Shock Trauma. Working With The Senses

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

Normalization of the client's feelings - fear, panic, rage, shame, guilt, insignificance, contempt, disgust, emptiness, confusion - this is their naming and acceptance, confirmation of the naturalness and legitimacy of all his experiences in a catastrophically threatening situation. The stretched handkerchief is a confirmation of the right to tears.

Liberation from toxic guilt and shame + the appearance of a minimal feeling of satisfaction + sadness + a grateful reaction to the presence of others - indicators of recovery from trauma, recognition of loss, restoration of the victim in rights, revival of a sense of rightness and goodness.

Natural matryoshka of feelings: indignation - (guilt) - anger - fear and shame - integrating pain - sadness - mixed with a powerful blow. Then it may be: self-flagellation - melancholy, hopelessness - depression - complaints and reproaches - fear - total shame - rage - horror - splitting, fragmenting acute pain. They can be felt archaic-undifferentiated, like a mixture, a mishmash, an irrational lump of unconscious unbearable suffering.

The therapist's complicity in a person's PERRITATION "How could she ?!", "What right did he have ?!", "How dare he ?!" gives a sense of the natural reaction of the victim to the curtailment or deprivation of important rights. Indignation, indignation, disagreement - this is a sign that the situation does not suit you, it is unfair. It is known exactly how it should be, but this is not. There is an idea of what should be now instead of what is.

"To dare" in this context is supposedly "to have the right", or rather the impudence, to allow yourself in relations with another that for which he did not give you permission. It is important to confirm that the abuser did not have the right, that the violence is unlawful, therefore, the indignation is justified.

Indignation directed at an aggressor is an antidote to guilt. Guilt is where the questions "Why did this happen to me ?!", "What do I want?" Answer: absolutely nothing, it did not depend on you, etc.

There is a biased idea of the aggressor, for example, from an abuser to an observer. This is not important at first: it is important that the Other is wrong, not me.

The call to humility is a setup for the client: it is impossible before integration.

If the victim is flooded and crushed by ideas of self-flagellation, his own badness, unworthiness, depravity, then the ambulance is in the "Distribution of GUILT", that is, in listing all the participants and circumstances of the traumatic situation, "responsible" for what happened and determining their share of participation, even in %%. For example, in a car accident situation, this is the state of the weather, roads, curbs, the presence / absence of signs, oncoming traffic, pedestrians, those. condition of the car, psychological characteristics of drivers and passengers, etc.

Analysis and discussion of the victim's characteristics and patterns of his behavior often reinforce guilt and create a sense of the pattern of trauma as an inevitable consequence of previous experience. Regularity can be felt as a reasonable, inevitable, "deserved" punishment for imperfection, badness, or immorality. Meanwhile, a traumatic event is multifactorial and is due to the combination, convergence in one place and time of several conditions-circumstances, including chance and the influence of archetypal determinants.

The most important of human rights is the right to anger, anger, hatred. These feelings protect identity. Since in traditional culture this right is suppressed from childhood, it can be difficult to actualize it in post-trauma as well. Indignation, anger of the therapist FOR, but in no case ON the client can ease, legalize his anger. Aristotle said: "We give credit to the person who expresses righteous anger against the right person and does it in the right way, at the right time and for the right time."In the religious interpretation, "If anger is excited by a sense of justice at the sight of a criminal act being committed, then it is praiseworthy, and this is an act of the righteous."

Welcome to the archetypal vocabulary that characterizes the aggressor as an adequate and sometimes the only way, apart from the pillow, to get angry in a therapy room.

Anger suppresses and contains FEAR. Sewing them in therapy brings relief.

Unexpressed, unrecognized suppressed anger inhibits differentiation from the abuser and the victim's internal integration.

Ideas to “just forgive the rapist” to cope with anger are not close to me. Moreover, I consider them a forgery, fraught with splitting and merging with the aggressor, which can lead to a new loss - betrayal of oneself.

Sometimes, on the contrary, the victim is torn apart with anger, HATE, a desire to take revenge on the offender, at any cost to destroy him or something important and dear to him - as a symbol of mobilization and focusing, at least after the fact. The approval, recognition and naming of these reactions as confirmation of their legitimacy and relevance in a situation of violence significantly reduces the severity of manifestations.

HATE and ANXIETY are directed against the attacker on the most important, fundamental needs of a person. Reflected in the replicas "I would kill", "I would not leave a stone unturned", "I would crush my head", "I would destroy it", "I would tear it off …", "I would level it to the ground". Fierce, incinerating hatred, fueled by fear of the power of the rapist, generates an indomitable desire for revenge. Ideas for revenge must be heard and recognized as a well-founded desire to make up for the bitterness of irreparable loss. It helps to recognize the enormous scale and value of the loss, the ability to drain into the channel of anger and the transition to grief.

Suppressed, in any way unexpressed hatred firmly, cruelly binds the victim to the abuser, especially if the previous attachment to him remains.

FURY, RAGE - a natural consequence of the feeling of one's own all-encompassing loss and the impossibility to resist it, powerlessness, internal annihilation. This powerful unfocused energy, designed to destroy and demolish everything and everyone in its path, is a reaction to internal chaos, disintegration, animal horror from the threatening decay of the personality.

Unlike anger, which integrates, rage by its nature destroys, fragments. Blind rage smothers and destroys. And the client himself, and the therapist, and the relationship. Even suppressed rage, or rather, especially suppressed rage in the countertransference causes tremendous tension, requires extra effort in order not to win back, and forces you to "gather in a bunch." The powerful suppressed energy of the client requires a willingness, figuratively speaking, to "squeeze" personal material in the container and to free up a larger container for the client by building a dense wall between the compartments.

The rage subsides in the process of reflecting the injured self as a whole (in the eyes) in relationships with Others and the therapist, as he reunites with himself former and eligible.

Hatred protects from the experience of unbearably hypertrophied and therefore suppressed SHAME as the horror of being caught in sheer deception: as if a person only pretended to be good, but it turned out - completely useless, dirty, spoiled; or as if he only pretends that he is, but in fact he almost does not exist. As if, due to violence, a person became a leper and lost the right to be among "normal" people … and therefore he becomes isolated and fenced off. Shame can cover up a feeling of emptiness, total fatal defectiveness, unworthiness, murder, and vividly marks the degree of loss of identity and a sense of defeat in rights.

SHAME contains and modulates rage. Therefore, it is important to maintain and preserve it for the time being, despite the toxicity.

If shame is not experienced at all and a person is pathologically easily exposed in therapy, immediately opening his intimate zone, there is a high probability of internal consolidation with the aggressor.

Shame, in turn, protects against PAIN. It occurs when the event does not fit into the personal picture of the world. Pain is suffering from the destruction of the soul at a deep level.

It is often localized in the abdomen, in the solar plexus or in the heart, chest, along the spine, as well as around the entire perimeter of the diaphragm. Breathing is spasmodic, impaired. Thinking is blocked. Muscle tension in the body, sometimes violent, creates physical pain.

Experiencing PAIN is a conscious-unconscious process of choosing between oneself and the world, a confrontation between centrifugal and centripetal forces. The choice between destroying your picture of the world or yourself. Between your life and giving up. Sacral intimate process. When the choice is made and settled, the pain subsides.

In one case, a person, freeing himself from the pain of disappointment in himself "ideal", full-fledged and discovering his vulnerability and lack of power, agrees to change the picture of the world, including the idea of himself, his transformed identity. Reintegration, expansion and deepening of mental abilities take place. Nevertheless, longing and hunger may remain for a long time for oneself and for past times.

In the second case, in the name of preserving the previous picture of the world, a person collapses - he splits himself. As a result, the picture of the world is fragmented, bad and good remain mixed.

The function of the therapist as the containing mother of the child is important here: to soothe-soothe-comfort-rock. With words, voice, look. But I think that the presence of a warm supportive atmosphere at home - a natural container - influences the successful outcome of the choice and the transition to sadness.

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