" It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma," Judith Lewis Herman asserts. The child becomes "fixated," or developmentally arrested at the age at which the trauma occurred, and even as an adult is stuck in a time warp of childlike helplessness. She continues to process emotions with a child's intensity and mobilizes only those defenses that were available to her at the time of the trauma. Rather than blame others for her problems, she views her pain through the magical thinking of childhood, convinced that she is responsible not only for what happened to her as a kid but all the subsequent problems that have befallen her. "Repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structure of the personality already formed, but repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality," writes Herman in her 1992 book "Trauma and Recovery". "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain