5 tips to overcome a traumatic situation
When natural disasters are the protagonists of the news and the fires, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes ... affect large numbers of people and touch us closely, tragedy enters our lives. Entire families are affected and this has serious psychological and emotional consequences. How to overcome these traumatic situations?
Traumatized people feel that the wound or wounds of the past cause them pain in the present and they are clouded by the construction of a future. Faced with a traumatic situation, we can not place the situation cognitively in any way, because they are often unpredictable, absurd, meaningless situations that can not be addressed. As a consequence, it disarms us and gives us a sense of vulnerability. This is what happens inside us when we live a trauma, because we can not give it a meaning.
Symptoms of post-traumatic stress
The re-experimentation of trauma, the main symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is mainly identified by the following symptoms, signs and thoughts: recurring memories, nightmares, flashback, but also manifests when the person is unable to face stimuli or memories that are associated with him and a strong feeling of anguish, sweat, palpitations, dizziness ...
Other symptoms are:
- Temporary amnesia. When some important part of the event has been forgotten.
- Hopelessness When you can not look at the future with optimism.
- Avoidance The person struggles to avoid thoughts, places, people ... that can remind him of a certain situation or fact, this avoidance is so strong that even the person is unable to explain it when asked.
- Affective life is restricted and lack of interest invades every moment of the day.
- Sensation of condemnation. The person has the feeling of being condemned forever by the situation suffered.
When should you go to a psychologist?
The acute phase of a traumatic situation can last up to about three months and is characterized by these reactions: difficulty sleeping, recurrent traumatic image, difficulty concentrating, sweating and irritability. Where also, avoid visiting places or see people who remember what they lived. After that time, if it has not been possible to develop the situation in an adaptive way, we will find a true post-traumatic stress disorder. For this reason, the recommendation to go to a psychologist is very linked to time.
We can say that our brain has a natural capacity to elaborate information in an adaptive way, what happens is that in these situations that natural capacity is blocked, even by the hormonal secretions that occur in that moment of strong stress, and as a consequence of all this generates a negative emotion that is accompanied by a negative belief towards oneself of the type "I can not" "do not take care of myself", "I am weak" "I am not worth anything" "I will never get it".
The goal of therapy is to produce this unblocking, so that emotions begin to flow and all that emotional charge of anger, pain, discomfort, sadness, begins to desensitize and thus reduce negative emotion, allowing to eliminate that negative belief about one same that the situation has produced and transform it later into a positive and adaptive belief.
5 steps to overcome a traumatic situation
The past can not be changed, but what we can do is change the perception of it. Change our way of seeing what happened and see it in a more distant way, where this strong discomfort no longer occurs, it is recognized that it has been a painful experience, but in a more constructive way, especially for oneself. In short, as Professor Giorgio Nardone says: "the only way to get rid of a pain is to have the courage to go through the middle".
1. Talk: When we are immersed in that state we need someone from outside to accompany us, help us and listen to us.
2. Try to forget voluntarily what happened What it does is make the situation worse, the more we strive to forget something, the more we remember it, "who describes his own pain, even though he cries, is about to console himself".
3. Awareness of the responsibility of things. There are things that do not depend on us that some change and others do not.
4. Work the will to return to normal.
5. Learn to manage doubts and negative thoughts well that come to us in a natural way: "if I had done this or that *", "If I did not *", "If I could have foreseen it *".
Jorge López Vallejo. Psychologist. López Vallejo Psychology