1) Indignation can motivate survivors to move beyond the state of victim

Indignation and anger that are not turned inwards and expressed self- destructively or destructively, but are sublimated and used as a vehicle to fight against injustice and abuse are important resources, which motivate survivors to move beyond the state of being a victim.

Below are short abstracts from Silva Amati Sas’s chapter in Bearing Witness: Psychoanalytic Work with People Traumatized by Torture and State Violence (edited by Andres Gautier and Anna Sabatini Scalmati)

‘Theoretically, indignation can be seen as a ‘working-off mechanism’ (Bibring, quoted by Laplanche, 1993), an emotion, an emotional impulse that helps us move out of the immobility, perplexity, confusion, and fear that overwhelm us when we realize that another human being is motivated by a destructive intent. It signals the fact that we are in contact with an abusive reality. The feeling of indignation necessarily has an aggressive dimension, that of an impulse that helps us to prioritize our values and free up our ability to think critically, as well as, our capacity to choose and to make a judgment of condemnation’

‘It is essential to maintain alive the feeling of indignation within ourselves, because in contemporary society, dominated by mass media, everything, including torture, can be seen both acceptable and justifiable….  Dominated as it is by the media where all is permitted, contemporary society tends to push both indignation and shame into the background. With the excessive and equivocal dissemination of images of torture, for example, we end up by adapting to it; overloaded and indifferent, we may lose all sense of indignation’.

2) Books

Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorder: An Evidence Based Guide by Christine A. Courtois PhD and Julian D. Ford

Foreword by Judith Lewis Herman

Afterword by Bessel A. van der Kolk

http://www.guilford.com/p/courtois

Short excerpts from the book:

Psychological trauma was originally considered to be an abnormal experience (i.e., “outside the range of normal human experience” in DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association, 1980), but as epidemiological evidence accumulated to demonstrate that a majority of adults (e.g.Kessler, Sonnega, Bromet, Hughes, & Nelson, 1995) and a substantial minority of children (e.g., Costello, Erklani, Fairbank, & Arnold. 2002) are exposed to traumatic events, there has been a shift to defining psychological trauma without any qualifications about its normality or abnormality. Generally, people who have not experienced traumatic events do not expect trauma to occur in their (or their families’ or communities’) 1ives, but once psychological trauma has occurred, he or she is both more likely objectively to experience subsequent traumatic events and more prone subjectively to expect trauma to be a possibility. With the increasing diffusion of virtually instantaneous information through the many forms of electronic and other media–not only in Westernized societies but also in socioeconomically underdeveloped countries–people’s awareness of traumatic events has been greatly heightened, even if these events never happen to them or to anyone they know personally (e.g., the Silver, Holman, McIntosh, Palm, & Gil-Rivas [2002] national U.S. survey on the effects of the September 11, 2001, terrorist incidents).

Another unfortunate reality concerning complex trauma is related to its interpersonal nature. The closer the relationship between perpetrator(s) and victim(s) and their group memberships (e.g., in a family, religion, gender, political party, institution, chain of command, the more likely they are to face conditions of divided loyalty. As a self-protective strategy, the group may coalesce around silencing, secrecy, and denial. As a result, victims do not receive the help they expect and need when the victimization is disclosed or otherwise exposed. This circumstance has been labeled the second injury (Symonds,1975) or betrayal trauma (DePrince & Freyd, 2007). A lack of response or protection–or victim blaming–is betrayal of the victim’s trust and the helper’s responsibility that can severely exacerbate traumatic victimization. In the worst case scenario, a caregiver directly and repeatedly abuses a vulnerable child or does not respond or protect the child from abuse by others. Young children exposed to betrayal trauma by caregivers often develop a disorganized/dissociative attachment style in childhood and an adult attachment style described as fearful/avoidant/ dissociative (Lyons-Ruth, Dutra, Schuder & Bianchi, 2006). Children, more than adults, are prone to use dissociation to cope with such overwhelming circumstances (Putnam, 2003), and it is now hypothesized that this style transforms the personality, preventing the integration of the traumatization across all aspects of the child’s and later the adult’s self. The result is a person who maintains a “front” or an “as if” or “apparently normal” personality that seems functional but is numb to and even unaware of the trauma, and an “emotional” personality that is incapacitated psychosocially by the knowledge of the trauma (see Steele & van der Hart, Chapter 7, in this volume)

One can read articles on trauma topics published by Dr. Christine Courtois at her site http://drchriscourtois.com/articlesandchapters.html