Psychology Of Trauma

Video: Psychology Of Trauma

Video: Psychology Of Trauma
Video: The psychology of post-traumatic stress disorder - Joelle Rabow Maletis 2024, March
Psychology Of Trauma
Psychology Of Trauma
Anonim

Mental trauma is the body's reaction to a traumatic event, as excessive and exceeding in terms of the strength of the mental load the body's resources necessary for experiencing it.

The cause of injury can be any very emotional stressful situation that is significant for a person: acts of violence, including emotional (screaming, humiliation, insults, devaluation of the person), sexual attacks, death or serious illness of loved ones, own illness, traffic accidents, captivity, wars, terrorist acts, natural and man-made disasters, and many other extreme situations.

In fact, any event experienced as a kind of crisis, provided that the mental capabilities of a person, for its processing and assimilation, are not enough, entails mental stuck at one stage or another of the crisis. Not expressed, stopped and accumulated in the body and psyche tension is displaced into the unconscious and begins to live and affect a person as a mental trauma.

In a bodily metaphor, this is an internal muscle clamp that takes on a huge amount of the body's resources and forces.

According to Peter Levin, traumatic symptoms arise as a result of the accumulation of residual energy, which was mobilized when faced with a traumatic event and did not find a way out and discharge. The point of trauma symptoms is to contain this residual energy. (It is important to say that any of the stressful events listed above may not entail a consequence in the form of mental trauma, provided that the person has enough internal capacity to recover).

The person exposed to the traumatic event is not necessarily directly involved; sometimes indirect participation, the position of a witness to someone else's violence, can lead to injury. Even in the form of watching a report on a terrorist act on TV. Injuries are acute (shock) and chronic. The former include often one-time cases of very strong and sudden traumatization and a stop of excitement and experience at the level of shock. Such trauma can be forgotten for many years and remembered when similar events in a person's life are repeated. Or the person dissociates their experiences and avoids talking about the trauma so that the stopped feelings do not reveal themselves. Shock trauma often develops during therapy, when self-sensitivity increases and the person begins to “unfreeze” in those places of his experience where he previously had reliable anesthesia.

The difficulty in defining chronic trauma is that it consists of a large series of weaker traumatic events, but repeating over a long time and also reducing the general sensitivity of a person. For example: regular punishment with physical violence is often perceived by adult victims as “the norm”.

The most common signs of trauma are:

1) The presence of a traumatic, tragic event experienced in an objective or subjective state of helplessness or horror, or aggravating living conditions that negatively affect a person for a long time.

2) Returning, sudden memories of what happened (nightmares, "flashbacks"). Sometimes the memories are fragmentary: smells, sounds, bodily sensations, which at first glance have nothing to do with the experience.

3) Avoiding anything that resembles or may resemble trauma. For example, an adult who was beaten under a blanket in childhood may be afraid to ride an elevator, because in an enclosed space it becomes difficult for him to breathe and there is an almost physical sensation of pain and horror. Or a girl who had a relationship with a tyrant will avoid places and any reminders of this contact. Since she finds herself in the same place where he mocked her, she will again have a rapid heartbeat and attacks of fear or panic, if she hears a similar perfume, she will immediately feel anxiety, anxiety, etc. The avoidance position often increases over time.

4) Increased excitability and fearfulness. Any new situation begins to require much more effort to adapt, causes strong anxiety, even if not associated with trauma. The autonomic nervous system, which regulates the vital functions of human survival, is in constant readiness for anxiety. It is like a motor running at all revolutions and still not driving a single meter. These four features form a pattern of impairment, which is outwardly expressed as an anxiety disorder caused by the impact of a traumatic event.

Mental trauma manifests itself in the form of a violation of the integrity of the functioning of the human psyche, when a significant part of the mental material is repressed or dissociated, the result is internal splitting. Trauma disrupts the normative mental organization and can lead to the emergence of neuropsychic disorders of the non-psychotic (neurosis) and psychotic (reactive psychoses) types, called by Jaspers - psychogenia.

Here we are talking about borderline or clinical conditions, which are characterized by both a stable weakening of immunity, working capacity and adaptive thinking abilities, and more complex changes (post-traumatic effect with justification) that harm health, social life of a person, leading to psychosomatic diseases, neuroses. Psychogenies are considered as the formation of an experience mediated by the entire personality (at the conscious and unconscious levels) during the development of pathological forms of psychological defense or their breakdown. Due to the fact that mental trauma entails in its own way some pathological adaptation of the body in the form of building excessive psychological defenses, traumatization can contribute to the disruption of the connections between the psyche and the body. So, the latter simply “ceases to be felt”, which ultimately leads to a loss of connection with reality. Psychotherapy helps to restore this connection effectively. Work with trauma is aimed at completing the traumatic reaction, discharging the remaining energy and restoring the disturbed self-regulation processes.

Trauma survivors are often accompanied by a high degree of bodily stress, which may be poorly understood. In an attempt to cope, a person, defending himself from fear, loses control over his body and psyche by suppressing, repressing his feelings. Free verbalization, awareness and response of feelings promotes healing. There is a deep acceptance of what was not previously accepted - traumatic experiences, attitude to the consequences of what happened get the opportunity not to be suppressed, but to be transformed. A new attitude towards the traumatic event and towards oneself is being developed. Psychotherapy allows you to assimilate this difficult experience and build it into your picture of the world, to develop new adaptive mechanisms for later life, taking into account the trauma you have lived through. Kurt Lewin considers trauma as an existential given of human existence, his being, which must be accepted, experienced and transformed for the benefit of oneself and one's life.

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