General Interest
General Interest · 05. April 2018
This piece is written by Professor Franz Ruppert, and originated in response to a discussion on the IoPT Facebook page. Thank you Franz for your contribution. To call one’s sexuality ‘hetero’, ‘homo’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘trans’, ‘queer’ etc. does not say anything about the quality of one’s sexuality, how I act my sexuality out – alone or with a partner. Also naming it ‘normal’, ‘natural’ or ‘colourful’ is often more an attempt to justify it for public...
General Interest · 30. November 2017
Trauma of Identity The trauma of identity means that I am not able to be myself; I lose my true identity in the moment in which this trauma happens. My survival of this trauma at that earliest time of my life, usually pre-birth, meant that I had to give up on my wants, my identity, and identify with the wants and needs of my mother, with her identity instead. We call this identification. This is the strategy for surviving a Trauma of Identity. To exist is to have needs... and wants. They are...
General Interest · 25. February 2017
In general we tend to think that our life begins at our birth. Our 'birth day' is the day we celebrate each year. And yet there is a whole nine months of life before this that we have already lived that we rarely consider. Our life actually begins at conception. That is the day we really should celebrate, but usually we know little about this day. Our mother may not even know when we were conceived*. In Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Therapy we see this time that we spend inside the body of our...
General Interest · 13. February 2017
Hanna Arendt used the term 'banality of evil' in relation to her witnessing of the trial of Adolf Echimann for crimes against humanity in Israel in 1961.
General Interest · 19. September 2016
Who am I… really? Thoughts on Identity and Identification There's a difference between acknowledging a fact about yourself, and identifying yourself with something. Identification is a substitute for identity, it is a trauma survival strategy. A fact about myself is that I was born in the UK and so have a British passport. This means I am British. Emotional identification with being British, however is a way in which I outsource my identity because of a lack of real identity; this is due to...
General Interest · 08. May 2016
In Juliet's famous 'balcony' speech she laments the name of her beloved, Romeo Montague:
General Interest · 08. March 2016
Trauma is a devastating experience that we cannot cope with. We are helpless, overpowered and vulnerable. We feel as if our very existence is in danger: we may not actually survive. Our psychological reaction to trauma is to split our psyche, to split off the unbearable emotional experience of terror, helplessness, annihilation, so that we can at least survive as an organism and continue our existence. We do continue to exist, but our psyche is split, and our ability to perceive clearly is...