I was following an online seminar, if it could be called that, on techniques for trauma recovery. A bit too new-age fluffy, and statements made about the neurology did not match some of the latest research I’d studied for the second part of a book I finished writing last year. The book is a true story about a street boy in early seventies London, whom I called ‘Thomas’ when I switched from writing in the first to the close third person. It makes things easier.
Below is a short essay I wrote last year summarising the main points of this second part.
Thomas and the Mirror of Negation.
Prefatory Note
This essay explores the intersection of lived experience, trauma theory, and philosophical reflection. Drawing on models of dissociation (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, Steele), contemporary neuropsychology (Eustache), and the Zen-influenced thought of Miyamoto Musashi, it seeks to understand how the human psyche reshapes itself in response to trauma — and how recovery may involve not merely healing but transformation.
Trauma, Memory, and the Shifting Self
In Eustache’s view (“Mémoire et Émotions”), traumatic experience may be “bracketed out” of conscious recall, while the emotions attached to it remain vivid and enduring. Such emotions, he suggests, can “retain their original charge” even when the narrative memory fades. This distinction reflects how the two parts of the brain most involved with memory and emotions, the amygdala and hippocampus — one mediating emotion, the other memory — become decoupled under extreme stress. Van der Hart and colleagues, in their structural dissociation theory, describe trauma as splitting the personality into an “apparently normal part” (ANP) and an “emotional part” (EP). The ANP
handles daily life; the EP holds unintegrated emotion and traumatic reaction. But this model risks implying that the ANP is a fixed state of health, and the EP an aberration — when in lived experience, the two may continually interpenetrate, evolve, and exchange dominance.
Thomas: A Case of Adaptive Transformation
Thomas’s story challenges neat psychological boundaries. Before trauma, he lived a “normal” childhood. Entrapped in exploitation, he rapidly adapted — a survival evolution rather than a breakdown. He became functional within a brutal system, learning its codes and power dynamics. When later rescued and returned to safety, family members described him as “a different person, as if dropped from Mars.” Yet, during the period he lived with a supportive couple, he was described as happier, even whole — suggesting that his new identity was not purely a mask but a true synthesis, a provisional but authentic ANP integrating his former EP. The difficulties that later emerged may thus
reflect not regression but re-fragmentation — the loss of the adaptive, street-forged self that had achieved temporary integration. When the pre-street self resurfaced, it brought with it inherited shame and repression. Trauma was not simply an interruption; it was a crucible of transformation.
Negation and the Human Mirror
What Thomas witnessed among his clients was the paradox of affirmation and
negation. Desire expressed itself as a search for life, yet immediately turned upon itself as shame and destruction. He saw men who, in affirming desire, negated both themselves and him. Over time, he learned to reverse that dynamic — discovering power in the ability to evoke and control the desire that once victimised him. Negation became mutual. This mirrors the existential tension Zen calls the interplay of affirmation and negation — forces
that, in their unity, drive transformation. As Musashi wrote in The Book of Five Rings, one must sometimes “descend into the world of confusion to find the true way.” Thomas’s descent, like Musashi’s paradox, was not moral decay but a movement through suffering toward insight.
Integration and the Journey Beyond Victimhood.
If we accept, as Eustache proposes, that emotion and memory can become uncoupled, we might also accept that recovery involves their reunification—not by suppressing emotion but by giving it context and meaning. Thomas’s challenge in later life lay in reintegrating conflicting selves without rejecting either. In this light, the ANP is not a permanent refuge of normality but a work in progress—a construct shaped by experience, culture, and moral imagination. Musashi’s Zen-informed teaching reminds us that descent into darkness can, paradoxically, refine character. He wrote that “the way of
strategy is the way of nature; it cannot be learned from others.” In this spirit, trauma may be understood not as the annihilation of self but as an encounter with its limits. It is not romanticising suffering to recognise that pain, faced directly, may deepen one’s capacity for understanding and compassion. Eustache warned that modern societies risk becoming “collectivities of proactive victims” — people who make woundedness the cornerstone of
identity. True recovery, therefore, must involve reappropriating one’s history without being trapped within it. Thomas’s journey — from innocence to survival, from negation to awareness — suggests that healing is not the erasure of trauma but its transformation into wisdom.
References
Eustache, F. (2019). Mémoire et Émotions. Odile Jacob.
Van der Hart, O., Nijenhuis, E. R. S., & Steele, K. (2006). The Haunted Self: Structural
Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatisation. Norton.
Musashi, M. (1645/1993). The Book of Five Rings. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Shambhala.
Wanting to be accurate, this second part is on hold pending a trip back to London and maybe, hopefully, checking by a suitably qualified and up-to-date neurologist.