ABSTRACT
Avoidance is a primary strategy for dealing with the aftereffects of trauma. Avoiding memories. Avoiding reminders. Avoiding the unintegrated fragments from the past. It wasn’t really until I noticed my marked avoidance about working on this chapter that I truly tuned in to my own, long-term countertrauma. My reaction surprised me. Every time I went to begin this chapter, my thoughts remained completely jumbled until something distracted me and I turned to some other project. I have observed the workings of my mind over time and I deal with the past largely by moving on to something pulling me into the future. Good events, bad events fade away, like landscape on a fast-moving train and unless pain or joy have riveted them as memory markers, I am just done with it-illustrating, perhaps, the adaptive uses of dissociation.
