Psychological Crisis - A Mismatch Between A Person's Needs And Abilities

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

The situation of losing something important in life plays not only a dangerous role, but also creates our personality. This is the creative adaptation of man.

Ph. D. gestalt therapist, psychiatrist - suicidologist

Merab Mamardashvili was once asked: "Where does a person begin?" “From lamentation for the dead,” he replied. The situation of loss, not necessarily of a loved one, but of something important in life, plays not only a dangerous role, but also creates our personality. This is the creative adaptation of man.

We all face grief, loss. This is not necessarily a deceased loved one, it is also parting, a collision with age, and sometimes it is a deceased "me". There are a lot of losses in life. Choosing something, we always lose something.

They often talk about the "torment" of choice; in fact, a person suffers from what he has lost or rejected. We face the experience of suffering and mental pain in situations of various crises that our life presents.

I say "gives" without an ironic connotation: crises are a gift, but we do not always know how to deal with them correctly.

True, today the very word "crisis" has become a cliche. Psychologists are often faced with the fact that completely different things can be behind "crisis", "stress", "trauma" or "depression". In this sense, it is important to understand that a crisis arises when a person as a whole (soul, body and system of relations with the outside world) is involved and must meet this "challenge of fate."

When everything inside me shudders, shakes me, “pins” and “sausages” - this is called a crisis state. According to the classical definition, a psychological crisis is a sharp discrepancy between the needs and abilities of the human body, on the one hand, and the requirements and expectations of the outside world, the environment, on the other.

This environment demands something from us, throws down challenges for which we are not ready. The abilities of a born baby are clearly not enough to organize their own existence in the world. The environment sends a demand for "survive": we need you in the family, our society, our culture, and so on.

On the one hand, there is this "survive - you are needed", and on the other hand, there is a situation of helplessness. This is a typical picture of any crisis. They say that in Chinese the word "crisis" is denoted by two hieroglyphs, one of which means danger, and the other - opportunity.

I think these two zones can be distinguished in any crisis. A crisis is not a state that lasts for minutes, days or even weeks. It takes us a lot of energy to overcome it, and time is important for us.

In 1917, a small article by Sigmund Freud, "Sadness and Melancholy," was published, which, in my opinion, was epoch-making for the development of crisis psychology. Freud introduced an important concept - "work of grief", which later expanded and became known as "work of the crisis."

Freud meant that in order to live through grief, crisis, it is necessary to do work that no one except the person himself can do. He may have a psychological companion, a counselor psychologist, volunteers and volunteers, even a spiritual mentor or guru - it doesn't matter who it is, the important thing is that a person can be accompanied on the path of grief, but the work itself is the fruit of personal effort.

In the "work" of the crisis, the main phases are distinguished.

The first thing an organism encounters is news of a crisis, which either comes from within us, or, conversely, is sent to us by the environment. I have no strength, no opportunities, and fate sends almost an unbearable challenge.

Naturally, the first thing I do is start to defend myself and fall into a state of shock. The mechanisms of repression and denial are at work: "No, this cannot be!" The meaning of this shock is so that a person can accumulate strength, energy.

A person is lazy by nature, he does not even like a good job that brings him money, and if the job is connected with living through suffering … In this phase of shock, you can get stuck, then the line of development of the crisis will be greatly slowed down and the crisis will transform into trauma.

Therefore, from the shock of a person, it is important to move a little. When we get out of shock, the first signs begin to appear associated with the need to respond to aggression. It grows, turns into anger, anger or rage - you want to destroy the whole world.

Sometimes a lot of energy is invested in protesting against the unfairness of fate. The phase of anger-powerlessness is followed by a phase of experience or a phase of suffering. The life horizon begins to "clear", the situation associated with a crisis, loss or loss, acquires unbearable clarity.

Suffering can be divided into two parts. On the one hand, it is bodily suffering. Probably everyone experienced grief and felt what bodily suffering was. Even the memory of a past crisis makes you take a deep breath - this is the remnant of a bodily experience.

Without experiencing bodily suffering, we become robots with well-developed cognitive function, a wonderful, as Fritz Perls said, an "alarming automaton" that thinks well, understands everything, can make a rational diagnosis, but lives without feeling any joy.

And the person turns into the head of Professor Dowell or appears in the form of pure Kantian mind.

Alexander Lowen called the state of "betrayal of the body" the state in which the soul is "split off" from the body. This is wrong - it is important to pay attention to the "I am suffering" signal that our body sends.

There is a second part - mental suffering, its axial symptom is pain, which is called mental, mental, existential. The founder of modern suicidology, Edwin Schneidman, said that mental pain is a metabolism, pain from the awareness of pain.

In the inner world there are no partitions, there are no any systems or organs - our whole inner world, our whole soul, hurts. It is impossible to hide, hide, except that by forcibly turning off your consciousness, for example, by getting drunk or by laying hands on yourself.

Mental pain testifies to a very strong emotional stress, to accumulated emotional experiences: horror, fear, anxiety, longing, despair - experiences that reach the degree of affect are manifested by this effect of pain.

To make this intolerable bearable, it is very important to begin with telling someone about your pain. Turn it into a story, a narrative. The sign is always limited. Our inner world is always unlimited. And when we talk about pain, the story itself localizes it, it ceases to be equal to the entire inner world.

Since I can somehow designate pain, it becomes semantic, is carried out, it becomes a phenomenon of contact - which reduces the unbearable tension. There is no "big green pill" for suffering, there are tranquilizers that only numb the pain.

Having designated pain, we write a line in the "text of experience" and, accordingly, we face our attitude. If I begin to relate to pain, the pain ceases to be me.

If I start to reflect, the pain diminishes. Mental pain is two-faced - it is not only a signal about the limit of endurance, it is also a signal about the experience. We do not perceive values that do not hurt as values.

The value side of the heartache leads us to the resource.

When I started conducting a workshop on the resources of mental pain, many colleagues angrily said: "Pain is when the soul is torn apart, and mental pain has no resources."

If we look a little deeper and see "for whom the bell tolls", for whom or what our soul hurts, then inevitably in our mind we will find the value that we have taken out of everyday life.

The main thing that brings us pain and any negative emotions in general is feedback - a kind of road sign.

In this respect, the value of any negative emotions and experiences is much higher than the value of positive ones. The latter seem to say: "Everything is all right. Keep up the good work." This is not always a good thing. The system is deprived of guidelines that would allow it to be corrected.

Examples of such positive feedback: paranoia and a tolerant parenting style (whatever the child does, everything is right).

And negative feedback is a signal of a deviation that needs to be eliminated. Carrying out the work of the crisis, we are moving to the next phase, it is called the phase of integration, recovery, reconstruction.

The crisis begins to turn into a past life event. This transformation of the crisis into a story about oneself is a rather lengthy process. A person must learn to live again, rebuild the destroyed world and look for an integrating basis in order to build it with a correspondingly changed life.

We usually find this basis not in books and films, not in authorities. We find her under our feet. Tell yourself: "I understand that I am suffering, that now I am in great pain, and I understand that I am now thinking about what happened. But besides that, there is just my life, and I continue, perhaps unconsciously, to put energy into something. ".

Into what? This is what the world is gathering around anew. Pay attention not to what is convex, but to the usual given of being. Simple things. I continue to feed my children, take care of my loved ones, and walk the dog.

I can suffer, howl, work with a therapist, be silent, drive myself into a funnel of trauma, but there are things that I continue to do. Life gathers around what we continue to invest in no matter what.