reflection papers, Over Trauma and Recovery 3
Love Life
pc408.session_1.pptxTrauma, Terrorism, Catastrophes and Pastoral Care
Prof. Cedric Johnson
PC 408
Spring 2017
Trauma & Recovery
What is trauma?
What are some of the ways that you or people you know have experienced trauma?
What is (1) hyperarousal, (2) intrusion and (3) constriction.
What surprised you from the readings?
The systems that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning are overwhelmed.
The incident includes threats to life or bodily integrity, a close personal encounter with violence, or witnessing grotesque death.
The event engenders a feeling of intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation.
Trauma often occurs when…
So the healing process must address the reestablishment of control, connection and meaning!
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Trauma & Recovery
When the force is of nature, we speak of disasters or catastrophes.
When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities or terrorism.
What is “overwhelming” about the experience of trauma?
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Auto Accident
Assault
Being Robbed
Domestic Violence
Death of a Loved One
Witnessing Terror
Natural Disaster
Miscarriage
Infertility
Suicide
Bullying
Abandonment
Adoption
Divorce
Childbirth
Abortion
Wartime Experiences
Emotional, Physical or Sexual Abuse
Slavery, Apartheid or other forms of domination
Pastor dies, leaves or is dismissed
Potentially Traumatic Experiences
Trauma undermines the belief systems that give meaning to human experience.
Traumatized persons can lose trust in themselves, in other people, and in God.
The Traumatized Self
Traumatic Stress
PTSD references a “disorder” characterized by symptoms that imply a high level of daily dysfunction which emerges in the wake of a traumatic experience.
Countless untreated people have sub-clinical traumas that do not impinge severely upon their activities of daily living.
The ordinary response to danger entails a complex system of reactions.
Threat arouses the nervous system, causing the endangered person to go into a state of alert.
Concentration on the immediate threat, allows a person to disregard fatigue or pain.
Changes in arousal, attention, perception, and emotion mobilize the person for either “fight or flight.”
An Ordinary Response
If there is neither time nor strength for fight or flight and death appears imminent, the body will freeze.
The victim of trauma enters an altered state – time slows down, there is no fear or pain.
Fight, Flight or Freeze
Many trauma survivors feel guilt and shame for freezing and not doing more to protect themselves by fighting back or running away.
Understanding that freezing is an automatic response can facilitate the healing process.
Fight, Flight or Freeze
Trauma occurs when the human system for self-defense becomes overwhelmed and/or meaning-making structures become undermined.
Components of our “survival” system tend to persist in an exaggerated state long after the actual danger is over.
Traumatic events can thus produce lasting changes in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition and memory.
Traumatic Events
The symptoms of trauma fall into three broad categories:
Hyperarousal
Intrusion
Constriction
Symptoms of Trauma
Entails the persistent expectation of danger.
System of self-preservation seems to go into a permanent state of alert.
Continually hypervigilant, anxious, and agitated.
May startle easily, sleep poorly or react irritably to small provocations.
Can become so accustomed to a state of hyperarousal that they no longer recognize the connection between their symptoms and the traumatizing environment in which these symptoms formed.
Hyperarousal
Reliving the incident as though it were recurring in the present.
Experience flashbacks and nightmares.
Reenact the incident, either in literal or disguised form.
Trauma arrests normal development by its repetitive intrusion into the survivor’s life.
Intrusion
Reflects the numbing response of surrender.
Characterized by
Suspension of initiative
Distortion of perceptions
Feelings of indifference
Emotional detachment (dissociation)
Passivity
Constriction
Unable to escape or alter the unbearable reality in fact, the abused child alters it in her mind.
Dissociation can become not merely an adaptation, but the fundamental principle of personality organization, leading to the genesis of personality fragments or “alters.”
Dissociation
This altered state might initially be regarded as adaptive – a protection against unbearable pain and total despair.
Dissociation may be the mind’s attempt to flee when flight is not possible.
Constriction
Constriction can be applied in every aspect of life, including relationships, activities, thoughts, memories, emotions, and sensations.
Constrictive symptoms are not readily recognized and their origins are often lost.
Constriction
The suppression of one’s thoughts is a typical constrictive strategy, particularly thoughts about the future.
Thoughts of the future can stir up such intense yearnings and hope that people held captive find it makes them vulnerable to despair.
Victims of trauma constrict their attention and their action. The subjugated no longer think of liberation. The future is reduced to surviving just another day.
People held captive also eventually erase the past. The past, like the future, becomes too painful to bear, for memory brings back the yearning for all that has been lost.
Constriction & Captivity
Challenges
Mechanisms such as dissociation or freezing can become so habituated that more adaptive strategies never develop.
For example, if a boy is harassed by a group of bullies and goes into a state of tonic immobility (freezes), when threatened as an adult he will be more likely to freeze.
The longer the person is exposed to the traumatic experience, the more symptomatic they tend to be, and the slower they are to recover.
While trauma-related symptoms seem to fade over time, they can be revived, even years after the event, by reminders of the original trauma.
Challenges
