What are the symptoms of repressed trauma according to psychoanalysis
When ghosts from the past condition our lives, psychotherapy helps to deal with them. Here are the symptoms of repressed trauma and how to deal with them.
During psychotherapy, one comes to terms with one's history and this can be frightening. Working on oneself, however, is the best way to exorcise one's ghosts and overcome the symptoms of repressed trauma.
Before the birth of psychoanalysis, more than a hundred years ago, certain behaviours and psychological states were considered merely signs of pure madness. Those who manifested psychological distress in those days were often excluded from society. A few years later, between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud's studies and clinical experience revealed a hidden and forgotten world, that of the unconscious. Thanks to Freud's discoveries, fainting spells, memory loss and 'obsessive neuroses' were no longer just bizarre behaviour, but finally took on a new meaning: that of symptoms of repressed childhood trauma.
Today, after more than a century of research, we know that childhood trauma can be repressed and forgotten, causing various symptoms in adult life that damage psychophysical well-being.
In this article we look at how and why we forget childhood and adolescent traumas and how we can overcome them to return to life.
Removed traumas are like ghosts
To understand how the symptoms of repressed childhood trauma affect a person's well-being, it may be helpful to read this quote from psychoanalyst Hans Loewald:
"Those who know ghosts say that they yearn to be released from their life as ghosts and brought to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they continue to live in the present generation, while as ghosts they are forced to haunt it with their life of shadows. [...] In the light of the day of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious find rest and are led back to the peace of the ancestors and their power is transformed into a renewed intensity of life in the present. In the neurotic, the past is improperly buried."
Put simply, Loewald argues that - when excluded from consciousness - painful and removed memories can affect a person's life in a negative way. This is why it is necessary to analyse such memories, and then finally 'bury' them, i.e. overcome them once and for all.
In psychic life, ghosts are our unresolved issues. As long as we shy away from them, they will continue to make us suffer. If we face them, on the other hand, we can bury them.
Repetition coercion: the main symptom of repressed trauma
The main symptom of repressed trauma is 'repetition compulsion', an
involuntary tendency to reproduce maladaptive behaviour, relational situations and patterns.
We repeat dysfunctional patterns of behaviour because of repression.
Repression l is a defensive mechanism that protects us from remembering painful aspects of our lives.
The psychoanalytic process consists, according to Freud, in the step of repeating-remembering-reprocessing. That is, in order to heal and be free of our ghosts, we must be able to overcome repression, recover painful memories and make sense of the past. Only then will we finally be able to renounce the self-destructive mechanisms that limit our lives.
An interesting fact is that even the most recent cognitive-behavioural theories have confirmed Freud's initial intuition. Fear-related brain circuits force us to repeat dysfunctional patterns, because these, however painful, are still familiar and therefore preferable to the unknown.
What does Sheldon Cooper have to do with repressed trauma?
Psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden argues that people who come to psychotherapy sometimes have the feeling that they 'died' during childhood or adolescence, or at a later stage of life. The patient hopes that the therapist will help him to reclaim their unlived life.
The origin of 'psychic death' lies in frightening events (trauma, bereavement, abandonment, violence), in the face of which the person has absented himself from his life, with the aim of protecting himself from a breakdown. In an attempt to defend itself against pain, in other words, the brain creates a psychic state that excludes intolerable emotions.
The problem is that the pain avoided at that moment does not disappear forever. but continually seeks a way to be experienced and reprocessed. According to the principle of the Zeigarnik Effect, we tend to complete tasks left undone.
When faced with removed/repressed material, our unconscious functions a bit like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory when faced with incomplete configurations, and feels the desperate need to complete them.
The same happens with repressed trauma.
While on the one hand we try to forget, on the other hand we tend to resolve an open conflict that has remained unresolved.
Hence the internal conflicts that generate anxiety, depression and various other symptoms of repressed trauma, which can vary greatly depending on the person.
Fear of collapse: symptoms of repressed trauma
In one of his last writings, the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott spoke of the 'fear of collapse'. According to Winnicott, when a person feels distressed, he or she is probably coming into contact with a series of 'primitive agonies', i.e. intense fears typical of the first years of life:
return to a non-integrated state of the self;
falling forever;
loss of settlement of the mind in the body (depersonalisation);
loss of the sense of reality (derealisation);
cancellation of the ability to enter into relationships (autistic state).
These fears first occur at a time when the individual is in a state of absolute dependence on caregivers (i.e. caregivers) who do not respond adequately to his or her needs. In order to survive the distress, the child 'short-circuits' the experience of the distress because it would be intolerable for him. The event is then experienced but not processed. As an adult, the individual will continue to fear a breakdown that has already happened but has not yet been experienced. Here is what Winnicott says about this:
There comes a time, in my experience, when the patient must be told that the collapse he continues to fear and which destroys his life has already happened: it is a fact that has been kept hidden in the unconscious.
In other words, something terrifying happened at some point in our lives, but at that moment we could not afford to process the associated emotions. These were too intense and would have led us to a breakdown. So, when faced with anguish, we defended ourselves by eliminating the fear, but it somehow remained within us, engraved in our bodies. As adults, we continue to be afraid that these anxieties will visit us again and 'present us with the bill'. This is what happens in panic attacks, for example, where we are afraid of going mad or dying and sometimes we do not understand why.
Here, then, is the point of psychotherapy: ghosts return to settle unresolved issues and have a proper burial.
The effect of repressed trauma on relationships
If we ignore our unresolved issues for a long time, we live in a state of semi-freedom. In fact, sometimes the mechanism of removal can be so powerful that we even forget that we have unresolved issues. The point is that the removed material has an effect on us, even if we hide it.
Let us take the example of a child growing up with neglectful or abusive parents. A neglected, abused or abandoned child has two options:
convince herself that she has bad qualities that make her worthy of neglect and abuse and 'save' a good image of her parents;
accept the reality that her parents are abusive, cold and disinterested. This generates terrible anguish.
As an adult, this child is likely to seek out relationships in which they are abused and neglected, so that they can relive the original drama and understand it better. Alternatively, she will become abusive and neglectful in order to regain a sense of control. Either way, they will experience relationships with discomfort without understanding why they has to suffer in this way.
In such cases, psychotherapy becomes necessary to become free again. And since internalised scripts are often calcified by time, it usually takes time for change to happen.
Recommended treatments for trauma are EMDR - in severe cases - or psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.