Reader’s Digest is one of my favorite quick reads. My life is so crazy that reading in small bytes is about all I can do … and Reader’s Digest gives me a chance to read about something besides attachment and trauma issues … or does it?


The recent November issue of the magazine had several articles that brought me back to … you guessed it … trauma and trauma related issues. One article was about an Iraq war veteran who had what was termed “conversion disorder”. This young man was confined to a wheelchair because he wasn’t able to walk, and yet all the tests and MRI’s had indicated there was no physical reason for his “paralysis.” He was sent to a lady shrink … and together they explored the reason for his nonfunctioning legs. It turns out his best friend was shot 45 times (so many wounds that when the marines carried his body back this “paralyzed” vet could “see daylight through his body.”) The veteran was supposed to be the “point guy” … he was supposed to have gone ahead of his buddy. When the psychiatrist walked her patient through this memory, she made him articulate those last few moments before his friend died. The young man realized he would have walked a few steps forward and then been killed as horrifically as his friend. Suddenly, his “nonfunctioning” legs made sense. A week later he was walking.


Another story described the events surrounding the collapse of the St. Paul, Minnesota bridge. This story has a special hook for me because Stephanie drove that bridge quite often. She attends college not far from where the bridge collapsed. One of the vehicles involved in the collapse was a school bus full of kids. They all survived, including the bus driver and her two kids who were pictured in the story. All I could think about when I read that story and looked at that picture was how that traumatic experience had affected those kids. The truth is … because they probably had a solid attachment and trust relationship with their mom (and perhaps a dad as well), they will most likely rise above the damage done to them because of this highly traumatic incident. Previously healthy people can survive extreme trauma if they have a solid foundation first. That is not to say that the trauma won’t leave scars … only that the impact is less pervasive and life-changing than trauma that occurs to a child who is trying to attach during the trauma or who never made any attachments at all.

Check this out for actual footage of the bridge collapsing.

Photo Credit