How does psychological trauma arise and heal in people?

These are the emotional mechanisms behind psychological trauma.

Trauma is a wounding fact of modern life (Levine, 1997); practically all of us have suffered at some point a traumatic situation, not only soldiers or victims of war, natural catastrophes, or other natural disasters, but also those who have suffered a traumatic event.of natural catastrophes, or abuse and aggression.

It can also be traumatic when human beings experience bullying, when they get 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 to attention in front of the whole class and punished them, when they lose their job, when their partner ends their love relationship or a friend no longer wants to see them, when after being fired they take months to find another job, when their grandparents die....

In fact, the causes and the causes and consequences are very varied and will depend on the subjectivity of each person, his or her capacity to cope, his or her capacity to bond, his or her environment and capacity for resolution at any given moment.

The good news is that the human being possesses instinctive capacities to feel, reflect, respond, associate, bond and overcome painful events that have been traumatic.

Overcoming the mark of traumatic experiences.

To understand how trauma arises, one must first begin by understanding what it is. According to Pier Janet, (1859 to 1947) a French psychologist and expert on trauma, psychological trauma is the result of a person's exposure to a stressful and unavoidable situation that overwhelms the person's coping mechanisms. s coping mechanisms. Given this, the physiological mechanisms of Fight or Flight will not be able to function, because the event is unavoidable.

Peter Levin, Psychologist and PhD in Medical Biophysics, points out that trauma is the way in which our body responds to the threat of survival.. That is to say that instinctively, when faced with a threat, more primitive physiological mechanisms that reside in our brain and nervous system, similar to those of animals, are set in motion, 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 come out of it, developing trauma symptoms such as pain, stiffness, collapse, cognitive dysfunction, anxiety, depression, among others.

The aftereffects of trauma can even affect our ability to bond, to distort life in the community, to distort the way we live.distorting our couple's life 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 safety, we develop a high level of resentment against those who we feel should have taken care of us, we feel betrayal from them or we also introject a feeling of guilt towards ourselves. None of the above is usually functional or resolving, but it does hinder us even more.but it manages to hinder even more the functioning of the person.

Trauma affects human biology and neurology.

When people feel too overwhelmed by their emotions, memories fail to become neutral narrative experiences.. They are memories that people cannot tell, the fear remains stuck in the body.

The terror becomes a memory phobia that prevents the integration of the traumatic event and fragments. Memories are removed from ordinary consciousness and are organized as visual perceptions, somatic concerns, and behavioral performances, and stored in our memories., remaining stored in our memories in the original mode of the experience (Salvador, 2017).

People who have been exposed to traumatic situations have been wounded (the word trauma comes from Greek and means wound), are afraid to remember, do not want to, 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 involves disconnecting from the experience, which eventually 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 lived, they remain in the jaws of fear, and the body unconsciously resigns itself to having no escape, allowing fear and anxiety to rule them, which prevents it from moving freely in the present.

Francine Shapiro (2001), creator of the EDMR Therapy and according to the hypothesis of P. Janet (1889), stated in her book Psychological automatism that traumatic experiences suffered at different moments of a person's development can interrupt the adaptive capacities of the individual.This makes it difficult to process experiences and leads to the appearance of symptoms, leading the human being to function in a dysfunctional, unbalanced and disorganized manner in most of his or her areas of development.

Several 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 from day to day is within familiar patterns, so we tend to forget it almost immediately. However, if something happens outside the pattern, it is likely to be forgotten almost immediately, if something happens outside the pattern, the mind will probably pick it up and pay attention to it..

If we run into a friend in the street that we haven't seen since childhood and he was one of our best friends, it will surely generate a very intense joy that will make it stick in our memory.

The same happens if we are exposed to a threat: the event will be out of the daily pattern, which will make us focus our attention on it.

Dealing with a threat to our well-being and safety, a series of neurophysiological mechanisms will be put into action to secrete hormones and endorphins that will help to fix traumatic memories with greater intensity, influencing our behaviors, emotions and thoughts (Van der Kolk, 2014, Bergman, 2012). When memories remain unprocessed they can lay the foundation for the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Shapiro and Maxfield, 2002).

So how does trauma heal?

Levin (1997), points out that the healing of trauma depends on the detection of symptoms, which in themselves are difficult to identify as they are primitive responses. For some people the symptoms are very clear, but for most people they are subtle.difficult to perceive on their own.

It is essential that the person has an awareness of illness and reflective capacity, and it is necessary to explore their reactions, behaviors, emotions and thoughts, as well as to make a journey in the history of the person that allows to to recognize the origins of the traumasto desensitize and reprocess the traumatic history (Shapiro, 2012).

On the other hand, let us remember that our natural system to overcome the difficulty is blocked by the impossibility of escape. This leaves a trapped somatic energy, which in the healing process must be released or mobilized out of the frozen state, enabling a resolute and creative response to the threat, which operates not only at the time of the experience, but also years later because our mind and our life has remained fixed in the trauma.

Our own healing capacity, to the rescue

There is a very nice case by Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, MD. In his book The Body Keeps the Score. A review of a 5 year old boy who experienced the attack on the twin towers in the USA on September 11.

The child drew the sudden, painful, dead-end, 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 capacity to actively manage and achieve a solution for his own rescue from the trauma (Van der Rohe, et al. for his own rescue from the trauma (Van der Kolk, 2014).

Unlike this little boy, many people who get mentally stuck in the experience, neural patterns are modified, their life stops, spontaneity is subtracted, and they remain in a permanent state of alert always functioning under threat, as each new life milestone is contaminated with past experiences.

@image( 26753, left) With the EMDR Psychological Therapy we access the traumatic memory that has contributed to the development of the disorder presented by the patient in a direct way, as it was filed in the neural network, the activation of the natural information processing system and the remission, therefore, the and the remission, therefore, of the symptoms suffered. By focusing on the dysfunctional information, results are achieved in less time than usual. If you are interested in receiving treatment for trauma-related problems, please contact me.