How Does Psychological Trauma Arise And Heal In People?
Trauma is a hurtful fact of modern life (Levine, 1997); Virtually all of us have suffered a traumatic situation at some point, not just soldiers or war victims. from natural disasters, or abuses and attacks.
It can also be traumatic when human beings experience bullying, when they achieve a good grade at school but their parents demand more and more, when they were not invited to the birthday party, when they are abandoned by their parents on the first day of school, when The teacher called them out in front of the entire class and punished them, when they lose their job, when the couple ends their romantic relationship or a friendship no longer wants to see them, when after being fired they take months to find another job, when they die the grandparents…
Actually, The causes and consequences are very varied and it will depend on the subjectivity of each person, their ability to cope, their ability to bond, their environment and their ability to resolve at a given moment.
The good news is that human beings have instinctive capacities to feel, reflect, respond, associate, bond, and overcome painful events that have been traumatic.
To understand how trauma arises, we must first begin by understanding what it is. According to Pier Janet, (1859 to 1947) French psychologist and expert in trauma, psychological trauma It is the result of the person’s exposure to a stressful and inevitable situation that exceeds the coping mechanisms. or of the person. Given this, the physiological mechanisms of Fight or Flight will not be able to function, because the event is inevitable.
Peter Levin, Psychologist and PhD in Medical Biophysics, points out that trauma is the way our body responds to the threat of survival. That is to say, instinctively, when faced with a threat, more primitive physiological mechanisms are set in motion that reside in our brain and nervous system, similar to that of animals, but unlike them, ours are blocked, because at that moment The person has not been able to enter the traumatic experience, go through it and get out of it, developing symptoms of trauma such as pain, stiffness, collapse, cognitive dysfunction, anxiety, depression, among others.
The after-effects of trauma can even affect our ability to bond. , to distort life as a couple, and sexual life. Physiological responses can be so intense and difficult to regulate that they can lead to symptoms such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune diseases (Van der Kolk, 2014).
Even after having been exposed to events that have endangered our emotional, bonding and physical security, we develop a high level of resentment against those who we feel should have taken care of us, we feel their betrayal or we also introject a feeling of guilt towards ourselves. None of the above is usually functional or decisive. but it manages to hinder the person’s functioning even more.
Trauma affects human biology and neurology
When people feel too overwhelmed by their emotions, memories fail to transform into neutral narrative experiences. They are memories that people cannot tell, fear stays stuck in the body.
Terror becomes a phobia of memory that prevents the integration of the event and traumatic fragments. Memories depart from ordinary consciousness and become organized as visual perceptions, somatic concerns, and behavioral performances. being stored in our memories in the original mode of the experience (Salvador, 2017).
People who have been exposed to traumatic situations have been hurt (the word trauma comes from Greek and means wound), they are afraid to remember, they do not want to, they cannot remember, avoiding contact with any person or situation that refers them to what happened. and often giving rise to dissociation as an extraordinary mechanism, which implies disconnecting from the experience, which over time becomes a maintenance defense mechanism. That is, what has served to survive now serves to maintain itself (Salvador, 2017).
When we live an experience, it is lived somatically through our body and our senses. People are unable to overcome the anxiety of what they have experienced, they remain in the jaws of fear, and the body unconsciously resigns itself to having no escape, allowing fear and anxiety to govern them, which prevents it from moving freely in the present. .
Francine Shapiro (2001), creator of EDMR Therapy and according to the hypotheses of P. Janet (1889), stated in her book Psychological automatism that Traumatic experiences suffered through different moments of people’s development can interrupt the adaptive capacities of the individual. making it difficult to process experiences and promoting the appearance of symptoms, leading human beings to function in a dysfunctional and unbalanced and disorganized way in a large part of their areas of development.
Various studies corroborate the importance of continued stress and chronic traumatization as determinants of mental pathology (Joseph, 1998; Osuch et al., 2001; Stickgold, 2002; van der Kolk, Mc. Farlane and Weisaeth, 1996).
memory games
Most of what happens to us every day is within known patterns, so we tend to forget it almost immediately. However, If something happens outside the pattern, the mind will probably catch it and place its attention there.
If we bump into a friend on the street that we have not seen since childhood and was one of our best friends, it will surely generate a very intense joy that will make it stick in our memory.
The same thing happens if we are exposed to a threat: the event will be outside the daily pattern, which will cause us to focus our attention on it.
Since it is a threat to our well-being and security, a series of neurophysiological mechanisms will be put into action to secrete hormones and endorphins that will help fix traumatic memories with greater intensity, influencing our behaviors, emotions and thoughts (Van der Kolk, 2014, Bergman, 2012). When memories remain unprocessed they can form the basis for the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Shapiro and Maxfield, 2002).
And how is trauma healed?
Levin (1997) points out that the cure for trauma depends on the detection of symptoms, which in themselves are difficult to identify since they are due to primitive responses. For some the symptoms are very clear, but for most people they are subtle. difficult to perceive by themselves.
It is essential that the person be aware of the illness and reflective capacity, and their reactions, behaviors, emotions and thoughts must be explored, as well as taking a journey through the person’s history that allows recognize the origins of trauma to desensitize and reprocess the traumatic history (Shapiro, 2012).
On the other hand, let us remember that our natural system for overcoming difficulty is blocked by the impossibility of escape. With this, a trapped somatic energy remains, which in the healing process must be released or mobilized out of the frozen state, enabling a decisive and creative response to the threat, which operates not only at the moment of the experience, but that also years later because our mind and our life has remained fixed on the trauma.
Our own healing capacity, to the rescue
There is a very nice case from Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, MD. in his book The body keeps score. Review of a 5-year-old boy who experienced the attack on the twin towers in the United States on September 11.
The child drew the sudden, painful, dead-end and extreme event experienced by many people, but he also drew a trampoline to jump on. By reproducing the experience in his mind, the little boy also had the ability to actively manage and achieve a solution. for their own rescue from trauma (Van der Kolk, 2014).
Unlike this little one, many people who get mentally stuck in the experience, their neural patterns are modified, their life stops, spontaneity is subtracted, and they remain in a permanent state of alert, always functioning under threat, since each new milestone of Life is contaminated with the experiences of the past.
@image( 26753, left) With EMDR Psychological Therapy we access the traumatic memory that has contributed to the development of the disorder presented by the patient directly, as it was archived in the neural network, promoting the activation of the natural information processing system and the remission, therefore, of the symptoms suffered. By focusing on dysfunctional information, results are achieved in less time than usual. If you are interested in receiving treatment for problems related to trauma, contact me.
