Transcript

The word trauma, meaning a terrible event we live through that cannot be remembered but which generates painful related symptoms captures an acute paradox in our relationship to our own histories. Some of what is most significant in our lives is inaccessible to day to day memory.

The more important something is, the less we may be able to recall it. There seems to be athreshold of pain above which our minds won't go in order to retrieve an event. We'll recall with ease the pleasant childhood spring morning 30 years ago by the river bank when we swam and fed the ducks, but we'll be sincerely unable to remember a moment that same day when our troubled father abruptly lost his temper over an apparent triviality, and from nowhere slapped us

extremely hard across the cheek and left us to walk home alone.