In our daily lives, unexpected events often occur that break the psychological balance and alter our emotional state. These disturbing events can range from a simple setback to dramatic events with tragic consequences, such as the death of a loved one, the diagnosis of a serious illness, a physical or intellectual disability, the total destruction or loss of a valuable asset, dismissal from work, divorce, physical or psychological violence, etc.
Setbacks are accepted and overcome quickly because they do not affect any essential and determining factor in our lives; But a traumatic event does, as it alters the perception we had about ourselves and the environment, causing transcendental life changes. In this PsychologyFor article, we will analyze and explain What is a traumatic event?
When faced with a traumatic event, some people tend to not accept the obvious and they try to live with their backs to reality, to avoid it, but this does not make it possible to recover psychological balance and emotional stability, this requires acceptance.
From a psychobiological approach, one way to address this issue is to analyze the mental processes involved in traumatic events and their acceptance, focusing on two basic processes:
The formation of a traumatic event from a real event.
The acceptance of this by the affected person.
The formation of a trauma from a real event
The question focuses on finding out how a real-life event acquires the rank of traumatic. From the analysis of the different existing definitions of psychological trauma, the most common characteristics that qualify an event as traumatic can be obtained:
That originates from a event unrelated to everyday experiences normal, that is, it is unpredictable, unexpected or casual (it can be unique and intense or less intense but repetitive).
Let it be perceived and experience as something negative (harmful, dangerous, threatening) to physical or psychological integrity and unwanted.
That causes a strong psychological impact and causes very intense emotional damage or suffering, capable of inhibiting or limiting your ability to respond.
As can be seen, two factors intervene in the traumatic event, one objective referring to the real event and its circumstances, and another subjective one that concerns the person who is affected by it. Among these strategies is the search for regularities in everyday events and, based on them, making predictions of future events.
Theories of psychological trauma
Regularity in the relationships within the human-environment system
According to General systems theory Regularity is an evolutionary mechanism that gives stability to systems, hence there is a tendency towards it. In the supersystem human being-environment there is also this tendency towards the regularity of its interactions, and we can see an example of this in social systems such as family, home, friends, the workplace or recreational associations, where each Member occupies a defined position, performs a specific function and maintains an established type of relationships, and all of these characteristics tend to remain stable over time.
Our mind looks for the regularities that occur in these interactions and through learning processes incorporates them into its memory, which means less cognitive and energetic cost, as it avoids having to explicitly process the same information each time. In this regard, D. Kahneman (2011) points out that the implicit cognitive system, and with it the forms of primary learning, have as their essential function ““maintaining and updating a model of our personal world that represents what is normal in it, and tends to reject changes, which can only be processed by alerting the explicit cognitive system, which represents a cognitive effort that is very difficult to maintain.”
The origin of psychological traumas
Each of us, from knowledge, life experiences, beliefs and values builds a stable and regular image of himself and the world around him (G. Kelly’s theory of personal constructs can illustrate this process through the fundamental postulate and its 11 corollaries), creating a coherent mental model or representation of how things are and how they work in everyday life and the links we establish with the elements of the environment that provide us with balance and psychological well-being (an example of these are family attachment, friendship and companionship). As the neuroscientist R. Llinás (2001) points out, our brain is not so much an information processor as a “world simulator”, a true builder of virtual realities in which we live as if they were true reality.
When, when processing information about an event, we perceive that it contradicts the way things are expected to happen according to the internalized mental model and representations, a cognitive discrepancy occurs that gives rise to an instantaneous reaction of disbelief and surprise, prompting our mind to activate all its cognitive resources to search for an explanation that allows us to establish coherence between both representations. But in traumatic events, the force of the psychological impact limits and even inactivates such resources, causing a kind of mental “block” that distorts or interrupts processing.
An indisputable element that contributes to configuring these regularities is the cause-effect relationship of events The mind tends to look for this relationship under the premise that the events that occur in the environment have their reason for being, they do not just happen, there is always a prior cause that must obey established norms and founded beliefs, and from this relationship look for regularities in events. Faced with an event that surprises us and we do not understand, we quickly ask ourselves: Why has this happened? and we immediately tend to look for its cause to obtain an explanation for it, and if this is unknown or we classify it as incoherent, illogical, unfair or absurd, as usually happens in the traumatic events (for example, alcohol consumption in traffic accidents), information processing is incomplete or incoherent.
Fulfillment of predictions
The mind consolidates these regularities and acts like things were not going to change and that state of things habitual will continue day after day: we will not get sick, we will not have any accidents, our loved ones will continue to be the same, we will not be fired from work, etc., thus forgetting the possibility of contingencies and unforeseen events. Furthermore, it is expected that the people around us They keep their intentions, beliefs, desires and attitudes stable, which provides a sense of automaticity to our social interactions in numerous areas and situations.
The regularity in the majority of events that occur in our daily lives (getting up, having breakfast, going to work, etc.) and the tendency to overvalue the control we have over events (the illusion of control) drives us to predict future situations and generate expectations about them. Cognitive neuroscientist Jeffrey Zacks tells us that everyday life is nothing more than a constant series of small cataract predictions. Likewise, philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the job of a brain is to predict the future in the form of forecasts. about the things in the world that matter to direct the body appropriately. The mind acts as if these necessarily have to come true and, although we are aware that the predictions may not come true, We consider it unlikely and do not take them into account when plan the future
The consequence of these two mentioned strategies is that we become accustomed to a state of things determined, both in the present and in the future, in which events have a logical and sensible cause that justifies them, and when an unforeseeable and undesirable event occurs that violates such strategies, that is, what is expected to happen does not happen (an encouraging medical diagnosis), or what happens was not expected (a death, a violent attack or an accident), a drastic change is generated in the configuration of the world we had, the regularity of the state of things that we had assumed, and the perception of inability to give an adaptive response to the situation that has arisen causes frustration and hopelessness
The potential for emotional activation
What qualifies an event as traumatic is not the cognitive contradiction mentioned above, but the negative and intense emotional alteration that accompanies it and causes the person’s inability to adequately cope with the situation generated (feelings of fear, guilt, anger, frustration, shame, despair, etc.).
If an event has no harmful consequences or they are inconsequential, negative emotions are hardly generated or they are of little intensity. But if the event entails consequences that are disruptive the pillars on which our model of the world rests and breaks the links emotions that sustain relationships with the environment ( The model of the world that we have built incorporates emotions that are closely associated with life experiences: love, friendship, solidarity, empathy), the result is that It is no longer possible to relate to him as we did before. Furthermore, the expectations for the future created disappear, and with them the meaning we had given to our lives may also disappear
This tragic situation generates a vigorous force or activation potential emotional capable of triggering a series of dramatic effects in the person’s intimate sphere: the loss of basic confidence in oneself and in the other elements of one’s environment, feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, decreased self-esteem, loss of interest and concentration on previously rewarding activities, change in value system, especially belief in a just world. Furthermore, the afflictive emotional state causes loss of control of the situation and limits your resources to cope with it.
The emotional potential generated by the traumatic event is measured through its effects, that is, it depends on the intensity, frequency and duration of the activation of the emotional system, and increases by virtue of the number of emotions that are activated. If anger, hatred or guilt are added to fear or sadness, which awaken a desire for revenge, the emotional potential will increase, which will make the acceptance process even more difficult. This increase also occurs when the traumatic event is repeated several times or becomes chronic (gender violence, bullying, etc.).
This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to What is psychological trauma we recommend that you enter our Cognitive Psychology category.
