In 1986, an experiment was conducted at the University of Texas. Professor and Department Chair of the Psychology Department James Pennebaker asked students to recall personal experiences that involved stress or psychological trauma. He then divided the course into 3 groups and gave each a task:
- the first group had to write about what is happening in life now;
- the second is to describe the details of the traumatic event;
- the third is to write about your feelings and emotions and how this event affected your current life.
Over the course of four days, each student set aside 15 minutes to write. During the experiment, many shared their secrets that they had never told anyone before.
It turned out that the free writing method has a beneficial effect on the immune system by reducing the level of chronic stress.
Carnegie Mellon University of Pennsylvania also conducted a similar experiment. This time, the students were divided into 2 groups and asked to complete a difficult task, which the majority failed to complete. Those who failed were harshly criticized. After this, the first group was asked to write about how they felt, but the second group was not given such an opportunity. For the first, within a few minutes the pulse stabilized, they let go of the situation, and for the second, it took a long time to come to their senses.
These experiments clearly show how useful it can be to write about what concerns us. In this article we will talk about how to make writing as effective as possible for healing from psychological trauma.
Safety precautions
The writing method isn't for everyone, and that's okay. But if you enjoy writing and find that you feel better after putting your thoughts into words, this is likely the tool for you.
You may love to write, but not be ready for independent work. This happens when the experiences are too painful or the protective mechanisms of the psyche do not allow us to touch the most important things.
Then you need to experience the healing process next to someone else. It is best if it is a psychotherapist who will help you process your strong emotions. It is very important not to take on too painful situations to work through on your own. Start small - that is, with what is relevant to you now and causes unpleasant (but tolerable) feelings.
Psychologist Sergei Klyuchnikov
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Consultation with a psychologist on release from psychotrauma
Many people live with a deeply traumatized psyche and do not even fully understand that the blows of fate they received were not forgotten, but remained imprinted in the subtle structure of the psyche.
The life around us is rough and cruel, it traumatizes many people who get used to the consequences of trauma and believe that such a life is in the order of things. What is psychotrauma by its nature?
Psychotrauma is the consequences of life’s blows or adversities that remain in the human soul after a collision with other negatively minded people or difficult circumstances.
Psychotraumas or blows of fate can be very different - acute and chronic, sudden or gradually destroying the psyche of another person, related to the influence of other people or circumstances.
If we were yelled at and humiliated in the presence of other people, if we were betrayed when we did not expect it at all, if we experienced grief for which we were not prepared and we remember these events painfully and for a long time - these are all different types of psychotrauma .
Psychotrauma is the impact on the human psyche of such a force that destroys emotional well-being, reduces self-esteem, leaves a feeling of pain in the soul and interferes with normal life and full communication with other people.
Manifestations of psychotraumatic effects on the human psyche include rudeness, insult, manipulation, rudeness, aggression, betrayal, and threat to life.
In addition to emotions, the body reacts to psychological trauma (and if this happens often, then diseases can gradually develop) and the mind, creating thoughts and mental images of a negative nature, which, when repeated, create and strengthen our negative psychological beliefs.
A person begins to think that he was not just insulted, but that he is a weak, useless loser who can be insulted by anyone with impunity.
A woman, offended by the betrayal of her beloved man, begins to think that all men are scoundrels and, in principle, one cannot have any relationship with them.
A young man who has experienced deep disappointment from an accidental failure adjusts his consciousness in such a way that his whole life will now be a complete failure.
The peculiarity of psychotraumas is their long-term and durable nature; they do not go away on their own and, like tape recordings, are applied to a thin film of consciousness, collapsing very slowly.
The consequences of psychotrauma lead to neuroses, social isolation of a person, illnesses of a psychosomatic nature, and a negative concentration of human attention exclusively on one’s pain and experiences.
How do people deal with the consequences of psychological trauma? Most often they choose the so-called passive method according to the principle “time heals.”
To some extent, this approach works, but not for all people and not in all cases.
The most powerful psychological traumas do not heal completely and smolder in the depths of the subconscious, ready to wake up again like sleeping volcanoes, even if their owner does not even suspect it.
Re-awakening of a psychotraumatic painful experience is possible after a person in a new situation encounters something that somehow resembles that fateful event from the past that traumatized his soul.
In this case, a similar situation again triggers the entire traumatic chain of associations and a person who has seemingly forgotten about the past not only remembers it, but is plunged into pain, as if he had just been hit.
Sometimes a person is able to independently compensate after receiving psychological trauma (“forget it”), but often the pain is so intense that this is impossible.
In an attempt to get rid of the consequences of psychological trauma, a person can use a variety of behavior options - from alcohol and drugs, to criminal behavior or complete isolation from the world.
If a person cannot overcome the consequences of psychological trauma on his own, then one of the most correct decisions would be to contact a psychologist for advice .
Modern practical psychology has accumulated many methods of getting rid of psychotrauma.
An experienced psychologist can offer the client methods of relaxation, extinguishing images, detaching from negative experiences, erasing and dissolving pain, reprogramming one’s own psyche, immersing oneself into pain and negative sensations, and other effective proven techniques.
He can teach a person methods of psychological protection, which will be reliable prevention against a wide variety of psychological traumas and negative effects on the psyche.
In my articles, which are in the My Articles section, Self-Regulation subsection, as well as in my books “Master of Life”, “Inner Strength”, “Master of Self-Regulation”, the topic of a person’s work with psychotraumatic experiences is discussed in sufficient detail.
It is also useful to use various exercises and psychotechniques, which are on this website in the section called “Exercises and Psychotechniques.”
In conclusion, I’ll tell you about a case from my practice so that you have a better idea of what consulting work is.
Getting rid of psychological trauma is not easy. To truly get rid of it, to dissolve psychological trauma, and not cover it with earth, you need either the help of a specialist, or the person himself must become a master of self-regulation.
Not long ago I worked with a woman who had suffered psychological trauma in childhood.
The nature of the injury is as banal as Russian life.
She was beaten by her drinking father as a child. He hit hard and brutally. Then he left the family, contact with him was lost.
The woman remembered this cry with her entire being. Every time, in her presence at work, the conversation began to be conducted in elevated intonations, she again began to experience the horror of a child who would be beaten.
We conducted a deep study with her on the very phenomenon of trauma, tried to understand and record how this trauma, created by childhood impressions, became entrenched and why she was unable to get rid of this trauma on her own.
For some time she tried to do something herself, even doing auto-training and Sytin healing attitudes.
The techniques helped her remove the sharpest feeling of the experience, but the emotion of fear and pain remained.
Fear nestled in my stomach and was reinforced by mental images.
The woman was prone to fantasizing, imagining the darkest pictures of her future illness.
At the same time, she was quite persistent in her actions and tried to save money on psychologists and get rid of psychological trauma herself. To do this, she tried autogenic training.
With the help of self-hypnosis, she managed to relax a little and believe that liberation from the trauma was near, but then things stalled.
The more she tried to convince herself that her trauma was going away, the more images came into her head that she wouldn’t succeed.
As a result, a strong belief was formed that the trauma had become stronger, as she said, “concreted.”
We determined how this injury was formed, what algorithm for strengthening and maintaining it was used by the woman herself.
It was a great revelation for her to learn that she herself had been “training the muscles of psychotrauma ” for many years and for some reason stubbornly maintained this pain and difficult memory.
I showed her that her method of dealing with psychological trauma was correctly called “repression” and that it did not work because by expelling this memory from herself, the woman continued to think intensely about it and thereby strengthened it.
It was like a call to “don’t think about the white bull.”
After all, the creation of an algorithm for failure is based on repeated mental replaying in our heads of a certain mental video, which we ourselves persistently and sometimes inventively create and “improve” all the time.
By replaying this video in her head, the woman unconsciously worked to implant negative feelings into her body.
But it is not enough to relax the body; you need to believe that getting rid of psychological trauma is possible.
The woman admitted to me that deep down in her soul there was a great distrust that it was possible to change.
Whenever she tried to do exercises to “disconnect from pain” (that’s what she called her practice), the thought periodically appeared in her head: “don’t play meditation, you’re a zero at this and you won’t learn anything”).
But as she told me, “if I hadn’t played, I wouldn’t have found you, I tried to save money, but still I couldn’t free myself.”
She also realized that she was also hampered by the “habit of feeling sick,” essentially a secondary benefit.
Thanks to this, she had a special, essentially privileged position in the family: her husband was essentially her servant, deprived of the right to vote.
He became so fed up with this situation that he started drinking.
But the main reason that was revealed to her during the training was that she had a weak, unstable motivation to free herself from pain, which did not give her the opportunity to complete her practice.
We began to work on all fronts - and create a clear confidence that she will cope with the situation and everything will be fine, and deepen relaxation, and master the art of observing the trauma from the outside in order to separate from it.
After some time, she realized that the method that helped her best was “diving into the depths of psychotrauma and then dissolving it.”
I tried to increase her level of self-control, which was quite weak by nature (despite all her attempts to practice independently) to a level where a person can eliminate it himself and maintain a confident harmonious state in himself.
As a result, she wrote me a review consisting of three phrases:
“Even though it’s late, but now I understand well that pies should be baked by a pie maker, and if I do it myself, I, of course, will bake them, but no one will eat them. I don’t know if I have completely gotten rid of this trauma, but it no longer interferes with my life. Thank you for your patience and ability to find the key to each person.”
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How does psychological trauma work?
Before we work through the injury, let’s figure out how it works.
Injury
- this is harm caused to a person’s mental health as a result of intense exposure to unfavorable environmental factors or stressful effects on his psyche. It is often associated with physical trauma that threatens life or violates the sense of safety.
Trauma is an interrupted grieving process. We want everything to be the same so much that we repress the traumatic event and the experience of it. This often happens automatically and unconsciously. We try not to touch on a sore subject: we avoid conversations, try not to remember, and if we do remember, we do not immerse ourselves in feelings. It turns out that trauma thus protects our psyche from the intolerable.
At the same time, such protection affects our lives: in order to keep our experiences locked up, we need to put in a lot of effort. This threatens our body with tension, exhaustion and anxiety. Also, just because we don't think about a traumatic event doesn't mean it didn't happen. It can be reminded of by various situations that associatively lead to places where it is intolerable to look. Thus, again and again, against our will, we plunge into strong experiences associated with the past. This can be expressed in nightmares, in excessive reactions to what is happening, in outbursts of anger or tears.
The healing process begins when our resources are redirected from defense to processing the situation. That is, when we gain the courage to look at what happened and experience our feelings associated with these events.
It is important to do this in a safe environment. Therefore, writing is a good way to cope with living: it provides security, helps to express emotions and to appropriate one's experience. If for verbal processing we need a person nearby so that we can stay in touch with our emotions, then writing allows us to keep our attention on our experiences by returning to the text.
Concept and mechanism of psychological trauma
Even Sigmund Freud in 1920 wrote that trauma is an unexpected excessive impact, due to excessiveness, during which the full functioning of the mental apparatus is powerless and the Ego becomes helpless. A person faces situations that are difficult for him to survive. They go beyond ordinary life and have a strong impact on the psyche.
Any injury is an unfinished and unprocessed action by our psyche. For example, psychological trauma in a child affects his subsequent development. How psychological traumas of childhood will affect the behavior patterns of an adult remains a big question. How much in the moments when the child experienced this. did he have psychological support, did he have enough resources for this? Psychological trauma can be caused completely by accident. In addition, it is important to note that the same event is traumatic and difficult to experience for one person, but not for another. It depends on the individual characteristics of the individual. First of all, it depends on the adaptive resources of the body and the human psyche.
After the onset of psychological trauma, the body as a whole is mobilized. All resources that are available at the moment are directed towards overcoming what is happening. More precisely, accommodation. A person who finds himself in an extreme situation experiences many conflicting emotions. This means there is no way to recycle them. The point is that any blocking of experienced feelings does not allow them to be released, take root, and can be repressed to the subconscious level. In addition, situations of psychological trauma can cause the development of psychosomatic diseases. This happens if a person keeps everything to himself for a long enough time and denies what is happening. In this case, there is no psychological release.
Trauma is perceived by the individual as something that should not happen and goes beyond the usual reality to which the person is adapted.
If we talk about developmental trauma, it is important to note that a person encounters opposition or adverse environmental influences. In this case, the child becomes limited in the use of his resources. For example, if something unpleasant happened that the child experienced difficultly, then the next time he finds himself in a similar situation, he will be more tense and cautious. There is a high probability that the child will perceive the new situation he finds himself in in a certain way. This event will be similar to one in which the child experienced a number of intolerable emotions. They are very similar to those experienced before. We can say that after suffering a trauma, a person becomes more adapted to the world. This is due to acquired and experienced experience.
What else will help?
Rescripting technique
The good thing about a letter is that you can use it not only to state what happened. Writing allows you to transform events. You can rewrite the event as you please: change the ending, add strength or helpers, rewrite your reaction. The brain doesn’t care how everything actually happened; it cares how you perceived it. And you can work with this perception. Here's how to use the rescripting technique.
Choose a situation you would like to work through. Let it be something that does not cause too painful feelings (for example, the experience of violence or recent loss is better to work through together with a psychotherapist).
Imagine a person who could give you now what you needed then. For example, a mother who would listen, a friend who would protect. It doesn’t have to be a real person; you can take a movie character or invent him yourself.
Find the appropriate security image. It is important to know what supports you have and what you can turn to if something goes wrong during practice. An image of safety can be a comfortable place you can go to physically (or in your imagination) or a meaningful support object that you can touch to feel safe.
Imagine the situation as it happened in reality. At any time you can press the "Stop" button in your imagination and the scene will stop. Once what is happening freezes, you can transform it. For example, call a defender for help and see how he comes and changes the situation in your favor.
Check to see if all your needs have been met. We evaluate how your character feels in your imaginary situation as a result of playing an alternative scenario. Was he satisfied, did he need anything more? You can add helping actions. For example, a defender, having dealt with the threat, came up to you, hugged you and offered to take care of you.
Do something for yourself in reality from the actions of a defender. For example, make yourself some delicious hot tea, wrap yourself in a blanket and lie down, addressing yourself with words of care, like the protector from your story.
With the help of such rescripting, you can artificially create an alternative experience of the past - and thus affect your sense of self in the present and your relationships with other people.
Journaling
Set aside half an hour of time every day and write everything that comes to mind. Or take notes in your phone as needed. This text should not be published publicly, but fragments can be used in the future, for example, to write a book.
Returning to the place where it all happened
It often happens that we remember a traumatic event and can even tell others about it, but our emotions are still inaccessible to us. We turn memories into a dry story and cannot immerse ourselves in feelings. In this case, the letter will help convey to others the very fact of the event and even its details - but it will no longer be able to help in living through the traumatic experience.
To awaken the body and emotional sphere, you can return to the places where painful experiences occurred. But before you go there, it is important to consider safety precautions.
Think about what usually helps you cope with strong emotions and make a list of techniques - for example, write down in advance the names of people you can contact if you need help and their phone numbers.
You can mentally return to the place where everything happened by closing your eyes. You can look through photographs from those times or open Google maps.
The strongest practice can be actually returning to the scene of events. Having encountered your experiences, try not to ignore them, but to live them: cry, get angry, if you want. If you are in a living space, pillows or upholstered furniture (they can be hit or thrown to express physical aggression) will help you release steam. If space allows, shout; To avoid embarrassing people nearby, you can use a pillow - it absorbs sound.
Writing will be an excellent tool for expressing feelings. It maintains the dissociation that is needed to feel safe - when you describe a situation, everything seems to be happening not to you, but to the person in the letter - while the text leaves you in contact with the experience.
If your emotions are so intense that you can’t cope with them on your own, seek help from a specialist.
Author-guide
To support yourself as you process your experience, seek out companions. This could be a friend with whom you will regularly meet, tell him about the work you have done and the difficulties you have encountered in the writing process. Or maybe an author whose work inspires you and serves as a guide. Reading his books can tell you how and where to move next.
Blog
Today I will share with you my psychotherapeutic experience - I will talk about the stages that need to be passed in order to recover psychologically.
For clarity, let's look at the example of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The client is a former participant in military operations in Chechnya.
Complaints: high anxiety, fears.
Anxiety and fear in the present are not lived fears in the past.
That is, there was a situation in which it was scary, but the person did not live through this fear.
He distracted himself with the present, calmed himself down with meditation, and tried his best to forget everything.
It is so IMPOSSIBLE to “forget” the pain. Just when it seemed to us that we had managed it and everything was behind us, a situation similar to 1% (the sound of a helicopter) takes us back to the past. A wave of wild fear and despair sweeps throughout the body. The brain tells us - remember this past, stay in it, live through these emotions.
But we misinterpret our reactions and again struggle to calm down. If none of the methods help, we “sit down” on pills.
IT IS POSSIBLE to “forget” the past only through experiencing ALL the painful emotions that accompanied the event.
Signs that we HAVE LIVED fear are the absence of unreasonable states of anxiety in the present - once. And two – when remembering an event from the past, we are not afraid. It feels like we are just watching a movie, and for the 20th time in a row. There is logic, but no emotions.
Let's return to our client.
So, therapy includes 5 stages of work (see the picture on the cover of the article):
1. FEAR. The first stage of the work is to experience the emotion of fear, which arises when we are immersed in the past. I remember what happened and I want to shrink so hard that I can disappear, I feel my legs and arms getting cold. When we correctly “squeeze out” fear, it decreases and we begin to feel the second emotion -
2. PAIN. “How is it possible... why did this happen, it’s so unfair...”
We correctly “squeeze out” the PAIN and move on to the third stage -
3. ANGER. "I hate! I hate those teenagers who beat me and to whom I wanted to prove by participating in hostilities that I was something!”
We correctly “squeeze out” ANGER and feel again
4. PAIN. Remains of tears.
And only after all this emotional cocktail comes -
5. TRUE ACCEPTANCE OF THE PAST – “What can we take from them, their parents are alcoholics, they humiliated their children. What the children received was sown around them. Sick people. I was just unlucky - I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Looking at these stages of psychotherapeutic work, the following metaphor suggests itself.
Remember stories about temples?
They wash the walls - one layer is washed off, a second, and under the third they find images of saints.
It’s the same here - we “erase” 1. fear, 2. pain, 3. anger, 4. pain and discover behind all this 5. love and acceptance.
By the way, when we independently try to cope with the trauma of the past, we strive directly from point A (1.fear) to get to point B (5.acceptance).
This is IMPOSSIBLE without fully experiencing 1. FEAR, 2. PAIN, 3. ANGER, 4. PAIN.
I would like to place special emphasis on the fifth stage of work - “Acceptance”. I find it truly wonderful:
No matter how much pain or resentment we work with, we always eventually come to acceptance and love . It’s surprising, and many won’t believe me, but even when we work with violence, the client at the end of the work comes to accept the behavior of the rapist, he reports, “What can we take from him, his mother threw cats out the window.”
Friends! Thanks to the achievements of psychology, it is absolutely possible to forgive parents for their “happy” childhood, for the betrayal of their ex, to understand why they behaved this way towards us and to accept them as they are!
I hope I have inspired you to work with a psychologist! It's work, but it's rewarding work!
Sincerely yours, #psychologist Anna Yakovleva
PS Welcome to personal and Skype meetings!
Tags: psychotherapy be healthy emotion management PTSD
