Small moments of loving connection preserve a traumatized person among the living.
references
Commonly the patient has the fantasy that she is already among the dead, because her capacity for love has been destroyed. What sustains the patient through this descent into despair is the smallest evidence of an ability to form loving connections.
⤷ Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman
Preservative love is shorthand for all of those acts that keep a being alive and intact, and it is characterized by a specific response to the vulnerability of an other. […] only some trans folks are children, and not all trans people engage in mothering. But if you’re a person of trans experience and involved in trans communities, you know that intensified forms of vulnerability and exposure to violence and debility continue to inform trans lives across age groups. […] we remain in need of mothering (in the many-gendered, expansive sense of the word) well into adulthood. (68)
⤷ Trans Care, Hil Malatino