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The author, when working as reporter in the Iraq war, was asked by a soldier while following a mission: “Have you ever been blown up before, sir?”
The question came one day before he himself was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad. “Everything was fine until it wasn't,” the author continues. In hindsight he wonders if the soldier's question was a clue, a warning, that something may happen, and he goes on to reflect on the phenomena of “apophenia”: “finding patterns where there shouldn't be patterns”, a phenomena well-known to survivors of traumatisation who spend a lot of energy looking for signs of danger.
This episode and the following reflections bring the reader right into the enigmas of the post-traumatic mind. “Trauma destroys the fabric of time”, he cites a prominent psychoanalyst for having said. “In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again. … In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fan can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas” (page xii).
The book that follows represents one of the most far-reaching explorations of what it is to be traumatised I have read. In parallel, the author explores his own mind and his own struggles to come to terms with what happened. And he explores how the profession, the mental health field that he encountered on several therapeutic occasions, has struggled to understand the post-traumatic mind. The profession has ignored and backed away, has neglected, misunderstood, and maltreated the traumatised person, during the last more than 100 years, until now, when a still insufficient, but maybe better understanding, has been reached. I emphasise “maybe” because there are still so many holes in the understanding, so much insufficient treatment, and still so many who suffer perpetually f