IT IS SERIOUS BECAUSE WE DONT REALLY SEE and REALLY KNOW.
Unhealed psychological wounds and hurts from traumatic experiences or losses overshadow our capacity for fulfilling relationships and for selflove. This can result in an inability to give and receive love, in isolation and fear of others, of certain situations and the challenges of everyday life.
Traumatic experiences leave wounds in the soul, which usually heal with more difficulties than physical wounds. People who have suffered traumatic experiences often feel as if their soul has been torn apart into many parts. They live with entirely contrary feelings and thoughts: irritable and frozen, flooded with memories and empty of memories, full of shame and rage.
In many situations can people experience violence in a way which will affect them traumatically: with abuse, mistreatment, rape or with shocklike experiences like traffic accidents, kidnapping, or catastrophes’. Also the loss of a beloved person can be traumatic, and even the witnessing of violence with human beings or animals can cause deep traumatic disturbances.
Many people manage by themselves to process traumatic experiences. Why this is so, psychologists cannot say yet. One thing is certain: It is less a matter of how robust the soul of a man is, and more a matter of what happens to him/her, and how it happens, and whether the circumstances are especially shocking or humiliating. It is also decisive how the environment reacts, if it supports the victim after the traumatic experience , if it denies the happening, or even assigns a joint guilt.
Of course the age is decisive, too, and the capacity to understand the traumatic experience, to process and to talk about it. The earlier a trauma happens, the deeper it will influence the attitude towards life and the selfworth of a person.
The psychological effects of various traumatic experiences are called in psychotherapy "post traumatic stress syndrom".
There exists a complex picture of these symptoms: flashbacks- sudden reliving of the traumatic situation, nightmares, emotional numbness and missing feelings, depressions, anxieties and sleep disturbances; avoidance of situations and behaviours which could stir up memories of the trauma, low tolerance of stress situations and low selfworth in daily life, inability to have fulfilling human relationships, feelings of shame and guilt.
The key to understanding the posttraumatic disturbances is basically hidden in the traumatic situation itself.
A traumatic experience breaks the entire psychological organizational structure of a person. The soul is overcharged and overwhelmed, and finally breaks down if it cannot process or digest the trauma.
With many traumatized people happens "Introjections": The victim identifies with the aggressor. Whatever has been done to him/her is unbearable , and he/she can hardly imagine that a human being can act like this. Therefore the victim takes the act of the aggressor into himself, ascribes it to himself. And the victim also takes on the unconscious guilt of the aggressor, which often he himself does not feel, so that the aggression and the guilt continue to live in his soul like a foreign body.
Also in the family trauma originates. Children are abused or mistreated. The common form of violence against children is neglect: when children are not nourished well, receive poor medical care or are not protected against dangers. Traumatic experiences can also originate from deprivation, a deficiency in care and safety, produced by loss, death or separation of parents or beloved ones.
If sexual abuse results in psychological disturbance later on depends on the situation. A forced act is particularly traumatic if the abuse happens over longer periods of time, if more than one person is involved, or if the offender is the father. In his book the german psychoanalyst Matthias Hirsch writes that it is less the individual act which is destructive, but more the fact that the child becomes deeply confused in his feelings and his judgments about reality. If the abuse is denied within the family, the child finds himself in a similar situation as the torture victim within the society: he has experienced something which nobody wants to realize and perhaps nobody will even believe. Therefore it has to bury the experience in a place in his soul from where nothing will ever come to the surface, to the conscious, he believes.
In a situation in which our life or psychological integrity is threatened, or in which we feel that we are threatened, there are only two instinctive reactions: fight or flight.
But the abused child can neither escape nor fight, as all victims of a traumatic situation.An escape is pretending to be dead, not feeling anything, in order not to be overwhelmed by painful feelings; to leave the situation with one´s consciousness, while the body experiences it, in order not to experience it consciously.
In psychotherapy this is called " disassociation", if the traumatic experience is split up, or "derealisation" if someone escapes into a different, phantasized world. These are defence mechanisms in the traumatic situation, which can become symptoms of a psychological disturbance later on, when one does not feel it, feels anaesthesized, feels cold or numb.
"We may not return the affection of those who like us, but we always respect their good judgment." --Libbie Fudim
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