2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
The result of mental trauma is the loss of integrity and fragmentation of the psyche, when the breakaway parts of the Self disintegrate into isolated parts.
Some of these parts are fixed on the painful experience, and therefore are "removed" from consciousness, after which they regularly invade it in the form of various frightening and destructive images.
Psychotrauma manifests itself not only in various forms of maladaptive behavior, disorders of communication with other people, psychosomatic disorders, but also in the field of traumatic imaginal production, which is reflected in dreams, images, diverse ways of symbolizing traumatic experience, in specific patterns of experiences and attitudes to the world.
One of the essential laws of the functioning of the traumatized psyche is the formation of an internal mechanism of self-harm and self-injury, which manifests itself in the action of a traumatic imago and leads to repeated traumatization. That is, protective mechanisms, the task of which is to ensure the protection of the psyche from damage, become chronic and act in a pathogenic mode.
Other parts of the traumatized psyche are associated with infantile experiences that took place before the traumatic event, and provoke regressive tendencies, such as merging with a significant other, providing protection and protection, "magical thinking", etc. The mental components of these parts are often described in the metaphor of the "inner child."
The following components of the traumatized psyche can perform the functions of an internalized offender, others are defensive and struggling parts of the personality.
Thus, trauma dissociates the psyche into different parts, which begin to behave incoherently and contradictory. Avoiding traumatic experiences and repeating them; alertness, increased control over the situation (in order to prevent new injuries) and regressive tendencies associated with the denial of traumatic experience, the desire to destroy it; the desire to "anesthetize" pain and autoaggression, inflicting new pain on oneself - these are the contrasting painful movements of the traumatized psyche.
In the process of therapeutic work with a person who has experienced a traumatic event, a number of specific reactions to trauma are revealed.
Among these reactions:
- "encapsulation" of trauma - the inability to withstand the presence in memory of the details of sensations, emotions and thoughts about the trauma, which are combined in their condensed form, isolating from everything else that is encrypted in memory and puts it inside a separate capsule; an attempt to make small and limited what is overwhelmingly huge by tightly folding and freezing;
- elimination of any intense emotions - emotional stunnedness;
- inability to experience positive experiences and have fun (anhedonia);
- intense feelings of guilt, shame and fear - the well-known "survivor's guilt", as well as guilt for the fact that the person was unable to resist the traumatic influence; shame always accompanies mental trauma, the experience of shame is accompanied by numbness, dasadaptive actions associated with self-loathing; fear often activates actions and feelings that are inadequate in a given situation, and vice versa inhibits those actions and feelings that are appropriate in a given situation;
- autoaggressive reactions, among which stand out those that are designed to "anesthetize" acute mental suffering with new, less intense suffering;
- obsessive experiences of irrational fear, nightmares, frightening images and memories systematically invading consciousness;
- self-destructive fantasies and impulses - suicidal tendencies, the desire to be killed, the desire for death, states of indifference to the horrors of life;
- aggressive fantasies and impulses arising from identification with the offender;
- regressive tendencies, the desire to return to the "innocent" existence before the trauma, "narcissistic paradise";
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