What Is Trauma And What Technique Is The Most Effective To Heal It?
Psychological trauma is a very painful experience that the person experiences and that exceeds their ability to understand it, give it meaning and integrate it.
Here we will see what this destabilizing psychological phenomenon consists of and how it can be treated in therapy.
Trauma can be due to adult or childhood excess or defect. When we talk about trauma due to childhood excess, we are talking about traumatic experiences that have to do with physical or emotional abuse (hits, screams, hateful looks…) or sexual abuse.
Also included are events such as witnessing domestic violence and abuse and others that have to do with the breakup between the child and their primary caregiver, such as divorce, serious illness or death. On the other hand, if there is childhood defect trauma, this primarily has to do with physical or emotional neglect.
Examples of this would be, showing little or no emotional availability to listen to the child’s emotions, not feeding or drinking, etc.
Traumas due to adult excess are exactly the same as childhood traumas, but they occur in adulthood, such as when we have a partner who physically or verbally attacks us. Added to these are bullying, the death of a family member or close friend, traumatic breakups, car or plane accidents, earthquakes, attacks, unpleasant experiences with animals or insects…
On the other hand, adult defect traumas follow the same line, except that they occur in adulthood or old age, and have to do with certain people who lack empathy, are not in tune with our emotions or needs.
The hidden trauma
There is a special type of trauma, called hidden trauma, that originates in childhood and has to do with when The child’s body produces emotions (sadness, fear, anger, joy…) that need to be attended to by a caregiver..
Said trauma refers to the inability of the caregiver (father, mother, grandparents…) to take care of the child’s emotions. For example, we could find a girl who felt very sad and alone at home because her parents had lost her little brother, or even another family member. The parents’ own sadness prevented them from taking care of that girl’s discomfort.
This girl, when she is an adult, continues to feel alone even when surrounded by people, she is even terrified that others will leave (breakups, deaths…). Furthermore, she has no control over sadness and other emotions, she feels them too intensely and with very sudden changes in mood… because her primary caregivers could not teach her to manage them.
In the most serious cases of hidden trauma, an attachment figure can cause traumatic experiences in the child if he or she presents depression, chronic disharmony with the child’s emotions, anger, withdrawal of affection, provocation of guilt, emotional blackmail, double messages, gestures of contempt, silences that ignore…
As an example, we could talk about people with more serious disorders, such as obsessive disorders (many thoughts), eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, binge eating…) or personality disorders (borderline, avoidant, narcissistic…).
Pre-verbal trauma
Another type of trauma is pre-verbal trauma. It is based on childhood memories based on emotional states without images and contain emotions such as loneliness and fear.. It usually has to do with bodily experiences.
What happens in these cases is that children usually do not have enough cortical consolidation to be able to store memories explicitly, so are stored implicitly.
As an example, we have people who feel bodily discomfort that has no medical explanation. They are emotions that cannot be expressed and that remain stored in the body (panic or anxiety attacks, hypochondria, headaches, muscle pain, chronic stress, feelings of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia…).
The trauma of betrayal
Betrayal trauma has to do with when the person loses trust in the people or organizations that are supposed to protect them. Sexual abuse by a caregiver is an example of this. Anger is a central emotion in this type of trauma.
Another example is when an abused woman asks for help from agencies and they do not believe her. Or when a person with an eating disorder suffers a very complicated admission that leads them to experience very unpleasant situations (eating tube, little care from health personnel…).
What happens when we don’t heal the trauma and let it pass?
Trauma, like infected wounds, remains like an open wound, constantly oozing pus.. Therefore, to close it you have to extract all that infection, curing it properly. When trauma becomes entrenched and is not processed, it can pass into the body, as in the case of pre-verbal trauma, becoming increasingly more difficult and time-consuming to work with.
Besides, any event that has to do with the original trauma will open the wound even more. For example, let’s think about a girl who was bullied at school because she was overweight. Years later, she meets a couple who begins to criticize her for her physical appearance.
This adult is feeling the pain of this partner’s criticism added to the initial pain, causing symptoms of anxiety, sadness, depression or insomnia or even the development of worse symptoms or conditions, such as anorexia or bulimia. Anorexia, on some occasions, is used as an instrument to overcome the belief that “I’m not worth it, I don’t like myself” and if I’m thin, I think they will accept me.
What is the most effective technique currently for working on trauma?
At Vínculo Psicología we use the EMDR technique. Is a psychological technique that is based on neuroscience, that is, in how the brain processes information. The acronym EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
Who gave a name to this type of technique? It was Francine Shapiro who coined the term EMDR in 1978.
EMDR therapy has scientifically proven high effectiveness. It is used to treat different traumas (losses, accidents, abuse, sexual abuse…), but also other difficulties such as chronic stress, conciliation or maintenance insomnia, anxiety, depression, fears, phobias, low self-esteem, emotional dependence, obsessions, problems in interpersonal relationships, relationship conflicts…
EMDR works by “unclogging” certain traumatic or painful memories that contain emotions that our brain was unable to process at different stages of our lives. These memories and their emotions are trapped in the right hemisphere and cannot be “digested” by the left, which is responsible for translating into words and giving meaning to what has happened to us.
EMDR is applied by performing bilateral ocular stimulation to the patient, that is, he looks from right to left with his eyes at a finger, at the light of a machine; or he hears sounds through one ear or the other that make his eyes move; or it can be applied with light taps on each of your shoulders (tapping) that also make you move your eyes from one side to the other. By moving the eyes from left to right and vice versa, the reprocessing of the memory and emotions that are stuck in one hemisphere (right) and flow freely to the other (left) are launched.
This causes the patient’s tension, symptoms or nervousness to disappear as we work on it in the sessions. In addition, EMDR also emphasizes the limiting beliefs that person had to learn when they suffered the trauma.
Following the example we talked about previously, a person who has suffered contempt from their parents, or who has lived with a parent with low self-esteem, may begin to develop the belief that they are “worthless.”
Added to the above, If this person suffers bullying or encounters partners who criticize their physical appearance, the belief will gain more weight and cause more symptoms. (anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, emotional dependence…). Once we process the traumas, we also change these beliefs for more adjusted ones, such as, in this case, “I am worth it,” since what my schoolmates did to me no longer hurts, it has already been reprocessed.
