Growing Up As One Of The Main Goals Of Early Trauma Therapy

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

It is very common to come across the belief that the problem exists because something is broken. And it is enough to fix the broken, as everything will work. For example, it is difficult for a person to endure closeness, and he thinks - it is necessary to dig, find out why it is buggy, fix it and everything will work out with closeness

When it comes to traumatics - especially early traumatics - most often the question is not about repairing, but about growing or growing. When trauma occurs, development stops in the damaged area of the psyche. And what should ideally grow there, either does not grow at all, or freezes at an embryonic stage.

That is, the traumatic with closeness has a problem not only that the first experience of closeness was terrible, but also that because of this the ability to be in closeness never got a chance to develop.

In therapy, you can understand the problem and get to the bottom of its origins, but this is only the first part of the work. The second part is in growing the missing capacity. Very often it will be a job of growing from scratch.

We can say that early trauma therapy is mainly about this very regrowth and about gaining missing experience (for example, the experience of a safe addiction) due to which development has stopped.

If we talk about panic and how to cope with it, then early traumatics often lack the ability to self-regulate. Their emotional state goes from one extreme to another - from panic to complete depression and vice versa. And nothing in between.

Self-regulation is the ability to cheer yourself up when you have fallen into comatose somewhere, and the ability to calm yourself down when you are in an extreme state. If we imagine emotions in the form of a sinusoid, then self-regulation is the skill to return oneself to that part of the sinusoid where there are no peak states, but there is just a moderate wave. Ideally, this ability grows in contact with the mother, who is sensitive to the infant's condition and can calm or cheer him up. In early traumatics, it often happens that the mother acts out of place all the time and regularly leaves the child alone with his conditions.

So the ability to regulate one's condition is something that a traumatic person should master already in adulthood and do it consciously. Like any skill, it is a matter of regular, systematic training.