Hurt People, Invisible Pain

Hurt people often go unnoticed. No one appreciates his broken parts or his invisible pain. However, the mark of traumas, of the adversities they experienced are still imprinted in their minds, making their day to day difficult. They sleep poorly, feel exhausted, angry, have serious difficulty trusting people again, and are unable to handle that internal reality.

Experts in trauma psychology often tell us that most of us will, at some point, face a complicated and adverse event. They can be traffic accidents, the loss of a loved one, a natural catastrophe, seeing or being the victim of an assault, facing the loss of a job, breaking an emotional relationship, an illness …

Failure to adequately face these and other types of realities conditions us. Daniel Goleman, already explained in his book Emotional Intelligence that to overcome these events we are obliged to start what he called “emotional relearning”. It is like restarting ourselves in every way, it is having to readjust our thinking, emotions and even our behavior.

It is not easy, there is no doubt. Injured people do not have any broken bones and yet they cannot navigate the world normally. His wounds are also not visible to the naked eye, but his pain is immense, stark and deep. Nobody deserves to live this way. Therefore, it is necessary to always remember that it is possible to emerge from these situations. Let’s see how.

Hurt people, anatomy of pain that does not stop being

At what point does a dramatic experience turn into a trauma? When is a person susceptible to post-traumatic stress disorder? Although it may surprise us, there is no standard answer to these questions. There is not because each person lives and processes these situations in a particular way.

Therefore, something that experts on the subject such as Lloyd Sederer, Medical Director of the New York State Office of Mental Health, point out is that the risk of becoming injured people, in those profiles susceptible to dragging a trauma, depends on three factors:

• Degree of exposure to trauma. For example, children who have had a complicated upbringing, neglect or abuse, will suffer a deeper trauma than the adult who at any given moment suffers the impact of a loss or witnesses an accident.
• The other factor is vulnerability. Genetically, there are people more vulnerable to the effect of an adverse event than others.
• The third element is the resources available. Facts such as having or not having social support are often a determining factor.  Likewise, we can also talk about psychological resources. Having previously gone through a trauma and having faced it successfully, gives us more adequate and effective resistance strategies.

Most common symptoms of the effect of trauma

In a study carried out by Carol E. Franz and Michael J. Lyons, from Temple University, Philadelphia (United States) over 24 years, they determined which are the most common symptoms that adults show in relation to trauma . Those that make us hurt. They are as follows.

• Insomnia and nightmares.
• Memory always focuses on traumatic memories. It is common in fact to suffer constant flashbacks .
• Anxiety and stress.
• Feelings of anger, rage and rage.
• Feeling of guilt
• Physical fatigue and even the appearance of psychosomatic illnesses.
• Problems trusting people again.
• Low self-esteem.
• Negative view of oneself.
• Always be on the defensive and in fear, with the constant feeling that something is going to happen.

Narrative therapy in injured people

Narrative therapy has been offering good results in the treatment of trauma in recent years. This approach, developed in the 1970s and 1980s by therapists Michael White and David Epston, has been gradually enhanced to shape such exciting perspectives as Thomas Elbert, Maggie Schauer, and Frank Neuner’s Narrative Exposure Therapy for trauma. .

It is based on the following objectives:

• Help the person tell their story to give it meaning. It also enables him to awaken his resilience and thus be able to alleviate suffering.

• Accepting, describing pain and accepting it as part of our life story helps people restore dignity and empower themselves.
• Studies such as those carried out at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, explain that narrative therapy is useful to reconstruct the sense of self and one’s own identity. Two very fragmented dimensions as a result of the traumatic events.

To conclude, as we can see, injured people have adequate resources at their disposal to rebuild their strength, dignity and worth. It is not a quick or easy process. Reinterpreting traumatic events involves mobilizing emotions.

Above all, it means having enough strength to be responsible for our resurgence, our improvement and progress. Repositioning ourselves in the world will take time, but we can do it.