Mental Trauma And The Traumatic Self-paradigm

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

To describe the phenomenology of mental trauma and create a model of psychotherapy, it seems to me useful and even necessary to introduce the concept of "traumatic self-paradigm", which complements the previous one. The existing actual self-paradigm has a certain frustration threshold, before the crossing of which self changes occur within the process of experiencing and have a more or less pronounced crisis character

In other words, the process of the current transformation is portable for self, although it is often difficult.

However, after crossing this threshold, dynamic self-processes begin to acquire a destructive character, since their constituent phenomena cannot be experienced. This situation looks as follows. As a result of the excessive demands of the field at the contact boundary, a colossal amount of energy appears, released due to the critical difference between the previous self-patterns and the actual ones.

If new, up to this point often absent in experience, and emerging in the current context of the field of feelings, images, representations, etc. cannot be experienced and assimilated, then such a situation presupposes the emergence of undifferentiated excitement (more precisely, it should be said that it ceases to be differentiated).

The id-function turns out to be frozen, phenomenologically fixing itself in the form of mental pain, often even to the level of its awareness. Similar processes occur in two other functions - the emerging traumatic images and ideas of a person about himself and the world around him and the corresponding emergency and often abnormal behavioral patterns seem to freeze in time, mental pain is the guarantor of this “mental freezing”.

Retroflection appears to be the leading mechanism mediating this process. In other words, the released energy of critical self-changes turns against itself, being blocked in the impossibility of experiencing.

For the sake of simplicity in explaining the traumatic process, I will try to use a metaphor. Imagine a stone thrown into water. Immediately, at the point of entry of the stone into the water, the excitement of a more or less calm environment until this moment appears.

Moreover, the force of excitement is directly proportional to the significance of the impact on the environment (the force with which the stone collides at the border of contact with water, and which, as you know, is the derivative of the mass of the stone and the speed of its movement at the moment of collision).

The waves that appear act as a metaphorical analogue of the process of experience, which ultimately brings the environment into a certain state of balance, more or less different from the previous state (before the intervention). Suppose that the described process is stopped in time.

Imagine a significant waveform captured by freeze frame or immediate freeze. The mental analogue of such field aggression can be mental pain with strong affects stopped in it. The picture that appears in front of your eyes is a metaphor for the phenomenology of mental trauma. The task of psychotherapy is to "defrost" the stopped dynamic process through the restoration of sensitivity and the experience of severe mental pain.