Injury. How To Maintain Dignity In Suffering?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-31 14:10

Trauma - how it happens

Our topic today is trauma. This is a very painful part of human reality. We can experience love, joy, pleasure, but also depression, addiction. And also pain. And this - exactly what I'm going to talk about.

Let's start with everyday reality. Trauma is the Greek word for injury. They happen every day.

When trauma occurs, we become numb and questionable - relationships in which we were not taken seriously, bullying at work or in childhood, when we preferred a brother or sister. Some have a tense relationship with their parents, and they are left without an inheritance. And then there's domestic violence. The worst form of trauma - war.

Thus, trauma confronts us with the fundamentals of existence. Any trauma is a tragedy. We are experiencing a limitation in funds, we feel vulnerable. And the question arises of how to survive and remain human. How can we remain ourselves, maintain a sense of ourselves and a relationship

Mechanisms of injury

We've all experienced physical injuries - a cut or a broken leg. But what is damage? It is the violent destruction of the whole.

From a phenomenological point of view, when I cut the bread and cut myself, the same thing happens to me as to the bread. But the bread doesn't cry, and I - Yes.

The knife breaks my boundaries, the boundaries of my skin. The knife breaks the integrity of the skin because it is not strong enough to withstand it. This is the nature of any injury. And any force that breaks the boundaries of integrity, we call violence.

Objectively, violence is not necessarily present. If I am weak or depressed, I will feel wounded, even if there is little effort.

The consequences of injury are loss of functionality: for example, you cannot walk with a broken leg. And further - something of its own is lost. For example, my blood spreads across the table, although nature does not provide for this. And then the pain comes.

It comes to the fore of consciousness, obscures the whole world, we lose our ability to work. Although the pain itself is just a signal.

The pain is different, but all of it evokes a sense of sacrifice. The victim feels naked - this is the basis of existential analysis. When I am in pain, I feel naked in front of the world.

The pain says, “Do something about it, it's paramount. Take a position, find a reason, remove the pain. If we do this, we have a chance to avoid more pain.

Psychological trauma is the same mechanism. Elsa

On the psychological level, something similar to the physical level happens: the invasion of boundaries, the loss of one's own, and the loss of functionality.

I had a patient. Her trauma came from rejection.

Elsa was forty-six, she suffered from depression since the age of twenty, especially in the last two years. A separate test for her was the holidays - Christmas or birthdays. Then she could not even move and delegated housework to others.

Her main feeling was, "I'm worthless." She tortured the family with her doubts and suspicions, got the children out with her questions.

We found the anxiety she was not aware of, as well as the connection between the anxiety and the basic feelings, and raised the question, "Am I valuable enough for my children." Then we came to the question: "When they do not answer me where they are going in the evening, I do not feel loved enough."

Then she wanted to scream and cry, but she stopped crying long ago - tears acted on her husband's nerves. She felt ineligible to scream and complain because she thought it didn't matter to others, which meant – it doesn't matter to her either.

We started looking for where this sense of lack of value was coming from, and found that it was a custom in her family to take her belongings without asking. Once in childhood, her favorite handbag was taken from her and given to her cousin, so that it would look better in a family photo. This is a trifle, but it is also firmly deposited in the mind of the child, if a similar thing is repeated. In Elsa's life, rejection was repeated constantly.

Mother constantly compared her to her brother, and the brother was better. Her honesty was punished. She had to fight for her husband, then work hard. The whole village was gossiping about her.

The only one who loved her, protected and was proud of her was her father. This saved her from a more serious personality disorder, but she only heard criticism from all significant people. She was told that she had no rights, that she was worse, that she was worthless.

When she started talking about it, she felt bad again. Now it wasn't just a spasm in my throat, a pain that spread to my shoulders.

“At first I was furious with the statements of my relatives,” she said, “but then my son-in-law kicked me out. He told my relatives that I slept with his brother. My mother called me a prostitute and kicked me out. Even my future husband, who was then having affairs with other women, did not stand up for me."

She was able to cry about all this only during the therapy session. But at the same time, she could not remain alone - in loneliness, thoughts began to torment her especially strongly.

Awareness of the pain caused by others, her feelings and melancholy, in the end led to the fact that during a year of therapy Elsa was able to cope with depression.

Thank God that the depression eventually became so strong that the woman could not ignore it.

Psychic trauma. What's happening? Scheme

Pain is a signal that makes us look at the problem. But the main question that arises for the victim is: “What am I really worth if I am treated like this? Why me? What is it for me?"

Unexpected trauma doesn't fit our picture of reality. Our values are eroded, and every damage calls into question the future. Each damage brings the feeling that there is too much going on. Our ego is under this wave.

Existential psychology considers a person in four dimensions - in his connection with the world, life, his own self and the future. Serious trauma tends to weaken all four dimensions, but the relationship with oneself is most damaged. The structure of existence is bursting at the seams, and the strength to overcome the situation is fading away.

At the center of the process is the human self. It is it that must recognize what is happening and decide what to do next, but the person does not have the strength, and then he needs the help of others.

Trauma in its purest form is an unexpected encounter with death or serious injury. Trauma happens to me, but sometimes it doesn’t need to be threatened just for me. It's enough to see how something threatens another – and then the person also experiences a shock.

More than half of people have experienced such a reaction at least once in their lives, and about 10% then showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder - with returns to a traumatic state, nervousness, and so on.

Trauma affects the deepest layers of existence, but what suffers most is basic trust in the world. For example, when people are rescued after an earthquake or tsunami, they feel as if nothing else is holding them in the world

Trauma and dignity. How a man goes down

The trauma is especially hard because of its inevitability. We are faced with circumstances that must be resigned to. It is destiny, a destructive force over which I have no control.

Experiencing such a situation means: we are experiencing something that, in principle, we did not consider possible. We even lose faith in science and technology. It already seemed to us that we had tamed the world, and here we are - like children who played in the sandbox, and our castle was destroyed. How can you stay human in all this?

Viktor Frankl lived in a concentration camp for two and a half years, lost his entire family, miraculously escaped death, constantly experienced depreciation, but did not break down, and even grew spiritually. Yes, there were also injuries that remained until the end of his life: even at the age of eighty, he sometimes had nightmares, and he cried at night.

In Man's Search for Meaning, he describes the horror of his arrival at the concentration camp. As a psychologist, he identified four main elements. There was fear in everyone's eyes, the reality was incredible. But they were especially shocked by the struggle of all against all. They have lost their future and dignity. This correlates with four fundamental motivations that were not known at the time.

The prisoners were lost, and gradually the realization came that one could draw a line under the past life. Apathy set in, gradual mental dying began – of feelings remained only pain from the unfairness of the relationship, humiliation.

The second consequence was the removal of oneself from life, people descended to a primitive existence, everyone thought only about food, a place to warm up and sleep –the rest of the interests are gone. Someone will say that this is normal: first food, then morality. But Frankl has shown that this is not the case.

Third, there was no sense of personality and freedom. He writes: “We were no longer human, but part of the chaos. Life turned into being in the herd.

Fourth, the sense of the future has disappeared. The present was not thought to be happening in reality, there was no future. Everything around was losing its meaning.

Similar symptoms can be observed in any injury. Rape victims, soldiers returning from war, are experiencing a crisis of fundamental motivation. They all feel that they can no longer trust anyone.

This condition requires special therapy to restore basic trust in the world. It takes a lot of effort, time and very careful work

Freedom and meaning. Viktor Frankl's secret and existential twist

Every trauma asks a question about meaning. He is very human, because the trauma itself is meaningless. It would be an ontological contradiction to say that we see meaning in trauma, in killing. We can have the hope that everything is in the hands of the Lord. But this question – very personal. Viktor Frankl raised the question that we must take an existential turn: trauma can become meaningful through our own actions. "What is it for me?" - the question is meaningless. But "can I take something out of this, get deeper?" – gives meaning to the trauma

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Fight, but not revenge. How?

Looping on the question "why?" makes us especially defenseless. We suffer from something that is meaningless in itself - it destroys us. Trauma destroys our boundaries, leads to loss of ourselves, loss of dignity. Trauma that occurs through violence against others leads to humiliation. Mockery of others, humiliation of victims – it is dehumanization. So our response is – we fight for meaning and dignity.

This happens not only when we are traumatized ourselves, but when people with whom we identify ourselves are suffering. Chechnya and Syria, world wars and other events lead to suicidal attempts even by those people who were not injured themselves.

For example, young Palestinians are shown films about the unfair treatment of Israeli soldiers. And they are trying to restore fair treatment to the victims and hurt those responsible. The traumatized condition can be carried out at a distance. When returned, this occurs in malignant narcissism. Such people take pleasure in seeing the suffering of others.

The question arises how to deal with these means, other than revenge and suicide. In existential psychology, we use the “stand next to yourself” method.

There are two authors, partly opposed to each other - Camus and Frankl. In the book about Sisyphus, Camus calls to make suffering conscious, to give meaning to one's own resistance to the gods. Frankl is known for the motto "take life no matter what."

Frenchman Camus proposes to draw energy from self-esteem. The Austrian Frankl is that there must be something more. Relationship with yourself, other people and God.

About the power of a flower and freedom of sight

Trauma is an internal dialogue. It is very important in case of injury not to let yourself stop. It is necessary to accept what has happened in the world, but not to stop the inner life, to preserve the inner space. In the concentration camp, simple things helped to keep the inner meaning: to look at the sunset and sunrise, the shape of clouds, an accidentally growing flower or mountains.

It's hard to believe that such simple things can feed us, we usually expect more. But the flower was a confirmation that beauty still exists. Sometimes they pushed each other and showed with signs how beautiful the world is. And then they felt that life is so valuable that it overpowers all circumstances. We in existential analysis call this fundamental value.

Another way to overcome terror was good relationships. For Frankl, a desire to see his wife and family again.

Internal dialogue also created distance from what was happening. Frankl thought that he would write a book someday, began to analyze – and this alienated him from what was happening.

Third, even with limited external freedom, they still had internal resources to build a way of life. Frankl wrote: "Everything can be taken from a person except the opportunity to take a position."

The ability to say good morning to a neighbor and look into his eyes was not necessary, but it meant that the person still had a minimum of freedom.

The position of a paralytic bedridden presupposes the very minimum of freedom, but one also needs to be able to live it. Then you feel that you are still a person, not an object, and you have dignity. And they still had faith.

Frankl's famous existential twist is that the question "what is it for me?" he wrapped up in "what does this expect from me?" such a turn means that I still have freedom, which means dignity. This means that we can bring something of our own even into the ontological meaning.

Viktor Frankl wrote: “What we were looking for had such a deep meaning that he attached importance not only to death, but also to dying and suffering. The fight can be modest and inconspicuous, not necessarily loud."

The Austrian psychologist survived, returned home, but he realized that he had forgotten how to rejoice at something, and he learned it all over again. And that was another experiment. He himself could not understand how they survived all this. And, comprehending this, he realized that he no longer fears anything except God.

To summarize, I really hope that this lecture will be at least a little useful to you.

There are always small values, if we are not too proud to see them. And the words of greeting spoken to our companion may well become a manifestation of our freedom, which gives meaning to existence. And then we can feel like people.