A post I made today for an online abnormal psychology class regarding trauma:
Undoubtedly the reason for traumatic research being such a controversial topic is because it involves the extremes of the human experience. The lowest dales of life are encapsulated by the word trauma. It has the power to bring kings to their knees, cause empires to fall and, on a more personal level, for love to flee and to be replaced by hate and fear. Whenever one deals with such extremes in the human experience it is no easy task to find calm, reasonable, well-thought out thoughts about the events that have occurred. Traumatized humans seem to regress to more base levels of functioning, if you will, to more reptilian brain cognitions. Not that reptilian brain functions are bad, in fact, without them life, as we know it, would be impossible. However, the reptilian brain has the tendency to not view life for all that it is. This brain has a manner of viewing life in a boxed, narrow and restricted manner. Therefore we need calmness, patience and inquiry into all facets of experience to behold the picture in its exorbitant, contradicting beauty more fully. In the heat of trauma or in its destructive wake, such multifaceted inquiry can be one of the hardest things imaginable to do as it may very well involve facing up to realities which are not easy to accept, but which need to be entertained in due time for true healing and growth to occur - which is what, in the end, we all seek and which is the best we can hope for after the whole world seemed to have collapsed one fell swoop.
Experiencing severe trauma was called "shell shock" in the olden days. Some cases were very serious and some of those people never recovered, spending their lives in what was called sanatoriums. Debriefing was not known in those days like nowadays. It is crucial that people who experience severe trauma, be debriefed by well trained trauma specialists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock
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