When we talk about emotional trauma , the image that can come to mind is usually something catastrophic. However, trauma is much more than that, since we are exposed to micro-traumas from birth.

What is emotional trauma?

Our organism considers a traumatic situation at an emotional level any event for which we are not prepared and which generates a strong burden of emotional pain .

Since we do not have the necessary tools for our system to store it in memory in a healthy and adaptive way, what our brain does with this painful information is to encapsulate it in order to continue functioning in the healthiest way possible for the person. But it is precisely the fact of blocking it that makes it become a trauma.

Its psychological consequences

Unresolved emotional trauma may be associated with the development of mental disorders that lead the person to organize his or her own perception of reality and lifestyle around the problem.

Among the usual consequences that begin to affect our lives are the following.

1. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Known as the pathology of trauma, it occurs in situations where the situation is relived in the form of intrusive memories in the memories. When the associated emotional impact is very high, the person can reach the point of disconnecting that information from their head, giving rise to dissociative disorders, which in a certain way becomes the person’s only resource to be able to continue living with that trauma .

2. Anxiety and panic attacks

Associated with the emotion of fear, it places us at a constant point of activation when various emotional memories connect with some aspect of our life .

3. Depression

If after the trauma the person begins to feel emotions of guilt, helplessness and disappointment , a depressive picture may develop.

How do you get over it?

Processing emotional trauma is necessary, as it is the only way in which information, stored in a pathological way, can be reconfigured by changing the psychological impact it causes.

To carry out this re-processing of information there are various cutting-edge techniques, which help more quickly to establish new emotional memories "corrective" regarding this painful information. In this new processing of painful information is the stage where the change is made between living with the acceptance of the past and struggling with the past to live.

What happens if the trauma occurs in childhood?

Given that childhood is the time when we start to build up our "Yo", and that our brain develops 80% in the first two years of life, a child whose parents are not able to recognize their basic emotional needs may develop an attachment problem that he or she will carry into adulthood. This is why safe attachment in childhood is spoken of as a protective factor for mental health in adulthood.

Making amends for a trauma often leads us to work on some aspects of childhood that may be forgotten or even neglected for years, but which have nevertheless served to organize our system in a certain way around this information.

Paradoxically, it is sometimes believed that a trauma such as an accident, an earthquake or a flood, is difficult to overcome. But, contrary to this belief, we psychologists know that the traumas that we call complexes are those that come from breaks in attachment , with such a simple basis in trust with the other, that in childhood it is translated by this capacity of the caregiver to look at us, to attend to us, to give us security and, above all, to give us love.

Author: Ana Carcedo Bao, Psychologist