What Is The Treatment Of Traumas Experienced In Childhood?
Traumas are part of the psychopathological alterations for which people seek psychotherapy more.
Although these are complex phenomena, their importance in the field of mental health has given rise to decades of numerous scientific research on this topic, so that although today it is not 100% understood how they work nor is able to predict how and when their symptoms will arise, very useful treatment methodologies have been developed to help patients with this disorder, even those who have had the problem since their first years of life.
In this article we will focus on What is the treatment of traumas experienced in childhood? through a summary of the procedures with which psychologists specialized in therapy work.
Psychological trauma is a set of psychopathological alterations that affect emotional memory from events associated with emotions linked to anguish and anxiety They arise when, in interaction with the environment, we experience something that marks us emotionally to the point of leaving psychological consequences on us, which will manifest themselves through a series of symptoms that damage our quality of life.
These consequences are usually of an anxious-depressive type, affecting both self-esteem and thought patterns when perceiving reality in general, and they also usually give way to crises in which intrusive thoughts or mental images in the form of “Flashes” enter the person’s consciousness recurrently and cause their levels of anguish or even fear to skyrocket in a matter of seconds or a few minutes.
Besides, Unlike what happens with phobias, these experiences can be reproduced in very varied situations Since traumatic events left a mark on the person, they are prone to “rekindle” that emotional imprint involuntarily from contexts that have very little to do with each other.
Psychological trauma can take many forms, post-traumatic stress being one of the best known, and is classically triggered by catastrophic events such as car accidents or other violent situations in which one’s physical integrity is at risk. However, trauma does not always have to arise that way. In this article we will focus on a specific type of trauma: complex trauma, closely linked to childhood.
What is complex trauma?
Complex trauma is a type of traumatic-type disorder whose triggering event did not have to be specific, but in many cases is constituted by situations that last over time Classically, this type of trauma begins in childhood, a stage of life in which we are especially vulnerable to harmful experiences that we cannot put an end to on our own, given that we depend on the help and involvement of others to change. of daily context in which to live (moving, changing schools, etc.).
Due to the nature of this psychopathological alteration, Many times complex trauma is based on the interaction between the child and one or more members of his or her family group , since the family is the element that constantly shapes. Situations that can give rise to the appearance of this alteration are parental neglect, sexual abuse by family or friends, constant humiliation at home and, in general, the dynamics of daily interaction in which one is the victim due to physical or psychological attacks.
Furthermore, another characteristic of complex trauma is that its consequences may take a while to appear, or may even appear for the first time after adolescence, generating a kind of “hiatus” between the traumatic events and the stage in which the symptoms appear. they manifest themselves.
This is an indication of the complexity of brain maturation processes , and also the way in which autobiographical memories and the concept of the “I” are based on the constant re-significance of what is remembered. Many times, we are only able to understand the implications of what we experienced in our childhood once we have entered adulthood, and that is when emotional discomfort arises.
Treatment of trauma due to events experienced in childhood
These are the intervention procedures most used to help those who suffer from trauma experienced in childhood.
EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
This type of psychotherapy is inspired by systematic desensitization and it has the advantage that it can be applied with relative ease in young boys and girls, given that it is practically not based on abstract thinking articulated through language.
It consists of a series of practices to help the brain re-process traumatic memories and deactivate or attenuate their “emotional mark” that triggers the extreme discomfort of the trauma. That is, it makes it much easier to develop habituation to emotionally painful memories, causing them to lose power over the person.
Hypnosis
Hypnosis can also be applied in the clinical context to allow the person to improve their relationship with those traumatic memories, offering new “access routes” to those who do not go through anguish , stress, etc. It is based on inducing the person into a state of suggestion in which it is easier to make their associations between thoughts and feelings malleable, so that the most constructive and least harmful way of thinking about the events that have occurred is sought.
Under this label there are a wide variety of therapeutic resources that can be useful when treating childhood traumas. The idea on which all of them are based is that to produce changes for the better in people, it is easier to achieve it through a two-way path: modification of habits and modification of thought patterns
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