TRAUMA. What I Understand It To Be. In The Words of Donald Kalsched, PhD
There’s good news/bad news about the word ‘trauma’- in its (over) frequent usage, (in) appropriate usage, over simplified, and without differential diagnosis usage in today's world.
Hello,
It’s Sunita here.
Here is what I have found to be the description of what I understand trauma to be.
(My understanding has developed through my personal lived experience. And over a decade of intensely studying my trauma experience through the lens of my unconscious/poetry, trauma literature, observation of human nature in my role as a doctor, parent and human, reading other individuals account of their trauma, and ultimately connecting dots across multiple disciplines by tapping into my innate ability for lateral thinking)
Donald Kalsched, a leading expert in the field of trauma states in his Introduction to his book, ‘The Inner World of Trauma,’
“… I will be using the word “trauma” to mean any experience that causes the child unbearable psychic pain or anxiety. For an experience to be “unbearable” means that it overwhelms the usual defensive measures against which Freud (1920 b:27- Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition XVIII) described as a “protective shield against stimuli.”
Trauma of this magnitude varies from the acute, shattering experiences of child abuse so prominent in the literature today to the more “cumulative traumas” of unmet dependency-needs that mount up to devastating effect in some children’s development (Khan, 1963 - The Concept of Cumulative Trauma in The Privacy of The Self), including the more acute deprivations of infancy described by Winnicott as “primitive agonies”, the experience of which is “unthinkable” (1963: 90 “Fear of Breakdown in C. Winnicott, R. Shepard, and M. Davis Psychoanalytic Explorations).
The distinguishing feature of such trauma is what Heinz Kohut (1977: 104 ‘The Restoration of Self’) called “disintegration anxiety”, an unnameable dread associated with the threatened dissolution of a coherent self.
To experience such anxiety threatens the total ambulating of the human personality, the destruction of the personal spirit. This must be avoided at all costs and so, because such trauma often occurs in early infancy before a coherent ego (and it’s defenses) is formed, a second line of defenses come into play to prevent the “unthinkable” from being experienced.”
I invite you to share your own ideas and thoughts here of what you feel trauma is.
Let’s open up the discussion.
After all, this blog is about the journey from trauma to transcendence, which is a personal and unique journey for us, so it’s natural to have different conceptualizations of trauma that we resonate with.
Until next time,
Moving forwards,
Sunita