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What is psychotrauma?
What if I said that what you are extra vigilant about, what you fortify yourself against, what you attack, what you reserve against, what you crave and desire, and what chances you take and don't take, are deeply influenced by the most challenging experiences of your life, which you don't necessarily remember or are aware of?
Trauma
The word trauma is big. For many, far too big. Too big to be part of one's own life, but something you read about. The word is derived from Latin and can be translated as "wound". Wounds come in many forms. Deep, shallow, short and long. What they have in common is that they leave scars. In this post, I will discuss how psychological scars arise and affect us. Psychotrauma is: An experience that generates so much stress that it exceeds a person's mental and emotional capacity to handle it. So it is not what happens to you, but what happens in you when it happens to you. Therefore, potentially traumatizing events will affect people differently based on the individual's capacity to handle the specific event. But we can set up some common guidelines: The traumas that touch us most deeply are those inflicted by other people, most deeply when they are closest to us and with whom we have a dependent relationship. The earlier they happen in life, the more deeply they touch and the more difficult they can be to get in touch with again and thus process. It may just as well be what you did not experience, as what you did experience. The symbiotic needs that were not met. With this in mind, you may understand that this does not only have to be about the obvious big things such as sexual abuse, acts of war, natural disasters and other events we are used to associating with the word trauma. My experience is that the root of human suffering almost always concerns experiences from the time when we were most vulnerable and had the greatest need for connection, protection and care. Often from before we can remember and all the way back to the time when we were a fetus. Therefore, childhood trauma will also be a recurring theme.
The splitting model
In everyday life, people of all ages regulate stress. Regulate up when sharpening is needed and regulate down when the "danger" is over. If the stress is high enough, fight/flight is activated for extra protection. If this is not successful, we say that you "freeze". This is where traumatization occurs and where the psyche must split off parts of itself to "put a lid on" what has happened and thus survive.
The splitting model (copyright Dr. Franz Ruppert) is a representation of how the psyche organizes itself and handles trauma.
Trauma parts: Those parts of you that carry the memory of the unmanageable and overwhelming emotions that became too much in the event and have been split away and made inaccessible to you.
Survival parts: Those parts of you that are the psyche's mechanisms to prevent "contact" between healthy parts and traumatized parts, and prevent recurrence at all costs. Can be considered a survival function.
Healthy parts: The parts of you that know who you are and what you want.
Repeated traumatization of a person also leads to repeated separation and creates a further fragmented ego.
Trauma parts
A traumatizing experience is a highly physical experience. Increased breathing and pulse, perspiration, secretion of adrenaline and cortisol. And perhaps ends in the opposite, physical "shutdown". Although the mind can hide traumatic memories, the body remembers right down to the cellular level. A connection has been shown between stressful experiences in childhood and effects on DNA, with the risk of subsequent illness (Kirkengen/Brandtzæg Næss, 2005). In this sense, one can say that the trauma parts live in the body. This is why trauma therapy that comprehensively includes body and psyche is important, and why it is very difficult to treat based on pure cognitive talk therapy beyond symptom management. A person who carries their trauma and protects themselves with their survival parts can encounter triggers in everyday life that exceed the survival parts' capacity to keep their distance from the traumatic memories and which thus cause retraumatization in contact with the trauma parts. This will take the body and psyche back to the original traumatization and can be a very unpleasant experience, even if there is no real danger present. Triggers can be people, objects, smells, sounds, etc.
Survival parts
Survival parts are programs that are supposed to protect you from remembering the emotions of a trauma and prevent you from experiencing the same thing again. Despite their positive intention, the problem with survival parts is that they don't age. They don't mature and develop as you do. The strategy that saved you when you were 1 year old is not necessarily as appropriate when you are an adult. Another aspect is persistence. When a survival part is intended to protect you from events that have caused strong emotions such as fear of death, it is not easy to deactivate this program. It is in thoughts, emotions and the nervous system. The theory is based on Dr Franz Ruppert's books.
