Misconceptions About Trauma, The Wounds That Accompany Us

To this day, we still have misconceptions about trauma.  The human being is vulnerable, but sometimes we forget how tenacious we can be. Thus, as Viktor Frankl once said, having an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is perfectly normal, a natural response that will eventually allow us to bring out the stronger / resistant side of ourselves.

Something that many psychologists and psychiatrists who are experts in treating traumatic events remind us is that all of us, at some point in our lives, will suffer some adverse event of greater or lesser severity for which we will not be prepared. It could be the loss of a loved one, an accident, the sight of something shocking, an assault, a natural disaster, or some medical emergency.

They are situations that generate a strong impact on our brain. Those areas related to fear and the feeling of alarm are stimulated, and soon everything begins to fragment around us. The prefrontal cortex, that structure that helps us think and reason clearly loses strength, loses agility and our mental focus becomes more opaque, more cloudy, plunging us into a very characteristic state of anguish.

Thus, it is very possible that many of our readers are familiar with this experience, this situation. It is important to understand that when this happens, and always depending on the severity of that traumatic impact, our brain does not recover from one day to the next. Not even from month to month. Healing a wounded brain in a state of post-traumatic stress takes time, effort and adequate coping strategies.

To achieve this, it will be useful to first know that there are misconceptions about trauma that must be ruled out in order to start a more optimal, more correct approach. Let’s see it next.

1. Misconceptions about trauma: a traumatic event destroys your life

When a therapist begins to work with the victim of abuse, with a person who has suffered an assault, the loss of a loved one, etc., he often hears the following phrase from his patient: “I know that I will never be happy”.

At first it is very difficult for that person to appreciate a fact: in reality, the trauma has a dual nature. On the one hand, it presents an undeniable destructive ability, but the paradox is that it also manages to transform the person to bring them back to life with greater tenacity, with better personal resources.

Suffering adversity on our own skin does not condemn us to eternal pain, to a life sentence. If we seek resources, support and combine will and effort, the brain can reprogram itself. The wound won’t go away, but it will hurt less and we can live a good life.

2. Trauma appears after a threatening event

If we refer to how trauma is defined in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” we will see that it appears as “that which arises after the experience of a death of a loved one, a real threat, a serious injury such as an assault, disasters , abuses or diseases that threaten one’s life ”.

Well, actually a lot of nuances can be brought into this definition. First, a trauma does not appear as a “reaction” to these adverse events as such, but rather as a result of the “emotional and psychological effect” it has on the particular person. Moreover, sometimes the same event can cause trauma in some people, but not in others.

What’s more, when something shocking happens, the reaction is not immediate, the injury is never instantaneous. It arises later, just when the person begins to question their own life, their own reality and what surrounds them both.

For example, consider a person who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Perhaps at first glance that news as such is already enough to feel defeated and traumatized. However, for many people the most shocking thing is not always the disease itself, but not having the support of the partner or those people who in the most complex moments cease to be.

3. A trauma is a mental illness

Another misconception about trauma is seeing or understanding it exclusively as “mental illness.” They are actually something much deeper. Today, many experts on the subject, such as psychologist Richard Tedeschi of the University of North Carolina, prefer to approach PTSD differently.

If trauma means “wound”, we are therefore facing something that is “broken”. For example, when someone falls or is hit, they may break one or more bones. Therefore, when someone suffers a psychological trauma, a break also appears, a mental injury that makes it impossible for that person to be the same person. Whoever suffers a trauma is “psychologically injured”, and these injuries can be moral or emotional,

4. If you are strong, you will be able to deal with the trauma on your own

We still live in that society where it is understood that whoever asks for help is weak, that whoever takes medicine is because they are crazy and that whoever is strong and can handle everything never falls. However, there are the data: suicide rates are alarming, and who apparently could with everything and still had strength left, in the end he could not even with his own life. We said it a moment ago, traumas break us inside and nobody, absolutely nobody, can run for a long time with a broken soul, a fragmented mind and an eroded heart.

This is undoubtedly another of the most common misconceptions about traumas: believing that time heals everything, that it is better to forget than face it, that a strong attitude will vanish all pain … Let’s not do it, let’s avoid believing such ideas, since we they lead almost desperately to a cul-de-sac.

To conclude, traumas do not deserve to turn us into people we do not want to be. We can stop feeling captive, we deserve a more dignified existence and freer from those weights of yesterday that blur our present. Let us seek help, actively work on that internal reality that is still injured, and have the opportunity to transform, heal and live fully.