2
" Secondary structural dissociation involves one ANP and more than one EP. Examples of secondary structural dissociation are complex PTSD, complex forms of acute stress disorder, complex dissociative amnesia, complex somatoform disorders, some forms of trauma-relayed personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS).. Secondary structural dissociation is characterized by divideness of two or more defensive subsystems. For example, there may be different EPs that are devoted to flight, fight or freeze, total submission, and so on. (Van der Hart et al., 2004). Gail, a patient of mine, does not have a personality disorder, but describes herself as a " changed person." She survived a horrific car accident that killed several others, and in which she was the driver. Someone not knowing her history might see her as a relatively normal, somewhat anxious and stiff person (ANP). It would not occur to this observer that only a year before, Gail had been a different person: fun-loving, spontaneous, flexible, and untroubled by frightening nightmares and constant anxiety. Fortunately, Gail has been willing to pay attention to her EPs; she has been able to put the process of integration in motion; and she has been able to heal. p134 "
3
" Dissociation, in a general sense, refers to a rigid separation of parts of experiences, including somatic experiences, consciousness, affects, perception, identity, and memory. When there is a structural dissociation, each of the dissociated self-states has at least a rudimentary sense of " I" (Van der Hart et al., 2004). In my view, all of the environmentally based " psychopathology" or problems in living can be seen through this lens. "
4
" Candice had been writing for two days’ straight, working on her publisher’s book deadline, when she wrote the end, smiled, and set the book aside. She would start proofing it tomorrow after she’d given her brain a break. Now she’d do what she always did when she finished a book, or reached a good stopping point in one. Clean house. Check her backlog of emails. Pick up some more groceries. And take a run on the wolf side.She finished vacuuming and dusting, swearing every window must let all the outdoors in, and then started a batch of gingerbread cookie cutouts to celebrate finishing another book and the Christmas holiday season. While they were baking, she finally settled down to check her emails. Fan mail always came first, and one from her website got her attention right off. She opened it up and read: Hello, I’m Owen Nottingham, private investigator for White River Investigations, White River Falls, Minnesota and my client, Strom Hart, hired me to locate you. Your parents, John and Cynthia Hart, left you an inheritance and you need to see the lawyer about it so that you can claim it. I need to verify that you are the right woman first. Is there any way that we can possibly meet and get this taken care of so you can collect your inheritance? Strom Hart will be the one to receive it by the end of the month otherwise. His assistant, Jim Winchester, said Mr. Hart is your uncle.”She reread the message again, not believing her eyes, tears filling them. She quickly looked at the date of the message. Two days ago! She knew she shouldn’t have neglected her emails, but when she was into the story, she couldn’t break away.She ground her teeth, raised her fingers to respond, and heard a knocking at her door. No one came here. Never. Ever. Not even salesmen.She glanced at her phases-of-the moon calendar. The waxing gibbous was just beginning. She should be fine. Just to be on the safe side, in case the person at the door was trouble, she pulled a can of mace from her desk drawer and headed for the door. She peered through the peephole. A handsome black-haired man waited at the door, with rugged features and intense blue eyes. He was dressed in a black suit, a red shirt, and a dark purple tie covered in red, purple, and gold Christmas balls. She raised her brows.“I’m Owen Nottingham,” he said to the door, holding up his PI license and driver’s license. He couldn’t know that she was watching him, so he must have hoped she was there, observing him. “I tried getting hold of you on your contact form on your website about your inheritance. Your contact form might not be working, so I had to locate you in person.”So this was the man who had sent the message. But was he for real? He had to be. He wouldn’t have come all this way to see her if he wasn’t. But how had he found her? She opened the door, the bells jingling on her Christmas wreath, and he glanced down at the can of mace in her hand. He smiled, his gaze holding hers with such intensity, it was as though he could see clear through to her soul. “Really, just a PI doing my job.”A chilly breeze carried his scent to her. Wolf scent. She felt so lightheaded all at once, she grabbed the door to keep herself upright, and dropped the can of mace on the tile floor. It clattered, but she couldn’t reach for it if her life depended on it. Oh. My. God.This couldn’t be real. He couldn’t be real. No wonder he was talking to the door. He must have heard her footfalls as she’d approached.He took a deep breath at the same time and his eyes widened in surprise when he smelled her scent. His hand shot out to grab her arm and steady her. For a minute, as she tried to control her breathing, her heart rate, neither of which she could steady. She felt like she was going to pass out.“Hell, you’re the wolf I saw across the White River, aren’t you? "
5
" Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which we engage all the time, may or may not be accompanied by behavioral actions. It is essential that you become aware of, learn to tolerate and regulate, and even change major mental actions that affect your current life, such as negative beliefs, and feelings or reactions to the past the interfere with the present. However, it is impossible to change inner experiences if you are avoiding them because you are afraid, ashamed or disgusted by them. Serious avoidance of you inner experiences is called experiential avoidance (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, & Follettte, 1996), or the phobia of inner experience (Steele, Van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2005; Van der Hart et al., 2006). "
― , Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
6
" I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind that had picked up speed and vigor from its Atlantic crossing. I’d study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the milk Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they’d been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation’s slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November’s chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called the “unfettered leewardings,” here at the end of the world. "
― Mark Doty , Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
8
" To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving’s to Truman Capote’s, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation’s literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan’s salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge. "
― Jacob M. Appel , The Biology of Luck
9
" He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.
Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit. "
― Cornell Woolrich , The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (Alternatives SF Series)
10
" The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes. "
― Helen Bevington , When Found, Make a Verse of
11
" Unless the object of the singer’s affection is a vampire, surely what Hart means is unphotogenic. Only vampires are unphotographable, but affectionate ‘-enic’ rhymes are hard to come by. "
― , Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1954-1981, With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes
