Trauma

What is trauma?

A trauma is not merely a terrible event though it is very much that too.

It is a terrible event that has not been adequately processed, understood and unpicked and that has, through neglect, being able to cast a very long and undeserved shadow over huge areas of our experience.

The concept of trauma was first observed in military contexts. Let us imagine that in bed one night in a country torn apart by civil war we hear a car alarm followed a few seconds later by a huge explosion. Our neighborhood is destroyed and several members of our family are killed. We are devastated but under pressure to continue with our lives are unable to reflect adequately or properly to mourn what has happened.

We are forced to move on from a dreadful experience with fateful haste and a lack of emotional assimilation. Yet the unattended memory of bloodshed chaos and loss doesn't disappear . Instead it curdles into an unknown interior presence we call trauma which means that in the years and decades ahead, even in the most peaceful circumstances, whenever we hear a car alarm or indeed any high-pitched sound that of an elevator's ping for example, we are mysteriously for reasons we don't really understand, thrown back into our original panic as if a thousand tons of tnt were about to explode once again,

However appalling this can be psychologists have learnt that trauma can as easily be acquired in ostensibly peaceful circumstances. We don't need to have been through a war to be traumatized in multiple ways.

Imagine a six-year-old child who makesan error in a maths exam and takes the news home. Suddenly her father who drinks too much and might be battling depression and paranoia flies into a rage shouts at her smashes a household object and slams multiple doors.

From the perspective of a six-year-old, it feels like the world is ending. There is no way to make sense of the moment beyond taking responsibility for it and as a result feeling like a terrible human being…and from this a trauma develops ..,this one centered around making mistakes. Every slip up on this person's part threatens to unleash an explosion in others far into adulthood every time there is a risk of an error.

There is a terror that someone else will get dementedly furious everyone becomes terrifying because one person in particular who was spine chilling hasn't been thought about and reckoned with in memory.

The solution in all such cases is to get a better sense of the specific incidents. In the past that have generated difficulties in order to unhook the mind from its expectations.

The clue that we are dealing with a trauma rather than any sort of justified fear lies in the scale and intensity of feelings that descend in conditions whenthere is no objective rationale for them…it's peace time a colleague is kind and yet still there is terror,still there is self-disgust still there is shame.

We know then that we are not dealing with silliness or madness or indeed genuine danger but with an unprocessed incident from the past casting a debilitating shadow on a more innocent present.

As traumatized people the memory of the founding incident is within us but our conscious mind swerve away from the possibility of engaging with it and neutralizing it through rational examination.

When we can finally feel comfortable and safe enough to dare look back we'll be able to see the traumatizing moment for what it was…outside of our original panic and our youthful or illogical conclusions that it was our fault that we did something wrong that we are sinful liberating ourselves will mean understanding the specific local and relatively unique features of what has traumatized us and then growing aware of how our minds have multiplied and universalized the difficulty in part to protect us from an encounter which was once too difficult to grapple with.

We will realize that it was one bomb that exploded and destroyed the neighborhood and that however dreadful this might have been there is no reason for all high-pitched noises to terrify us.

Similarly it was one father who screamed at us for making a mistake when we were tiny. Yet not everyone who is in authority threatens to annihilate us in adulthood.

Countless situations will be frightening so long as individual incidents have not been understood and thought through with kindness and imagination by properly gripping an original event…in the claws of our rational adult mind and stripping it of its mystery we will be able to repatriate fearful emotions and render the world, less unnerving than it presently seems.

Life as a whole won't have to be so terrifying once we understand the bits of it that truly once were, how to overcome your childhood is a book that teaches us how character is developed.

The concept of emotional inheritance the formation of our concepts of being good or bad and the impact of parental styles of love on the way we choose adult partners.