After serious life shocks, we sometimes cannot recover for a long time. And even an indirect reminder of what happened causes acute pain. Why is this happening and how can you help yourself?
“Shadow, know your place.” This quote from the famous play by Eugene Schwartz can rightfully become an epigraph to this topic. Post-traumatic syndrome is a consequence of severe mental trauma that takes a person by surprise. A sudden break in family relationships, a failure in some very important undertakings, an attack by bandits or terrorists, participation in a difficult battle, a fire, an earthquake, a car accident … It is impossible to enumerate all the events that cause this emotional upset.
But the traumatic event itself has long been in the past, the person survived and, it would seem, can return to his usual way of life, but he does not succeed. From night to night, he is haunted by frightening dreams, in which vivid scenes arise, directly or metaphorically reproducing the trauma experienced. In these dreams, as once during real events, a person unsuccessfully tries to escape, overcome obstacles – and regularly fails and feels helpless.
And in wakefulness, if he accidentally becomes not even a participant, but simply a witness of some incident that remotely and indirectly resembles what he experienced, he suddenly has a severe vegetative crisis: an acute feeling of anxiety arises, his heart begins to pound, breathing is disturbed, blood pressure rises, muscles tense, as if it were necessary to immediately enter into a fight or flight. Sometimes, for the development of such an attack, it is enough just to remember or read about something that evokes associations with a long-experienced trauma.
These attacks occur according to the law of “positive” feedback with negative consequences: each previous attack determines the development of the next one, prepares the ground for it.
It is impossible to replay what has already been completed once. You can’t win the fight against the shadow
But the state of such anxious tension is not the only manifestation of post-traumatic stress syndrome. These panic attacks alternate with a state of depression, passivity and the same feeling of helplessness that was caused by the first stress and which is so similar to depression.
What are the psychological mechanisms behind these, at first glance, so different manifestations of post-traumatic syndrome? An analysis of the history of the formation of this syndrome shows that at the moment of the trauma that caused it, a person gives out a surrender reaction, manifested in a feeling of helplessness. This is a very difficult experience associated with a sense of inferiority, and it is difficult to get rid of such a feeling, even if the incident itself has long been a thing of the past. It continues to live in the inner world of man. Any random associations, what can be called a shadow of the past, again cause the same state of helplessness – as if the shadow came to life.
And what do the described seizures, with which I began the story, reflect in wakefulness and in dreams? They look like an active state of tension and mobilization. I assume that this mobilization is aimed at fighting the shadow. This is an attempt at a figurative level to “replay” the experienced defeat. But it is impossible to replay what has already ended once. You can’t win the battle against the shadow. As soon as you get out of this strange symbolic game, whether it is in wakefulness or in a dream, you find that the past experience has remained the same experience of defeat, the shadow of the past is invulnerable and again provokes a feeling of helplessness in you. These states change each other regularly.
What can be done? You need to explain to yourself that this is only a shadow of the experience. You can start new games, not with the shadow of the past, but with the real difficulties of today, reminding yourself of the experience of overcoming, which turned out to be obscured by the shadow of defeat. Psychotherapists should and can help with this. Each success in this direction, the recollection of past successes and the orientation towards achieving current goals will also contribute to the neutralization of the past experience of defeat.
This is not an easy, but promising path. The self-awareness of a fighter with real difficulties will return, and the shadow will also return – to its place in the past.