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Confronting Trauma: Which experiences can tear people apart?
Trauma is an emotional reaction resulting from an extremely stressful event, such as physical injury, sexual violence, or a life-threatening threat to yourself or your loved ones. These disturbing events can be accessed through visual exposure or indirectly through the media, and either way can result in an overwhelming physiological stress response. While not all situations translate into psychological trauma, these experiences do cause great trauma for many people.
After experiencing trauma, many people will feel uneasy, painful, and may even develop psychological disorders.
Trauma reactions can generally be divided into short-term and long-term. Short-term reactions such as psychological shock and denial are accompanied by long-term reactions such as reliving the trauma, panic attacks, insomnia, nightmares, and difficulties with relationships. Such reactions not only have psychological consequences, but may also cause physical symptoms such as migraines, hyperventilation, and nausea.
Everyone may react differently to similar events. Most people who experience a traumatic event do not suffer psychological trauma as a result, although they may experience discomfort and pain. Some people may develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after experiencing a traumatic event. Variability in the condition is related to protective factors that some people possess, such as emotional resilience and willingness to seek help.
People may turn to drugs or alcohol to escape or relieve these painful feelings, but this often makes the situation worse.
Trauma can lead to emotional reliving, which is a psychological and physical re-experience. For example, the sound of a motorcycle engine can trigger painful memories or even the impression of reliving the experience, a process called trauma coupling. Re-experiencing it may damage an individual's sense of security and self-efficacy, undermine their ability to regulate emotions, and affect interpersonal relationships. For example, traumatic triggers can cause flashbacks to cause anxiety or other related emotions, and often people are unaware of the triggers' existence.
The effects of trauma can cause significant changes in an individual's daily life and may even lead to morphological changes. Some research suggests that extreme stress can disrupt normal development of the hippocampus, affecting its function in adulthood. People in high-stress situations, whether police officers, firefighters or first responders, may be at risk for such effects.
In war, psychological trauma is known as "shell shock" or "combat stress response," which is closely related to post-traumatic stress disorder.
In addition to primary trauma, many people experience stress due to future risks, such as the trauma of climate change. As public awareness of climate change increases, so does the emotional experience associated with it, requiring collective emotional processing that can help build resilience and post-traumatic growth.
Moral loss is another condition relative to post-traumatic stress disorder that is often accompanied by feelings of guilt or shame due to moral lapses, which are studied in Partial Changes. This shows that trauma involves not only physical harm but also serious moral and emotional consequences.
For example, staff may experience vicarious feelings when witnessing trauma in others, which is known as vicarious trauma. This places an additional psychological burden on professionals working in related fields, especially when faced with traumatic circumstances, the risk of which increases with the degree of exposure.
For individuals who have experienced trauma, timely psychological consultation and treatment are crucial. Although trauma is often difficult to express, through appropriate counseling institutions and support systems, self-recovery can be helped and basic trust relationships and self-understanding can be rebuilt.
Past trauma can become a barrier to future self-understanding, preventing people from reshaping their worldview.
Facing the challenge of trauma requires not only psychological treatment, but also the support and attention of the whole society. Especially when the hearts and souls around us are being torn apart, how to provide support and understanding to those who are going through difficulties has become an important issue that we must think about.
