When reading Martha Stout's “When I Woke up Tuesday Morning, it was Friday”(2001), and Robert Thurman's “Wisdom”,( 2004); in The New Humanities Reader. I felt a sense that these two passages could easily connect with another. Published in 2001, highlighted in The New Humanities Reader, Stout's book goes into depth about what psychological trauma is and how disassociation develops as a result of a traumatic event. Disassociation is defined by Psychology Today as “the splitting off of a group of mental processes from the main body of consciousness, as in amnesia”. This means that after a person experiences a traumatic event, the person’s ability to retain the memory is shifted and results in a complete, or almost complete, mental block of the…show more content… Seeming to be the logical thing to do, Stout says that you have to work on yourself in order to help others. Thurman, as well, teaches the same thing. This is why Thurman’s teachings are perfectly logical when it comes to bettering yourself. Bettering yourself takes time and energy, and you have to be more than willing to work for a better life. Stout talks extensively on trauma in her book “I Woke up Tuesday Morning and it was Friday”. Stout says that when processing events, the event is saved in the brain as a whole memory. When a traumatizing event occurs, “the result is that portions of the traumatic memory are stored not as parts of the unified whole, but as isolated sensory images and bodily sensations that are not localized in time or even in situation, or integrated with other events” (Stout 421). What Stout is saying is that traumatizing events are stored as triggering events in the brain. When these sensations are stored, the person can experience an event and be triggered from a pasta trauma. The person may not distinguish what caused the overreaction of the situation. “In a heartbeat, the present is perpetually and emotionally the past” (Stout
