Shock (acute) Trauma

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

A trauma is an event that generates unusually strong or uncontrollable feelings, or the very crisis state of a person.

In psychotherapy, there are 2 main types of trauma: 1 - chronic, or cumulative (acts and builds up invisibly over the years, starting from childhood), or, in other words, developmental trauma, childhood trauma; 2 - acute or shock trauma, which has a short-term, but strong effect on the psyche.

Under the sharp psychological trauma is understood as a state of disintegration or breakdown that occurs when the mental apparatus is suddenly exposed to super-intense external or internal stimulithat are too strong to deal with in the usual way.

Thus, traumatic stress occurs if the stress factor is strong enough, continues for some time, overloads the psychological, physiological and adaptive capabilities of a person, destroys psychological defense, causes anxiety and leads to psychological and physiological “breakdowns” in the body … It is important to emphasize that if the experience of a stressful situation normally mobilizes the adaptive resources of the body and contributes to the adaptation of a person to changing conditions, then traumatic stress depletes his adaptive capabilities.

Trauma significantly violates fundamental beliefs and ideas about the reliability and safety of the world, affects the ability to trust.

Psychological signs of such trauma:

- violation of the integrity of the narcissistic core

(loss of identity)

- destruction of natural psychological defenses, - regression.

First of all, the concept of trauma includes physical violence, incl. sexual rape, loss of loved ones, car accident, earthquake, terrorist acts, etc. Events such as losing a job, moving to another country or city, divorce, treason, robbery, failure in the entrance exam, serious physical illness are also highly traumatic. However, even at first glance, not very significant events may turn out to be acutely emotional, for example, public humiliation, insult, salary reduction or non-increase, family troubles, deception, severe punishment by parents, loss of an important subject, conflicts with friends, betrayal - everything that affects social prestige and reputation, respect for others, the possibility of self-affirmation and the intimate and personal state of a person.

The destructive power of psychological trauma depends on the individual significance of the traumatic event for the person. Therefore, it is difficult to evaluate it from the outside, it is strictly individual! And this is extremely important to consider in trauma therapy.

In addition, the traumatizing effect depends on the degree of protection, "hardening" of the person, his resistance to the blows of fate (ego strength). A negative event especially strongly affects the psyche of sensitive, empathetic people and children. So, for a child, it can be traumatic to meet a stranger or a drunk in the dark, fall from a tree, stay in the hospital, separation from parents, bullying of classmates, unexpectedly bad grade at school, scary movie, illness of a parent, type of funeral, for a kid - barking of someone else's dog, an unusual appearance of close people or familiar things, etc.

Thus, people who are already under the influence of stressors, as well as those who have experienced something similar in childhood, have an increased vulnerability. For them, what happened becomes a reminder that provokes re-traumatization. Some events are painless, we remember others for a long time, others hide in the subconscious and “float out” only in the form of symptoms after many years.

It seems appropriate to me to use the glass tempering metaphor here.

Tempered glass is a type of safety glass. It becomes hardened as a result of heat treatment. When broken, such glass breaks up into small fragments that do not injure a person. The bending strength of toughened glass is doubled, and the shatter resistance is increased by 5 times compared to non-tempered glass.

The first stage is glass slowly heats up to a temperature of 600–720 ° С. Remaining in a solid state, glass absorbs the thermal energy of the heaters through radiation and heat transfer. Heat propagates linearly and the result is only a change in the distance between the molecules. This linear expansion is reversible., and does not generate constant voltage in the glass.

Subsequent heating brings the glass into a transition state, followed by a viscous one. The seconds during which the glass is in a transitional stage have a particularly strong impact on the quality of the final product.

Then, in the second stage, the glass is rapidly cooled. The resulting compressive stresses increase the mechanical strength and the strength of the glass.

In other words, the gradual "hardening" of the psyche by difficulties allows it to more easily cope with subsequent sharp stress factors.

Each person has certain expectations, hopes and plans for the future. The discrepancy between our forecasts, models of the future and reality is one of the sources of psychological problems. In a situation where reality undergoes drastic changes that do not fit into the framework of existing ideas and the scenario of the future, a person is injured. Frustration - extremely painful. It produces an experience of intense fear, helplessness, extreme despair, shock (stupor), and extreme terror. Sometimes fear may be absent, but at the same time depression, confusion, complete confusion are felt. There may be a feeling of loss of security ("the ground is slipping from under our feet"), the threat of serious injury to oneself or loved ones. A person may experience a feeling of loss of integrity and unity of being, fragmentation of "I" and abandonment.

After injury, there may be 2 response options: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) … The first option is a healthy and natural reaction of increasing the "combat readiness" of the organism, mobilizing resources in response to a superstrong stimulus. Therefore, a traumatized person can be very active and active, even overexcited, but internal confusion, a feeling of being crushed, loss of meanings and goals does not always allow directing this energy into a constructive channel.

The second option can manifest itself as a repetitive and obsessive reproduction of a traumatic event in the mind, or, conversely, by avoiding any associations reminiscent of a traumatic event, and often requires treatment. It happens that anxiety and the need to control the people and events around them greatly increase, uncontrollable outbursts of anger and guilt, melancholy and hopelessness, nightmares appear, psychosomatics become aggravated, hysterical or depressive behavior is fixed. That is, post-traumatic disorder interferes with a person's ability to adequately cope with a stressful situation. Symptoms of such a disorder can be: insomnia, neurotic reactions, dissociation, a feeling of stunnedness, increased emotional lability, inhibition of reaction, a feeling of emptiness, suicidal thoughts, and others. In any event, these symptoms and behaviors are NORMAL responses to an ABNORMAL event. Some try to drown out painful experiences with the help of psychoactive substances - alcohol, pills, "classic" drugs. In such situations, it is in the person's best interest to seek professional help and support from a specialist with work experience as soon as possible. with acute traumabecause the methods of dealing with cumulative trauma (developmental trauma) are fundamentally different.

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