Secrets, Taboos And Trauma

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

Killing secrets

In the life of every person there are such special spaces that carry the meta "you can't come here" - you can't talk about something, you can't discuss, you can't mention something, but what's there, it's not even permissible to think. These spaces carry an aura of mystery, something forbidden, even transcendent, otherworldly. In psychoanalysis there is the concept of "another scene", which capaciously denotes these mental spaces.

We also talk about "skeletons in the closet." Skeletons in the closet are secrets, taboo in a person's life, in his past, terra incognita. And any terra incognita, as the psychotherapeutic experience tells us, is associated with something traumatic, traumatic for a person, with something extremely painful and unacceptable for comprehension.

Anything traumatic is usually taboo. Whatever community we are talking about - family, team, society. Trauma is something that cannot be talked about. We are stopped by feelings of shame, pain, guilt, rising from the bottom of the traumatic situation, from this point of horror and destruction.

In any family history there is always something about which family members, sometimes even the clan, at the level of several generations, prefer to keep silent, hiding what happened in secret, protecting the dark plot from prying eyes.

And, on the one hand, a painful traumatic experience is taboo due to the impossibility and painfulness of contact with it. On the other hand, hushing up secrets is in itself traumatic and destructive, it hurts us even more, exacerbating an already difficult situation. We are confronted with the traumatic nature of secrets.

We noticed that in the life of people there is a very common approach that it is better not to talk about injuries; in general, it is best to keep silent about injuries, be silent, closing this topic forever. This approach of silence is highly developed, but the paradox is that it only exacerbates the injury. As a result, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to survive the trauma, we avoid the opportunity to normalize our condition.

What trauma is silent about - trauma as an inability to speak

It is always very difficult to talk about trauma. In general, a lot of things that people cannot talk about, that cannot be expressed, told, are, in essence, very traumatic.

Lack of clarity is one of the key features of trauma. Something sits in the depths, pricks from the inside, but at the same time a person cannot speak out, cannot be frank with anyone, even with himself. A difficult situation sits somewhere deep, and the person is silent, not being able to start talking. And then this trauma begins to destroy the person from the inside.

The peculiarity of mental trauma is that the external traumatic force of the event, as a result of a person's inability to survive these negative influences, turns into an internal self-destructive force. And then, being once external, the traumatic force becomes internal, its own for a person. That is, there is a reorganization of external trauma into an internal self-traumatic force.

As a result, this suppression and cutting off of one's past leads to fragmentation and further traumatization of a person's life. A person is forced to constantly hide a fire in his soul, while he spends so much strength and energy so that the fire does not grow, but he is not able to completely extinguish it, because he is not able to completely extinguish it. for this you need to open up to a difficult past, you need to give it a way out.

Two sustained responses to trauma

In situations of trauma, we can observe two very stable and characteristic reactions to traumatic events. This is getting stuck in trauma, or total forgetting.

Stuck in trauma is expressed in the fact that, on the one hand, a person cannot experience and process all the consequences of traumatic events, give them a way out in words or actions in order to free themselves from painful memories. But at the same time he cannot forget them. As Freud said about it: "you cannot forget, and remember - impossible." A person suffers, cannot get out of trauma, constantly returning to these painful experiences, experiences, being literally flooded with a terrible past.

In another situation of total forgetfulness, a person behaves as if nothing had happened. He either does not remember anything (we then understand that “it is as if he does not remember”), or he devalues all the negative consequences experienced by him from a collision with traumatic factors, rationalizing a difficult situation, or denying the pain, the severity of the impact of the experience. He exhorts himself with appeals that everything is fine, all terrible is over, and now you just need to forget it as a bad dream and move on. It seems that everything is fine on the external level, the person has coped with it, he is building a new life, he is looking into the future.

But at the same time, a person can avoid any external stimuli that are associatively reminiscent of or associated with a traumatic situation, with the traumatic history of which he was a participant. He may have panic attacks, or phobias, avoidance forms of behavior, psychosomatic reactions. He may avoid and dodge, such as taking the subway or driving, or avoiding social activities. In general, we can observe a rather serious clinical picture of developing neurotic symptoms, and even borderline, up to psychotic symptoms.

Search for the culprit

Another characteristic moment when confronted with a traumatic experience is the feeling of guilt of the survivors and the vector of efforts associated with this feeling of guilt aimed at finding the culprit.

Often people in traumatic circumstances, stressful situations begin to look for the culprit. The so-called witch hunt is initiated. The trauma situation activates the context posed in the famous Russian question "Who is to blame?"

But the search for the guilty, unfortunately, does not solve the problem of trauma, traumatization, does not lead to the normalization of the process characteristic of post-traumatic events. Rather, it leads to the reinforcement of the injury. Those. we thereby aggravate the situation of the search for guilt, the guilty, the situation of punishment. Which, perhaps, gives us a feeling of relief for a short while, but does not heal from the consequences of traumatic influences.

In this process, the vector of pain, horror and aggression is directed at the culprit of the events, but at the same time the feelings and traumatic experience are not integrated by the psyche, mental processes are not involved in the direction of experiencing and processing this difficult experience. Therefore, the internal traumatic force retains its destructive effect in the human psyche.

A world of trauma - wounds that never heal

When we talk about mental trauma, we are referring to such a category as time and memory.

What is characteristic of the world of trauma is, as it were, the erasure of time boundaries, time gradations. After all, mental trauma has no time boundaries, it is always a response that stretched out in an indefinitely lasting period of life. A person can suffer because of what happened to him at the age of 10, and suffering can last a lifetime.

We are far from always able to identify and localize trauma in time, in a specific event. Often this is not an event. Rather, we are talking about a process that can be very extended over time. These are the situations that are spoken of as "continued present", i.e. when the past is not finished, it is not closed.

There is such a mental mechanism as aftereffect, the essence of which is that a person's response to a traumatic stimulus may not appear immediately after a negative impact, but after a long time, sometimes even a very long amount of time. It seems that nothing happened right away, the person adapted to reality, to its requirements, but years later, faced with a similar phenomenon, associatively reminiscent of a stimulus, the person “falls through” into the world of mental trauma.

And sometimes we see that people are very deeply traumatized, they remember their trauma, and it seems that they can never get rid of it. Of course, injuries leave scars on our souls. Sometimes these are wounds that cannot heal. In such a situation, a person gets stuck in a trauma, and is forced to return to it all the time, as if it does not let go.

In psychoanalysis, we talk about the phenomenon of compulsive repetition. This is exactly what happens to the bearer of the traumatic experience. The person becomes fixed on the trauma and is held captive by the painful experience. A person is constantly immersed in painful memories, or he constantly dreams the same nightmare. Sometimes he may even feel that the painful event is repeated over and over again (under masks and clothes of other circumstances and events), he may experience strong emotions in response to the slightest stimulus, reminiscent of that event from the traumatic past.

Those. man cannot free himself.

Important points to remember when dealing with trauma

We have already spoken about this, it is important to understand that the psyche transforms an external traumatic stimulus into an internal self-traumatic force. Therefore, the disappearance of the external threat and the stabilization of the external situation by no means guarantee that the internal traumatization will stop and the person will return to normal. Without being processed, the trauma can continue its effect from the inside for an indefinite amount of time.

The next important point relates to our individual ability to cope with stress and frustration. The fact is that the level of intolerance to stress and frustration is very individual. And what for one person will be extremely traumatic and destructive, another can go through much easier, calmer and with fewer consequences. And often people forget about it.

Remember what Freud said about trauma, this can be very useful for us in situations of trauma:

When experiencing trauma, people suffer primarily from memories. Trauma cannot exist without memory, so the core of mental trauma will be activated whenever any stimulus appears, even remotely resembling the previously received mental trauma, while simultaneously triggering pathological response mechanisms.

Mental trauma can be caused by any experience that provokes affect, and above all, situations associated with the experience of loss, feelings of fear or shame.

The outcome of the experience always depends on the vulnerability of a particular person.

A number of minor or partial injuries can add up and then have a cumulative effect in the form of a powerful reaction when faced with circumstances that associatively reproduce the nature of the original injury.

To heal mental trauma, we need to reproduce the trauma, and in the "here and now". It is important to respond to the traumatic experience so that trapped emotions can be released. Without this process, we cannot talk about the normalization of trauma.

Normalization of mental trauma

So, we come to the topic of normalizing mental trauma. We have already said that the main post-traumatic factor in psychotrauma is the ideology of non-speaking, silence, secrecy. Therefore, the most important thing in dealing with trauma is to start talking.

A crucial process in dealing with trauma is its representation, i.e. transfer to some other level than psychosomatic, bodily. We transfer the trauma to the level of reflection, recollection, expression, experience of pain. Those. we come to the point that we become ways of talking about these events, thinking about them, reflecting painful experiences.

The work of trauma is to close the gap that has arisen between the flash of a traumatic discharge and our rational part, our rationality.

A traumatic experience took place, in the human psyche there were gaps, gaps, voids that close a person from terrible affects in connection with a difficult experience, feelings of horror and extreme helplessness, up to a state of disorganization of the psyche - this is the core of psychotrauma.

We need to stay with this so that the energy that is concentrated in this core gradually dissolves through our contact with painful experience, with feelings, memories. It is extremely difficult to do this alone, we need another person who will be there and help to cope, help connect these affects, share painful feelings.

We are looking for forms for experiencing this traumatic experience, we create rituals, ritual mechanisms that help us to normalize our state of health, self-awareness.

Grief, pain, horror, shame must be expressed, expressed, mourned. Letting your emotions out is a major step in dealing with trauma. So that a person can get out of this closed and walled up space of the world of mental trauma, in which there are no opportunities for processing, there are no representations for it, there are no words and forms of expression of these terrible conglomerations of affects.

The work of trauma is not a linear process, it goes in waves, we are captured by the waves of returning to the traumatic past, they either calm down, then begin to worry and rise again and again.

Some cultural events, cultural rituals help us along this path. Films, books, works of art, sharing this experience with other people, group psychotherapy - through contact with these cultural traditions, we can overcome mental trauma, experience them, gradually weakening their harmful effects and getting rid of them, healing.

There are many things in culture that can help us. To overcome and normalize the trauma, it is important to relive the past, and not to close oneself from it, not to run away as from something unacceptable or unworthy. The task is to get out of these taboo zones and spaces, to bring to the light of day all these inner monsters, to see them in broad daylight, thereby experiencing the healing moments of liberation.

Mutual compassion must be the result of the trauma. Trauma is a state, as if you were exposed to existential cold, thrown to be devoured by tigers. And we are required to have involvement and empathy, because in this sense we are all vulnerable to possible traumatic events. We are all in the same boat.