“On April 27, a third-year middle school student in Mizhi County, Shaanxi Province, was attacked on the way home from school, resulting in 19 students injured and 9 students dead. Medical experts, doctors, and nurses at all levels actively participated in emergency rescue efforts, racing against time and sparing no effort to save students’ lives.”
This news shocked the whole country.
In the 19 families, how many people, eyewitnesses at the scene, students, teachers, and how many people will be affected and harmed by this disaster, whether long or short, big or small?
“People grow up in trauma.” Some people come out, while others are trapped in trauma and unable to get out.
01
What is psychological trauma?
Psychological trauma is usually defined as an event that exceeds the ordinary person’s experience. Trauma often makes people feel powerless, helpless, and paralyzed. Trauma occurs suddenly and is irresistible.
When we talk about psychological trauma, we think of wars, floods, earthquakes, fires, and plane crashes. In fact, psychological trauma goes far beyond these powerful events and may also include long-term experiences in our daily lives such as traffic accidents, neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, or violence… It will promote the formation of psychological trauma, especially impulsive psychology in modern times, which is more likely to cause psychological trauma.
02
What are the manifestations of psychological trauma?
What are people’s psychological reactions to unexpected crises?
They will face suffocating anxiety and primal fear deep inside and in the real world. Confidence in the predictability of the outside world and the protective function of objects is lost.
Crises disrupt people’s inner peace, especially those involved in the event, observers, or those who have lost loved ones and friends in the event, who may have the following psychological reactions to varying degrees:
1. Fear, terror
2. Helplessness
3. Sadness
4. Resentment towards oneself
5. Anger
6. Constantly being in memories
7. Fantasizing
03
Healing from psychological trauma
1. Recognize past scars
First, we should learn to stop blaming others and thinking that others are harmful to us. The first step in psychotherapy is self-reflection, understanding what happened during your growth process and looking at it from your current perspective.
From a psychological perspective, emotional overreactions that make people especially angry or hurt are often related to the original family when they were very young.
People should learn to look at past events from a present, more mature, and more objective perspective. If your father was once very cruel to you, try to look at it from a new angle, you may know that your original father was also forced, or he just inadvertently said something that hurt you so deeply and truly. It’s hard to get rid of it unless you can explore it again. Even if your father intentionally hurt you, psychological exploration and therapy can reduce the harm, help you accept others’ shortcomings, learn to put yourself in a position to see why your father did what he did, and then forgive him. Children can’t stand it either, and sometimes cause serious harm when they encounter something, but if we trace it back to an adult situation, the wound won’t be so deep, which is why it’s important to reexamine the psychological process.
2. The second step. Writing emotional diaries can help you understand yourself better.
Through emotional diaries and lifeline analysis, we can read more books, listen to more interpersonal and psychological speeches, or understand our emotions and psychological interactions with others. Try to write an “emotional diary” and carefully consider what things in life will cause you to overreact. Recording these things is very helpful for your growth and psychological recovery.
If we don’t have the courage to face past painful experiences, blindly suppress our hurt emotions, we will become slaves to these emotions and be controlled by them. Strong suppression and denial of these emotions often erupt with greater intensity at unexpected times and occasions. So we often go to the province, learn to understand emotions, and manage emotions well. When we are in an emotional crisis state, it is the best opportunity for us to relearn. This process of direct reflection can help us understand the various subconscious psychological operations. So don’t give up easily, on the contrary, we should take this opportunity to make a point to record, through emotional diaries, which can help us observe and think.
3. Revisiting the past using the lifeline
Tracing back to the sad or happy events in memory and the past family history, you can do lifeline analysis or psychological history analysis as follows. Draw a horizontal line on paper. Write zero on the left and your current age on the right. Record happy and constructive things in life. Write down the history of hurt below.
4. Find a safe person to keep secrets
We cannot be a completely different person, but we can be deeper and more complete ourselves.
This means that we have already suffered losses completely. In the process of losing experience, we have various emotional experiences. This is what we call a richer, more subtle, more experienced person.
