Lecture
Psychological trauma is a psychological state that arises in response to an event or a series of events that cause significant stress and emotional shock. These events may be extreme, dangerous or traumatic, and the person may feel helpless and unable to cope with them effectively.
Here are some key aspects of psychological trauma:
Types of events: Psychological trauma can be caused by various events, including natural disasters (for example, earthquakes, floods), accidents, acts of terrorism, violence (physical or psychological), the loss of a loved one, war or military conflicts, as well as prolonged and severe stressors such as psychological abuse or childhood trauma.
Symptoms: People who have experienced psychological trauma may experience a wide range of symptoms, including anxiety, depression, recurrent dreams, flashbacks (re-experiencing traumatic events), increased irritability, problems with sleep and concentration, and other emotional and psychological disorders.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): This is one of the best known and most extensively studied psychological disorders associated with psychological trauma. PTSD can develop after severe traumatic events and is characterized by intense symptoms such as recurrent dreams, avoidance of situations that are reminiscent of the trauma, and heightened arousal.
Individual reaction: It is important to note that people react to psychological trauma differently. Some may experience intense symptoms, while for others they may appear less intense. This depends on a variety of factors, including personality traits, prior experience and the level of support available.
Treatment and support: Psychological trauma can be treated and managed, usually through psychotherapy such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or exposure therapy, and, at times, with the help of medication. The support of family and the social environment also plays an important role in recovery from trauma.
A special place is occupied by events that have a
traumatizing character for a person's psyche: a threat to one's own life, physical injuries.
The concept of “psychological trauma” does not have a clear-cut definition in
the Russian-language literature. The concept of
"psychological trauma" gained its widest currency within the theory of post-traumatic
disorder and within crisis psychology, which arose in the late 1980s.
Psychological trauma is the experiencing of a particular interaction between a person and
the surrounding world. Psychological trauma is an experience, a shock.
The main content of psychological trauma is the loss of faith that
life is organized according to order and is amenable to control.
This approach actively examines the influence of psychological
trauma on the perception of time, that is, how the vision of the past,
present and future changes (a dynamic aspect in the study of the life
path) under the impact of trauma. At some point in life a person
experiences psychological trauma, which evokes the strongest
feelings. Traumatic stress, in the intensity of the feelings experienced,
is comparable to the whole of one's previous life. Because of this, the traumatic experience
seems to be the most significant event of one's life, a kind of "watershed,"
dividing the whole of life into events that occurred before and after the traumatizing
event. The trauma received changes the vision not only of the present,
the past, but also of the future. A person who has received psychological trauma
feels themselves to be not what they were before, but significantly more mature,
more experienced than their peers.
A person who has lived through a traumatizing event but has not
worked through it emotionally remains, as it were, stuck in the past. The traumatizing event draws
the person to itself and does not let them go. For this reason there is a fairly high probability
for such people of repeating the traumatic situation in the future. They
strive to relive the traumatizing event again in order to work through it emotionally.
Example: veterans of the war in Afghanistan go to fight in "hot spots."
It is widely known that accidents happen more often to people who have experienced psychological trauma,
that they commit suicide more often than others, and become involved
with alcohol and drugs. One of the main
determinants of suicidal behaviour is the social-psychological
maladjustment of the personality under a subjective interpretation of life's
problems as unsolvable. The person begins to feel that they are "in a dead end,"
from which there is no longer any way out. Because a person's consciousness is "narrowed," at times
it seems that death is — the only way out. Young people in particular suffer from
social and economic instability and uncertainty. The
suicide rate among young people is very high.
The number of non-pathological suicides has increased — attempts to renounce life by
mentally healthy people. The value of the very concept of "life" has become
extremely low.
Psychological science pays insufficient attention to childhood
traumatization. As is well known, the traditions of Freudianism in the West remain to this day
very strong. Therefore any problem is considered with an eye toward
Freudianism. But even S. Freud, who already at the end of the last century established
how strongly childhood influences the whole of subsequent life, could not
subsequently bring himself to believe in the high prevalence of phenomena of this kind,
regarding traumatic experience as a fantasy on the part of patients. Z. Hall carried out an analysis
of the consequences of childhood sexual and psychological trauma for a person's subsequent
functioning. This analysis allowed her to note “that
psychoanalytic theory of child development considerably
hindered not only generations of analysts, but also generations of
other mental health professionals from acknowledging the fact
that acts of violence against children occur not only in someone's fantasies,
but also happen in reality.”
In studies of an individual's life path, the dynamic aspect
was singled out by means of the categories of past, present and future. These
categories are the most adequate to the features of the life path as a
specific process, not only because they reveal
the irreversibility of human time, but also because they are relative to
the personality, which is constantly moving through time.
Psychological perspective (the psychological future) is a
cognitive capacity to foresee the future, to forecast it,
picturing oneself within it; it is also a holistic readiness for it in the present.
Such a perspective can be present even in individuals with a cognitively
impoverished, undifferentiated, unconscious conception of the future.
A personal perspective opens up given the presence of abilities as
future possibilities, of maturity, and hence readiness for difficulties,
the unexpected. A person's conceptions of their own future are
a factor of their life path, forming the subjective image of the
individual's development. A person's forecasting of their own life path has
quantitative and qualitative characteristics. The quantitative aspect is
the duration, scope and probability of future occurrences. The qualitative aspect is
the definiteness of future occurrences. Features of their structural relations
manifest themselves in optimism — pessimism, realism -
fancifulness.
Studies of the life prognoses of adolescents and senior schoolchildren
have shown that the traumatizing consequences of the post-Chernobyl situation
manifest themselves fairly persistently in symptoms of a "foreshortened future," in
the presence of uncertain life plans, in the avoidance of situations
that require constructing life forecasts.
We have already noted above what the consequences of traumatic events are.
The immediate consequences of traumatic events manifest themselves in the form of
mental states (fear, horror, helplessness and others), which
reflect the objective content of the events and correspond to the character of
the given person. The states that arise influence a person's interaction
with new circumstances, determining whether they will take an active stance and
fight against them or, conversely, become confused and fail to find a way out of
a difficult situation. The duration of these states ranges from several minutes
to several years, and this depends on the strength of the external impact and on the character
of the person. There is a close connection between character and states. Herein lies
the distant effect of an event. Distant psychological consequences can
arise even without clearly expressed psychological states.
Certain biographical facts do not produce an immediate
psychological effect, but do have distant consequences.
The psychological role of such an event lies in the fact that it determines
many subsequent events, laying the foundation for a new way of life.
Understanding and treating psychological trauma are important aspects of psychological work, especially in the context of helping those who have experienced serious traumatic events.
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