Our feelings are a link between the conscious and unconscious content of our mind/brain — they have a representational structure.
from McGovern, K. (2022, January 5). General Psychological “Operating Characteristics.” Cognition and Emotion, Wright Institute.
Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.
No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don’t need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers — but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens.
Many traumatized people find themselves chronically out of sync with the people around them. Some find comfort in groups where they can replay their combat experiences, rape, or torture with others who have similar backgrounds or experiences.
Focusing on a shared history of trauma and victimization alleviates their searing sense of isolation, but usually at the price of having to deny their individual differences: Members can belong only if they conform to the common code.
Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group promotes a view of others as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst, which eventually leads to further isolation. Gangs, extremist political parties, and cults may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility needed to be fully open to what life has to offer and as such cannot liberate their members from their traumas. Well-functioning people are able to accept individual differences and acknowledge the humanity of others.
from van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
I hope that diagnosis will be no longer considered a “dirty word” (quoting Nancy McWilliams), or a bureaucratic or devalued act. Rather, it is an engaging and challenging process that can bring us back to the original, ancient meaning of the word diagnosis: “knowing through.” Through the patient, dialogue, and relationship.
The diagnostic process has no simple, easily applied formula. In his General Psychopathology (1913), Karl Jaspers claims that “Every diagnostic schema must remain a tiresome problem for the scientist” (Alle Diagnosenschemata müssen für den Forscher eine Qual Bleiben). In the original quote, the German word Qual is used where “tiresome” has been used here; Qual literally means “torment,” and in fact I think that for researchers and clinicians diagnosis should be a “torment.”
There is always a tension between the need to connect a patient to a general category and, at the same time, to connect the patient to [their] unique qualities — “the impossible science of the unique being,” as Roland Barthes would say.
from Featured Author – Vittorio Lingiardi. (2017, December). Guilford Press.
Matthew M. Sholler, Psy.D. 
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