Final Draft 2

Expos 101

Final Draft #2

Soredn Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher once said “Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.” A traumatic experience can be a very overwhelming and unending experience that can affect a person’s day-to-day life. Ultimately, a trauma is like the brain allowing for a movie to be played over and over again, once it can make any sort of association with the trauma causing for an individual to be completely dissociated with reality for minutes, days, hours and even days. In “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday,” author and clinical psychologist, Martha Stout gives her input on sanity and dissociation through giving examples of what her patients have told her during their therapy sessions with her. Stout gives explicit details on her patient's traumatic events along with their upbringing and an overall background of their lives. She goes on to argue that dissociation can be a torturous experience for many people because it has the power of severely weakening a person’s ability to be present psychologically thus, giving them a limited perception of reality, to the extent that it becomes chronic and consequently feels unbearable. While Stout uses more of a biological approach when looking at individuals who have suffered trauma, Malcolm Gladwell, in “The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime,” uses an environmental argument to describe the influential power that environment can have on an individual’s behavior especially when fear overcomes in a stressful situation. He explains that being put in an unfamiliar context creates a time of possibilities in which the choices that one makes, the outcomes one expects automatically can shape who we are at the moment and who we will become. Understanding the context of the trauma is a healing process because it enables an individual to set predictions for the future in familiar contexts and situations, and this can help them...