Dealing With Traumatic Events In Therapy

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

If I am not mistaken, Freud's approach was this: the event must be remembered and relived in the therapist's office. And to worry until the event from the catastrophe begins to be perceived as bitter, but not fatal. As far as I understood, this is due to the dulling of the senses.

In general, if we consider that in traditional psychoanalysis the psychoanalyst behaves uninvolved, then this will be retraumatization, not healing. Especially when it is used amateurishly: a person read about it in a book and let's remember and replay everything in ourselves. Personally, for a very long time, I was in the illusion that in order to solve the problem, it is enough to remember the event from which it all began, and as soon as this connection is established ("I am afraid of dogs because at the age of three I was attacked by a dog and bitten"), so the problem will resolve by herself. Sometimes, however, this happens. When the event did not become a trauma, but simply led to strange behavior in some situations. For example, a man is very suppressed in front of his boss, a fat woman with long dark hair, falls into a stupor, etc. After working with his memory, he suddenly remembers that at the dacha, when he was very young, they had an angry neighbor, big, fat and with dark hair, who often beat him with a broom for no reason. He remembered, stopped associating the boss with the neighbor - and let go. The problem has been resolved.

With trauma, simply remembering the event does not work for a number of reasons:

1. Not all memories - especially early childhood memories - are stored in an integral form, like a small video clip with sound, color, subtitles. It happens that memories are stored in a torn form (a picture without sound or a sound without a picture), and it happens that only an indistinct patch of memory remains in memory (an inexplicable sensation in the knee) that cannot be deciphered. What is there to remember if there is no file?

2. Amnesia is not the cause of trauma, but its effect. Not forgetting events leads to trauma, but trauma leads to oblivion. You are not afraid of dogs because you forgot how the dog bit you. You forgot, because the experience was too catastrophic at that moment, and the psyche took it away.

Trauma is an overwhelming experience at the time of a traumatic event, plus a state of loneliness and helplessness (plus conclusions about oneself and the world made after the injury). The most terrible legacy is not that a person has experienced such an event and received such an experience. The worst thing is the fixed feeling of powerlessness that arose at the moment of trauma, and the subsequent feeling of loneliness if there was no support and help after the trauma.

Returning to memory recovery as a way to heal trauma. Yes, it can help in therapy, but not because the memory has been pulled out and played many times to the point of dullness. But because speaking the memory and the feelings associated with it, the person is no longer alone - at this moment he receives the therapist's support, his participation, attention and sympathy. That is, the injured part gets in real time what was not there at the moment of the injury. This is what helps (and this is the main thing that helps in therapy in general).

So if a person is sitting alone recalling, or some lamer-with-training-trained people with him, there will be no healing, there will be retraumatization. With-girlfriends-in-the-kitchens, the effect will be the same, even if they howl loudly and hold hands. The person will simply re-experience powerlessness and loneliness in an acute form. Support is full presence, valuelessness, authenticity, empathy, and knowing how to do it right in the case of traumatized people.

About working with impotence. There are different approaches here. For example, a telescope. It is believed that at the moment of injury, a muscle clamp is created in the body: the person wanted to do something (defend himself, shout and call for help, run away), but could not. If you find this clamp and complete this movement (respectively, scream, fight, run away), then psychologically it also lets go. Instead of powerlessness comes the feeling of a perfect action, and despite the fact that it did not happen then, and got the opportunity to happen only many years later, it still works.

Another important point: to work with trauma, it is not necessary to remember and know the very event. You can work with what is now, what consequences are manifesting now and how. As I explained above, sometimes it is simply impossible to remember. There is no file in the system, or a couple of bytes are left from it. There is no file, but the consequences of the event are there, and you can work with them.

Summing up:

1. Just remembering is ineffective.

2. To remember and live alone or in a company with non-professionals (or even with professionals, but who do not care about work with trauma) is not only ineffective, it is dangerous with repeated retraumatization. If you continue to do this, your system will simply say: basta! And he will put up an internal fence out of such fear and blocks that you simply cannot get to the bottom of it during your lifetime.

3. It is often impossible to remember at all, because it was preserved in memory in a badly beaten and illegible form.

4. The most important thing in dealing with trauma, its events and experiences is not to remember and establish causal relationships, but to gain experience of support and non-loneliness, sincere participation and empathy.

5. The worst consequence of trauma is powerlessness. Without working with powerlessness - not only by realizing it, but also by converting it into the experience of "action" - it is impossible to completely eliminate the consequences of trauma from oneself.