![]() I believe that very often the trauma is a prolonged process in which one experience follows another and where, really, you eventually have a summation, and more than a summation, a piling up of experiences – sometimes in a way which I think is not too different from war neurosis, where there comes a breaking point when the patient gets sick” (Fromm, The Art Of Listening Kindle Version, page 25 of 195). “I am aware of the fact that when Freud talks of trauma he means something different from what I would mean: he would look for a trauma essentially of a sexual nature he would look for the trauma happening in an earlier age. We were recently reading a great lecture Erich Fromm gave where he spoke to what we’re talking about here. Just as the rock eventually changes form due to all those feet walking over it, the personality structure eventually changes due to to all those tiny traumas, leading to a cumulative result we could call neurosis. It’s the cumulative effect that counts.įrom the psychoanalytic point of view insidious trauma has profound ramifications for the mental health of the individual. But each individual pair of feet makes no visible impact. Over the years these boulders erode until they’ve changed from their original form. Insidious trauma is like millions of feet walking over boulders on a footpath. Insidious trauma, which isn’t listed in the DSM-V but is something we believe to be just as real, is different from the typical definition of trauma in that it’s a collection of tiny, barely noticeable traumatic happenings that build up over time. They might try to ignore, rationalize or deny their symptoms , they might try to convince themselves and others they’re just fine when really they’re not, but there isn’t much room for denying that the event occurred. People might choose to deal with the experience in myriad ways, some ways that could be considered healthy and other ways not so healthy. It’s like an earthquake, or a punch to the face. There isn’t much mystery around this definition of trauma. Actual or threatened death must have occurred in a violent or accidental manner and experiencing cannot include exposure through electronic media, television, movies or pictures, unless it is work-related. Here’s the way the DSM-V defines trauma: Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence in one or more of four ways: (a) directly experiencing the event (b) witnessing, in person, the event occurring to others (c) learning that such an event happened to a close family member or friend and (d) experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of such events, such as with first responders.
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