​Vesna from Slovakia sent this email:

"I am reading Traumatization and Its Aftermath and I must say that I have never read a better book about trauma. I gained insight into my life, my story, why what happened to me happened to me.
When the author explained the process of traumatization, I understood that this is a natural course of events when something constantly eats away at you and you cannot escape. I also understood when it had all started for me, which I was unable to pinpoint due to my severe dissociation.

When I started high school, I suddenly couldn't eat dairy anymore, and I read it in this book for the first time that intolerance to dairy or gluten is a sign that changes are happening in the body. This explained to me the subsequent "quiet" period I had when I was acting "normal" on the outside, but in reality I was in allostasis.

The thing that stayed with me the most is that it is by no means necessary that everything has to do with the outside world and that I’ve put too much emphasis on that. I understand this now as traumatic thinking when you're just trying to explain your symptoms to yourself, but not really understanding what is going on. It’s only now that I’ve realized that this is neither fair nor true. But that's how I explained it to myself, even though I was wrong. That's how I’ve experienced it, as a sort of default thinking, which is also explained in the book.
It’s a very comforting book to read. In fact, it explained everything I wanted to know and what I was interested in, and everything is in line with my experiences. I realized it's really not okay to accuse myself of anything. For the longest time, I was without access to knowing for sure that there's nothing wrong with me. I look at it completely differently now and I am able to use this wisdom and calm down.

I was very pleased that the book made such a strong case for dissociation, because I stopped feeling ashamed about it. It's completely logical. I just did this to help myself. I remember exactly why and how I did it and that I was proud of myself at the time. I felt strong.
I also understood there is no need to fear dissociation. In my case, I started to be very afraid of it. Mainly because I had forgot why I was doing it, which confused and scared me. This book taught me that everything is reversible. Or almost everything, if I understood correctly.