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

• 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. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood […].

• The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day.

• The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive posttraumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.

• In order to escape accountability for his crimes,
  ➤ the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting.
     Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense.
  ➤ If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim.
  ➤ If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.
     To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most
     sophisticated and elegant rationalization.

• After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies:
  ➤ it never happened;
  ➤ the victim lies;
  ➤ the victim exaggerates;
  ➤ the victim brought it upon herself;
  ➤ and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on.
  The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

• And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion.

• Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.

• When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.

• The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.

• In order to gain their freedom, survivors may have to give up almost everything else.
  ➤ Battered women may lose their homes, their friends, and their livelihood.
  ➤ Survivors of childhood abuse may lose their families.
  ➤ Political refugees may lose their homes and their homeland.
  Rarely are the dimensions of this sacrifice fully recognized.

• Though both partners may wish for reconciliation, their unspoken goals are often sharply in conflict. The abuser usually wishes to reestablish his pattern of coercive control, while the victim wishes to resist it.

• Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.

• Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection with others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience.
  ➤ Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging.
  ➤ Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms.
  ➤Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her.
  ➤ Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.
  Repeatedly in the testimony of survivors there comes a moment when a sense of connection is restored by another person’s unaffected display of generosity. Something in herself that the victim believes to be irretrievably destroyed – faith, decency, courage – is reawakened by an example of common altruism. Mirrored in the actions of others, the survivor recognizes and reclaims a lost part of herself. At that moment, the survivor begins to rejoin the human commonality […].

• Recovery unfolds in three stages.
  1. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety.
  2. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning.
  3. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.

1. First, the physiological symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits.
2. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories.
3. Third, the person has authority over her memories; she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside.
4. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling.
5. Fifth, the person's damaged self-esteem has been restored.
6. Sixth, the person's important relationships have been reestablished.
7. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of trauma.

• The first principle of recovery is empowerment of the survivor.
  She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery.
  Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure.

• Many benevolent and well-intentioned attempts to assist the survivor flounder because this basic principle of empowerment is not observed. No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest.

• Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. In her renewed connection with other people, the survivor re-creates the psychological facilities that were damaged or deformed by the traumatic experience. These faculties include the basic operations of trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy.

• In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task.
  • She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent.
  • She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safety with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe.
  • She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring or cruel.
  • She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environinent in which her body is at the disposal of others' needs as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace.
  • She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser.

• Survivors feel unsafe in their bodies.
  Their emotions and their thinking feel out of control.
  They also feel unsafe in relation to other people.

• Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure.

• Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. S. 246-247, February 1997

• Working with victimized people requires a committed moral stance.
  ➤ The therapist is called upon to bear witness to a crime.
  ➤ She must affirm a position of solidarity with the victim.
  This does not mean a simplistic notion that the victim can do no wrong; rather, it involves
  ➤ an understanding of the fundamental injustice of the traumatic experience and the need for a resolution that restores some sense of justice.

• Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe posttraumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?

• In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.

• Most people have no knowledge or understanding of the psychological changes of captivity.
  Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh.

• Many survivors have such profound deficiencies in self-protection that they can barely imagine themselves in a position of agency or choice. The idea of saying no to the emotional demands of a parent, spouse, lover or authority figure may be practically inconceivable. Thus, it is not uncommon to find adult survivors who continue to minister to the needs of those who once abused them and who continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or limits. Adult survivors may nurse their abusers in illness, defend them in adversity, and even, in extreme cases, continue to submit to their sexual demands.

• Those who attempt to describe the atrocities that they have witnessed also risk their own credibility.

• To speak publicly about one's knowledge of atrocities is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims.

• It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict.
  The bystander is forced to take sides.

• When traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator.
  It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator.
  All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing.
  He [perpetrator/bystander] appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil.
  The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain.
  The victim demands action, engagement and remembering.

• To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.

• While in principle groups for survivors are a good idea, in practice it soon becomes apparent that to organize a successful group is no simple matter. Groups that start out with hope and promise can dissolve acrimoniously, causing pain and disappointment to all involved. The destructive potential of groups is equal to their therapeutic promise. The role of the group leader carries with it a risk of the irresponsible exercise of authority.

• The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma.

• For survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma, it is not practical to approach each memory as a separate entity. There are simply too many incidents, and often similar memories have blurred together. Usually, however, a few distinct and particularly meaningful incidents stand out. Reconstruction of the trauma narrative is often based heavily upon these paradigmatic incidents, with the understanding that one episode stands for many.

One evening Milarepa returned to his cave after gathering firewood, only to find it filled with demons. They were cooking his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed. They had taken over the joint. He knew about nonduality of self and other, but he
still didn't quite know how to get these guys out of his cave. Even though he had the sense that they were just a projection
of his own mind – all the unwanted parts of himself – he didn't know how to get rid of them.

At that point, all of them left except one. Milarepa said,

(We all know that one. Sometimes we have lots of them like that. Sometimes we feel that's all we've got.) He didn't know what
to do, so he surrendered himself even further. He walked over and put himself right into the mouth of the demon and said,

Then that demon left, too.