Whether you are close to a dissociated person who has experienced trauma or a professional who will hear their word, here are some important points that can help you and help us:
Don't be too expansive:
When we first tell you about our traumas, don't be too expansive. We have learned to separate our feelings so as not to suffer, not to feel. If you cry too much, if you get overly angry, it will scare us and shut us up.
On the one hand, because we have integrated the fact that people in general flee from suffering and unhappiness. We regularly hear "move on, it's the past", society asks us to always be in a good mood, happy ... Depressed people are rejected and scare, depression is a "taboo subject" ... So we know that your sadness will not help us and that if you feel too much you will end up running away from us because it will become unbearable for you to feel. I lived it with several friends who expressed a lot of sadness at my story and then disappeared.
On the other hand, anger is something that scares us because it is a feeling that can lead to loss of control and we are afraid that you will take yourself for a vigilante or that you are so angry that you want to force us. to complain or to say what we have been through to others without understanding the complexity of what we are going through internally with our parts and the reality of the traumatic amnesia we are experiencing. And you risk becoming a danger to us. Some of my friends reacted like this, exploding with anger and not understanding my backup reactions and then blaming me for my experience by telling me that "I liked to take pleasure in misfortune" and that in fact "I was responsible for it. "then left, slamming the door. It was extremely violent for me!
At first when we tell our voice is monotonous, we show little or no emotions. This is normal, it is a normal physiological protective reaction. It's like we're the robotic narrator of a horror story without being the main character. We do not really recognize ourselves in what we have been through, and the reality seems very strange to us, our body is like frozen and we do not feel anything. These are symptoms of dissociation: depersonalization (experiences of unreality or detachments from one's mind, self or body) and derealization (experiences or detachment from the outside world). Reconnecting our feelings and emotions to our memories would come back to reliving everything as if it was happening again and it would be like dying again for us. The very definition of trauma according to Doctor Muriel Salmona is a threat to physical integrity (a confrontation with death) and a threat to psychological integrity (because the situation is abnormal, unfair, degrading, humiliating and incomprehensible) . There is a vital cardiovascular and neurological risk for us! Detaching ourselves in this way from our feelings is therefore a normal and instinctive survival reaction to an abnormal situation.
Don't criticize our laughter or our jokes when we tell you about the horrible things we've been through. It is our means of defense, of survival. This reaction is normal. At first, that was how I told my story. It allowed me to "test" my surroundings. If I laugh or joke about the horrible things I have experienced, and the person opposite laughs and jokes too, it lets me know that they are not really listening to my words, that they are not observing not my body language and therefore that this is not a person I can rely on, that they will not be able to understand my dissociation and what I had to put in place to survive. When I said this with a laugh, usually my hands would put on my neck and squeeze it as if they were strangling me. It was not something I had control over. But the person in front could have, should have seen it ... None of my friends saw it. Many laughed and acted as if nothing had been said. It brought a lot of despair in me, the impression of being invisible, transparent ...
No doubt that people expressing their emotions strongly thought they were doing well and being benevolent in doing so. Perhaps they thought this would help me reconnect my emotions to what I had experienced atrociously. But it was extremely painful for me and made me suffer. They were like a mirror that sent to my face all the much too strong and painful emotions that I was not yet ready to face. It was torture for me! It was like being thrown into a pot of boiling water or lava. This is how I feel about it, my whole body, my skin, my heart, my whole being was on fire and I only wanted to escape.
I believe the question is to tune in to the person you are listening to: if your own intensity is too different (much higher or much lower) than ours, we will not feel heard, understood, and it can be. violent for us.
In terms of emotional register:
If we are laughing while saying something horrible, it is important not to laugh as loudly as we are, but neither should you show an emotion that is too far removed from what might feel brutal. So in the face of laughter, you might for example just have a benevolent smile and then gently say something like: "Is it difficult for you to talk about it?" or "Does it sound like it's hard to feel your emotions related to this?".
If the person in front is talking like a robot with no emotions, you can just look at us kindly and tenderly and say, "This must have been very scary and very painful for you?" "Does it seem difficult for you to think about it again and to feel the emotions associated with it again?" You can also say out loud what you see: "While telling what you lived, I see that your hands are posed on your neck and tighten it tightly, are you afraid of putting yourself in danger by telling me what you? Have you lived? Are you trying to shut up? You are safe, I will not do anything without your permission, I am here and I listen to you. " Or "I see your body shakes a lot when you talk to me, you are safe with me, I will not hurt you, I am here and I listen to you."
In both cases, you get closer to the intensity and register of the person speaking to you, which will gradually allow them to find an intensity and a register more accurate in relation to what they experienced.
Reconnecting our emotions and feelings to what we have been through is the most difficult and painful task in our healing. This is what will allow us to integrate our experience into our autobiographical memory. You have to find the right approach to take with us because, on the one hand, seeing them is akin to plunging into a burning fire that terrorizes us, and on the other, seeing emotions in a mirror allows us to understand that it is must be similar emotions inside us and accept to become aware of it little by little. By naming the dissonances in what we say or show, you help us to be curious and to seek to understand and accept what our dissociated parts carry, to make the connection between our story and our emotional feelings ...
Give us time to decide when we are ready to face it and help us reconnect with our emotions little by little by giving ourselves the time that is necessary for us to do so.
To do this, observe us and say out loud what you see with gentleness and kindness:
What you see (our gestures, our body language ... nervousness, hand movements, body posture ...),
What you hear (the words used, I said a lot that my rapist "took me in confession in his room" if someone had asked me about the strangeness of this word that would have helped me ... or I punctuated my speech of sighs or howls that escaped me ...)
The emotions that you feel or the absence of emotions that you feel (Note internally the discrepancies that there can be between what we say and what we show in terms of emotions. The colder and more distant we are, the more is a sign that what we went through was horrible and destructive.)
Do not speak of our suffering in exaggerated terms.
Instead, focus on the exact words at the beginning to describe what we have experienced.
We are not aware that what has been done to us is mistreatment, torture, rape. Put the right words on our experience. This is what we need the most.
Understand and analyze our trauma, put things right, name them in order to be able to integrate them. And give us time to become aware of the emotions we have experienced at our own pace. Let us express them when we are ready to welcome them as part of our experience.
Commenti