Misconceptions About Trauma, Wounds That Accompany Us
To this day, we still have misconceptions about trauma. Human beings are vulnerable, but sometimes we forget how resilient we can become. So, as Viktor Frankl once said, having an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is a perfectly normal thing, a natural response that will at some point allow us to show the stronger, tougher side of ourselves.
Something that many psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in dealing with traumatic events remind us is that all of us, at some point in our lives, will suffer some adverse event of greater or lesser seriousness for which we are not prepared. It could be the loss of a loved one, an accident, witnessing something shocking, a robbery, a natural disaster or a medical emergency.
These are situations that have a strong impact on our brain. They stimulate the areas related to fear and the feeling of attention, and soon everything starts to break up around us. The prefrontal cortex, the structure that helps us think and reason, loses strength, loses agility, and our mental focus becomes more opaque, more cloudy. We plunge into a very characteristic state of anguish.
As such, it is quite possible that several of our readers are familiar with the experience of this situation. It is important to understand that when this happens, and always depending on the severity of this traumatic impact, our brain does not recover overnight, or even from one month to the next. Healing an injured brain, plunged into a state of post-traumatic stress, takes time. It requires effort and adequate coping strategies.
To achieve this, it will be helpful to know first that there are misconceptions about trauma. It is necessary to get rid of them to start a better approach to this situation. Let’s see below.
Main misconceptions about trauma
1. A traumatic event destroys your life
Think about when a therapist begins to work with an abuse victim, a person who has suffered an assault, or the loss of a loved one, etc. He often hears the following statement from his patient: “I know that I will never be happy again . ”
In the beginning, it is very difficult for this person to understand the following: in reality, trauma has a dual nature. On the one hand, it has an undeniable destructive capacity. However, the paradox is that he can also transform the person in order to get him back with greater tenacity, with better personal abilities.
Suffering on our own skin does not condemn us to eternal pain, to life imprisonment. If we look for resources, support, and combine will and effort, the brain can be reprogrammed. The wound won’t go away, but it will hurt less and we can have a good life.
2. Trauma appears after a threatening event
If we resort to the definition of trauma in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, we will see that it appears as “what arises after the experience of a loved one’s death, a real threat, a serious injury, such as assault, disasters, abuses or life-threatening illnesses.”
In reality, many nuances can be introduced into this definition. First, trauma does not appear as a “reaction” to these adverse events as such, but rather as a result of the “emotional and psychological effect” they have on the particular person. Also, sometimes the same event can traumatize some people but not others.
Furthermore, when something shocking occurs, the reaction is not immediate, the wound is never instantaneous. It occurs later, when a person begins to question his own life, his own reality, and what involves both.
For example, think of a person who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Perhaps, at first glance, the news is enough to make a person feel defeated and traumatized. However, for many people, the most striking thing is not always the disease itself, but not having the support of a partner or those people who, in the most complex moments, tend to distance themselves from us.
3. A trauma is a mental illness
Another misconception about traumas is seeing or understanding them exclusively as “mental illnesses”. In fact, they are something much deeper. Today, many experts in the field, such as psychologist Richard Tedeschi at the University of North Carolina, prefer to focus on post-traumatic stress disorder in another way.
If trauma means “wound”, then we are facing something that is “broken”. For example, when someone has a fall or a bump, you may break one or more bones. Therefore, when someone suffers a psychological trauma, there is also a rupture, a mental injury. It makes it impossible for that person to be the same thing as before. Anyone who suffers trauma is “psychologically injured”, and these injuries can be moral or emotional.
4. If you are strong, you can face trauma alone
We still live in a society that understands that anyone who asks for help is weak. This is another misconception about trauma. Many believe that those who seek medical support are crazy and that those who are strong never fall. However, we must look at the data: suicide rates are alarming. Apparently, many of those who seemed to be able to take it all and still have strength, in the end couldn’t even stand their own lives. We said this a moment ago, traumas break us and nobody, absolutely nobody, can go on for long with a broken soul, a broken mind and a broken heart.
This is, without a doubt, another of the misconceptions about the most common traumas: believing that time heals everything, that it is better to forget than to face it, that a strong attitude will make all pain disappear… It won’t be like that, avoid believing in these ideas, since they can take us down a dead end street.
To conclude, the traumas need not make us people who do not want to be. We can stop feeling captive. We deserve a more dignified existence, freer from those burdens of the past that affect our present. We must seek help and actively work on the inner reality that is still wounded. Thus, we will have the opportunity to transform ourselves, heal and live fully.
