Discharging traumatic stress is key to resolving intra-personal and inter-personal issues that are highly emotional. Too often individuals get triggered and release inappropriate and unprovoked powerful emotional charges. At first they are surprised and embarrassed, and over time they may become defensive, claiming that it is not their fault, even projecting the fault onto others.
During a state of overwhelm the body automatically readies to defend against a threat in a fight/flight/or freeze mode. When a person experiences overwhelm without adequately discharging this intense survival energy of the defense response, it remains immobilized in the physical body. This is commonly called post-traumatic stress. All unresolved stress accumulates and is easily activated.
Whether these eruptions occur in the family home, at the work site, or in traffic, unresolved traumatic stress is an expensive and costly endangerment to oneself, others, and the community at large.
A past unresolved traumatic episode could be a singular life-threatening event or a culmination of events over time. Most of us have had both types of threats in our lives. Some of us have had narrow escapes from death itself. Others remain consciously unaware that the body may have been severely threatened, such as in surgery. During a medical surgery one part of your brain (known as the reptilian brain) will likely experience a perceived threat. Even a general anesthesia, for instance ether, could be perceived as a poison and the scalpel as an attack upon the body. Though consciously you trust the surgeon and believe that the surgery was successful, you may experience some of the common symptoms for post-traumatic stress days, weeks, months or years later.
For some of us, the thought of going to a doctor or a dentist causes negative physiological sensations in our body whether it be teeth, spine, brain, neck, legs, knees or whatever. This can be an indication of the accumulation of post traumatic stress which when triggered can unlock and express these unresolved activations.
Everyone is unique, and situations are different. However, the healing professions are more aware today than they were 30 years ago about traumatic stress.
Suppressed, compressed, and depressed survival energy needs to be expressed appropriately in a safe and secure environment with professionals trained in healing traumatic stress.
For further Management Techniques in de-activating post-traumatic stress, see the following links:
Partial Listening and Total Listening
Instructions for and Explaining the Processing Experiencing Log
Also see Exercise: Processing Experiencing Log Handout
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