About Trauma
Do you go through the day with intrusive, distressing thoughts or images?
Witnessing or coming close to death or suffering serious injury can result in intense emotional responses of fear, helplessness, or horror. It is difficult to recall memories of the event because the psyche protects your ego by splintering off the details of the event that are too threatening to integrate.
You may experience nightmares that may represent a repression of difficult thoughts or uncomfortable feelings. You may also experience a sense of detachment from others.
Survivors of trauma may repeat patterns of interpersonal conflict with others, especially intimate relationships.
Talking with a professional may help you to:
- Return to previous levels of functioning in relationships, daily routines, work, school, and other activities.
- Desensitize reactions to triggers.
- Integrate repressed thoughts, feelings and beliefs.
- Learn to develop and maintain a new sense of safety.
- Understand what your dreams and nightmares mean, and how this may help you in your life.
- Improve interpersonal relations.
- Develop the ability to recall the event without becoming overwhelmed with negative emotions, or losing clarity of thought.
- Learn new coping skills that promote acceptance of past events.
Complexes may get activated after you experience trauma in your life. Carl Jung identified a complex as - a feeling toned autonomous content of the personal unconscious, usually formed through psychic injury or trauma.
If your complex gets activated (triggered), you become threatened with a loss of control over your emotions, and sometimes this affects your behavior. Have you ever reacted irrationally and regretted later? Complexes are to humans what instincts are to animals.
Therapeutic intervention can help you recognize the destructive, repetitive patterns that manifest themselves, as a result of your reaction to the activation of a complex.
Take a proactive position in your life and call today.
Marie Kerns, Psy.D, MFT
Phone (949) 285-5199
