Psychoanalysis is the base of all things in psychology. It was first elaborated by Sigmund Freud, one of psychology’s founding fathers, and it hinges on one specific aspect of the mind; what you can and can’t access in your memoryRef. He theorized that the human brain’s inner workings were comprised of three main parts.
Now, these thoughts don’t end up in the subconscious just like that. According to Freud’s theory, they are sent there as a defence mechanism of the brain because the distress they cause would be too grand to bear for the person, and so it represses them. Unfortunately, they can still manifest in various ways, often being the cause of trauma-related symptoms and behaviours. Such is the case of, for example, the Freudian slip. Let’s say that someone represses a desire to stab people, and whilst trying to say, “I’m going to grab you” (rather humorous, I know) they misspeak and instead say “stab.” In that moment, them saying the seemingly wrong word/phrase actually exposes a desire that lives deep within them, usually without their knowledge.
When applied to trauma, this theory dictates a few things:
Many ways have historically been used to help resurface a distressing memory by many a psychologist, including an in-depth analysis of the patient and their mannerisms and hypnosis. When it comes to our method, think of it as a sort of short, shallow self-induced hypnotic trance that’ll help align your id, ego and super ego in order to identify the source(s) of your distress. More on that later.
The humanistic approach, developed by the American psychologist Carl Rogers in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, places the patient, or in this context, you at the center of the healing process. Humanism is known to focus more on free will, self actualization (last stage of Maslow’s pyramid) and the belief that everyone has the power inside them to grow as a person, rather than relying on an already established technique and expert driven guidance. You are the one who wants to help yourself grow, not the psychologist. For trauma work, it helps you be more in control of your healing rather than relying on someone else to heal you.
What Roger believes isn’t that the therapist fixes directly the person. Instead the therapist listens to you and he tries to create a trusting relationship that makes it easier to explore your experience at your own pace rather than being rushed to a diagnosis. The trust between the two people becomes a key part to help you open up about what really happened and how you feel.
According to psychologist Stephen Joseph from the University of Warwick, Rogers’s theory is a credible and recommended way to work with trauma. The person centered approach can help explain how PTSD is felt and what are its symptoms, why every person has different symptoms and how being with someone that listens to you diminishes the state of distress and promotes your psychological growth.
The goal of this approach is to help you reach a state of well being by having better acceptance of yourself and inner peace in your body. Whenever you find that state of inner peace you go back to what Rogers calls a “fully functioning” person. When you’re back to being a “fully functioning” person you experience life more openly because you can now react with much better flexibility to events that displease you, you can be more authentic and you can show compassion to yourself for healing.
Trauma can disrupt the natural organization of your body. Rogers believed that people are organized and well-structured organisms. When trauma attacks, it disturbs the links between how we see ourselves and how we act in the world. The interpretation of the world is disrupted whenever trauma strikes. To protect ourselves, we often rely on some odd/negative feelings like denial, distortion and avoidance. These feelings separate us from reaching safely a new organized self.
Rogers and Joseph remind us that anxiety is an alarm whenever there is a threat to our body. If the original defence against the danger fails, the structure breaks down, which leads to disorganization and the appearance of PTSD symptoms. The humanistic point of view believes that trauma is a rupture in how the person interprets the event versus how it actually happened.
Rogers believed that there were “conditions of worth”Ref. These “conditions” are standards that we put on ourselves and that we believe must be done to be a person that is accepted or valued. These conditions are meant to shape a person not to dominate them. Whenever these conditions do dominate, people will deny or distort the experiences that they lived because it doesn’t match the interpretation of the event that the conditions made.
Trauma shakes these foundations. At any instance where those conditions aren’t met it makes the person feel fragile, unsafe or powerless, which then leads to incongruence. Incongruence in a person shifts the balance of what is real and what isn’t. The traumatized person rejects parts of the experience because their feelings don’t match what they think they should be feeling. Just so you know, it’s completely normal to feel a certain way and to feel fragile after a traumatic event.
These are the six conditions that someone needs to follow for personal growth:
These conditions help the client feel understood and valued whenever the therapist is there to help and make them approach what they feared for a long time.
Unlike other approaches that are way too strict or impose techniques to heal, the humanistic approach tries to accompany you through the whole process of healing without forcing exposure or telling you exactly what to do. The goal of this therapy is not to push you into becoming traumatized again because you are talking about your experiences, it’s actually to help you put words on what happened where you couldn’t before. As time goes, awareness will grow bringing you to feeling better about that event and having your body reorganized.
The humanistic approach not only restores psychological balance but it also encourages post traumatic growth. After accepting and feeling empathy from another person, you will start to develop deeper self consciousness and you will have a better understanding of your personal values.
This type of therapy views trauma as a disruptor. The event disrupts the link between personal meaning and self structure. By using dialogue, trust and emotional understanding, you will start to feel accepted and will open up about past experiences that haunt you. You then grow as an individual and feel better about what you experienced in the past.