I forgot also, they said of course at best someone can accompany or support, but it's up to us. And that trauma has a ripple effect of negative consequences on others. They also stressed, it's the fact (now) that it can be severely impacting or limiting the present.
Far as naming goes, I think of the saying the mind is a meaning-making machine. I remember a woman who finally could accept she couldn't prevent her child's death (on her lap) with a vehicular collision simulator (she went in it). Another psychologist (wish I could find it again) from Ireland helped a Vet go back to a road and he saw for his own eyes what he had been telling himself he failed to do (and ended in his friend's death) would have been impossible, so he could rewrite the story he had been telling himself for years with additional facts he could believe in his heart.
That saying of what is simplest is most difficult to grasp resonates with me. Perhaps the difficulty of just stating a simple fact without self-blame as the explanation why it occurred, or minimizing it entirely, is just a way to avoid? (It is for me). Yet equally, I can never know someone's motivation. I don't have to though to acknowledge something was harmful. I mean, by her definition a car accident was evil/ not good; so would be a tornado or natural disaster . Still potentially horrific and terrifying and kills people, yet not even personal. Yet despite the differences between traumas they can hare some similar responses. But, for example, I remember this couple they studied who both got ptsd from a 100+ car pile up in fog, that her symptoms were different than his (bodies ejected and thrown were bouncing off their windshield and no one could get out of the line up/ rear-ender, and no one could see the highway warnings because of the fog and so kept coming and hitting the next vehicle). Not necessarily due they thought to gender, but because she was the passenger and he was the driver. So they presupposed not only their roles (as a man he was less likely to express himself, not that some women don't do the same), but because he was responsible for driving. On her part she said she felt really helpless as on top of it all she wasn't the driver and could only helplessly watch (she ended up suicidal). He felt responsible for not being able to get them out of it and had tremendous guilt and rage.
Far as naming goes, I think of the saying the mind is a meaning-making machine. I remember a woman who finally could accept she couldn't prevent her child's death (on her lap) with a vehicular collision simulator (she went in it). Another psychologist (wish I could find it again) from Ireland helped a Vet go back to a road and he saw for his own eyes what he had been telling himself he failed to do (and ended in his friend's death) would have been impossible, so he could rewrite the story he had been telling himself for years with additional facts he could believe in his heart.
That saying of what is simplest is most difficult to grasp resonates with me. Perhaps the difficulty of just stating a simple fact without self-blame as the explanation why it occurred, or minimizing it entirely, is just a way to avoid? (It is for me). Yet equally, I can never know someone's motivation. I don't have to though to acknowledge something was harmful. I mean, by her definition a car accident was evil/ not good; so would be a tornado or natural disaster . Still potentially horrific and terrifying and kills people, yet not even personal. Yet despite the differences between traumas they can hare some similar responses. But, for example, I remember this couple they studied who both got ptsd from a 100+ car pile up in fog, that her symptoms were different than his (bodies ejected and thrown were bouncing off their windshield and no one could get out of the line up/ rear-ender, and no one could see the highway warnings because of the fog and so kept coming and hitting the next vehicle). Not necessarily due they thought to gender, but because she was the passenger and he was the driver. So they presupposed not only their roles (as a man he was less likely to express himself, not that some women don't do the same), but because he was responsible for driving. On her part she said she felt really helpless as on top of it all she wasn't the driver and could only helplessly watch (she ended up suicidal). He felt responsible for not being able to get them out of it and had tremendous guilt and rage.
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