Trauma Of Violence - Taboo Or Request For Therapy?

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

“Poverty, curse, darkness, flickering, black swarming slime, father, Satan, darkness, loss, abyss, tank, endless prison, desecration, desecration, indescribable, inexpressible feeling of flickering in my body. Where is the beginning, where is the end, feel nothing, live as if nothing had happened, silently, helplessly. Who wants to know it, nobody hears the message. He must lie on me, the fiend of Satan, desecration screams in me, used, slandered, fouled, soaked in stench, smeared. He will take over my body. I can do nothing, he owns my body, I give my body, my only chance, slandered, desecrated, raped. Waste, refuse, destroyed, defiled, emasculated."

Having seen this quote, I realized that it is possible for a long time not to describe all the horror that is happening in the inner world of a person who has experienced violence, especially at an early age, and even worse - incest.

The word "therapy" comes from the Greek θεραπεία, which means "service, treatment, care and healing." The verb θεραπεύω - "to look after". In therapy, we are concerned with caring for a person to “heal” them. Healing refers to whole, so to heal means to make whole.

Is it possible to heal the soul after the experience of violence? Having begun to reflect on this question, of course, others have also risen. What is this phenomenon? Why is it so ubiquitous? Why, despite the developed civilization and obvious progress, as well as, by and large, the growth of spirituality, violence did not decrease, I'm not talking about completely disappearing from human life. When I started working on this topic, I was faced with the fact that there is very little quality psychotherapeutic literature on it. Much has been written about politics, about wars as a manifestation of universal human violence, etc. But for now, I do not want to dwell on these types of violence. The consequences of wars, occupation and other mass violent actions are also difficult for a person, but I believe that the degree of trauma is different.

I heard this expression: “life is a kitchen where everyone prepares their own dish called happiness. And everyone decides for himself which ingredient to add to it. A person who has experienced violence becomes, as it were, deprived of this ability. And one of the main tasks of therapy is its restoration. If we continue the metaphor of the kitchen, then after the dish is burnt, there is no need to put an end to your career as a chef of your own life!

It is the trauma of interpersonal violence that I want to address. Namely: suppression, chronic neglect, sexual assault, beating, intimidation, moral harassment and, including, incest. Such invisible violence psychopathologizes a person very strongly. These are aspects of violence that are embarrassing to talk about, with which the client is unlikely to come immediately as an explicit topic. The consequences of such violence, especially if it is chronic, eats into the structure of the personality and changes it. Of course, the consequences of such trauma are unique to everyone. But from my point of view, states such as suppressed will and suppressed aggression are universal consequences for everyone. And for the therapist, this can serve as a diagnostic criterion indicating the fact of the presence of violence in the client's life. Moreover, as my experience now shows, the specific situations of violence that happened to a person are in themselves the result of the fact that he lived in an environment of chronic violence.

While working with clients, I began to form my own theory of violence.

1. In ontogeny, cold, ignorant parents.
2. The prohibition on the expression of aggression. As a result, she is generally suppressed.
3. The border of the norm of human relations is shifting - the usual human attitude (respectful, calm, without demanding anything in return, etc.) is perceived as a miracle, and, as a rule, causes a feeling of guilt and duty.
4. Violence is an irreparable act. There is something that lends itself to compensation, but violence, from my point of view, does not lend itself to compensation. In engineering there is such a concept "material resistance" - each material has its own strength threshold. So, if you break it, then the material changes and does not return to its previous state. So it is with violence - something very important in the soul and in the psyche breaks down, then changes and does not return to its original state.
5. The main defense mechanisms - adaptive, as I call them - are dissociation and splitting. According to the age at which the violence occurred and its duration in time, the severity of the formation of the borderline personality depends.

A person who has experienced violence develops a whole complex of symptom defense mechanisms such as splitting, dissociation, loneliness and isolation, and as a result, the formation of a borderline personality as a way of adapting the psyche after the trauma of violence.

If a traumatic event occurred at an early age, before the maturation of the personality, then the person seems to get stuck in an infantile state, as if further personal development becomes inaccessible to him, namely such quality as individuation and decentration. And this also becomes a characteristic feature of the borderline organized personality. After all, it is known that they are either egocentric and simply do not see the point of view of other people, or they are so dissolved in others that they do not see themselves.

Loneliness and a sense of isolation are among the most painful outcomes of violence experienced. It springs from a sense of shame, one's "depravity", "dissimilarity" to others, suppressed aggression, which can transform into hostility towards people. Moreover, a person can be socially active, have a certain circle of friends, and even his own family. And at the same time, it is chronically and difficult to experience your loneliness and isolation from others, even close people. This is closely related to a defense mechanism such as cleavage. This loneliness is far from always being realized by a person, since it has a traumatic nature of origin and, as a rule, is located in a split-off part of consciousness.

Many humanities are dealing with the problem of loneliness, but there is no single interpretation of what this process and state is. In my opinion, the definition of Frida Fromm-Reichman, who studied this condition on a group of schizophrenic patients, describes well the state of loneliness that I am talking about: “This extreme condition is destructive, leads to the development of psychotic states and turns people into emotionally paralyzed and helpless . This is a mental state that arises in a situation of violence and immediately after it, but is not realized. This is why I consider loneliness to be one of the worst results of this trauma. And in therapy, it must be realized and integrated, only then the glass wall between the victim of violence and the people will go away. And a person will be able to choose between communication and solitude, but he will not be hostage to unconscious destructive loneliness.

Psychological trauma causes emotional paralysis in a person. Subsequently, these people demonstrate rigidity of mind and body, insecurity, suffer from a deep-rooted sense of their own inferiority.

In my opinion, there are 5 main stages of the trauma of violence:

1. Denial of reality;
2. Coping - behavior (coping with stress, any activity, any effort to deal with stress);
3. Facing reality - either triggers or retraumatization;
4. Inclusion of adaptive defense mechanisms as ways of interacting with reality;
5. Life in non-contact with oneself and with reality, isolation, loneliness.

I do not pretend to scientific reliability of these stages, but based on my experience, phenomenologically they can be presented as follows, and depending on which of these stages the client turned to for help, the timing of therapy also depends.

I really like the statement of K. G. Jung on the goal of therapy: “The effect that I want to achieve is the creation of such a state of mind in which my patient begins to experiment with his character, when there is no longer anything given forever, there is no previous hopeless petrification, that is, the creation of a state of fluidity, variability and becoming.

Victims of violence have been in a state of numbness and separation from themselves for years, and now in therapy they have the opportunity to again be in sensual contact with themselves, to perceive what kind of people they could and should become. Therapy has to do with this inner renewal. Those who have been used sexually and emotionally have lost themselves. The human was not given a place to open up, so there was nothing left but self-alienation and emptiness.

Violent trauma therapy, like any trauma, is a journey from personal hell to one's own integrity. It is the restoration of creativity, both cognitive and mental. This is the acquisition of meaning and contact with the world after its complete destruction. This is the development of consciousness and the ability to use traumatic experiences as a source of serious personal transformation and gaining wisdom, strengthening the strength of the spirit.

I will not describe the methods and approaches of psychotherapy for trauma violence in this article. With this article, I want to remove the taboo from this topic, primarily for people who have experienced this. If something like this has happened to you, don't expect the consequences to go away on their own. If you recognize yourself in the descriptions above, contact a specialist for help. Free yourself from this burden and be happy! It is possible!