I read this in an excellent article by a graduate of the SERE program, the Cold War-inspired torture institute set up to try to train American servicemen to resist inhumanly brutal interrogation and brainwashing techniques (SERE later formed the blueprint for the “enhanced interrogation” –tortures — Dick Cheney, John Yoo and David Addington were so enthusiastic about):

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a disease characterized by, among other things, an addiction to the reliving of powerful memories, memories that habitually traumatize and re-traumatize the mind until, in the worst cases, it becomes impossible to live without the chemical rush the memories provide.

This reminded me of the study a brilliant, and disturbed, classmate of mine in Law School told me about.  Scientists studied the brains of people who had been abused as children and found there were significant physical changes in the brains of these people, now adults.  Being traumatized and re-traumatized, living in a hostile environment where you are powerless, frequently punished for infractions of brutal, arbitrary, impossible to know rules, changes your brain, literally.

I’m not putting this all together for you correctly now, and I must toddle off to sleep, have to be up early to attend a workshop about getting blood from corporate stones.  I’ll reorganize it better tomorrow evening.  But for now, when I wonder about my own debilitating moods, the odd actions of people I’ve known for years, self-destructive or strangely gruff behavior, and grimness, this traumatizing and re-traumatizing gives me an insight, or the glimmer of one.

Stay tuned.