Survivors of trauma feel that suffering is not depression and return to life hurts.

Evidence

But they have all been dead, even those who returned home smiling. They have all been in the arms of the unnameable aggressor: death itself “in person.” We can go on living afterwards, even laugh about it when we come back from hell, but we hardly dare to admit that we feel initiated by the terrible experience. When we have lived among the dead, when we have lived through death, how can we say that we are ghosts? How can we make others understand that suffering is not depression, and that often the return to life is what hurts? — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 4157

Categorization

• BMF: The claim that returning from death is itself the wound—‘the return to life is what hurts’—resonates with the structure in White Noise where the mediated proximity to death and the fear of it suffuse ordinary living, though the mechanism differs.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion ‘often the return to life is what hurts’ caps a dense meditation on post-trauma existence as ghostliness rather than psychic injury—an idea that resists summary and repays long sitting.
• XREF: connects to: Collectivist Bosnian war survivors reported less distress than individualist ones — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 1034