ABSTRACT
Trauma can be understood as the experience of being made into an object, a thing. One suddenly becomes the victim of someone else’s rage, whether expressed as overt anger or as a clever manipulation, of bad luck, or of nature’s indifference; e.g., a lightning-strike disaster kills one child (Dollinger, 1985). The essence of traumatic stress is the experience of helplessness and loss of control rather than fear or pain. One young man whose leg was so badly broken in a motorcycle accident that it was eventually amputated had initially managed to save his life by walking off the freeway where he was lying, without conscious experience of pain, by engaging his imagination such that he was at a mountain lake fishing with his father. He used his concentration (self-hypnosis) on this imaginary scene to detach himself from the immediate experience of terror, pain, and helplessness. Many rape victims report floating above their body, feeling sorry for the person being assaulted below them
