Content, Healing, and Integration
See also: Trauma, The Structure of Trauma, Trauma Smells, and Culture, Taboo, and Trauma.
I defined trauma earlier as something like "pathological changes in psychology as a result of adverse experiences." In this section I'll talk about broadly something to the effect of the ceasing of dysphoria and dysfunction, and centrally of the removal or resolution of their generators.
This of course already relies on some assumptions about a. the identification of some pattern as undesirable and usually pathological, and b. its etiology. I'll weave in and out of discussing the nuance with each of these.
Psychological content​
Most models here use some notion of generators (never by that name), namely usually of some disruption or intrusion which is regarded as causally upstream of some psychological changes. I'll refer to the generators involved in sustaining traumatic changes, at least in my own conception, as psychological content, and especially just content.
So, "content" here presumes a model, though thankfully it's wildly less laden than "trauma." The usual story goes something like this:
- Alice has a traumatic experience, eg. has an abusive relationship.
- She is disturbed in general for some time, and continues to feel fearful towards men indefinitely.
- She "processes" these experiences, this is stereotypically cathartic and emotive, especially including revisiting specific memories and feeling associated with her disturbance.
- (This also may include practicing embodying some new posture socially, etc.)
- Her previous disturbance has ended, and she is able to hold a more "mature" relationship to herself, male peers, and potential future partners.
In this kind of story, Alice's ongoing disturbance is due to some content which needs to be "processed," and that the disturbance ceases once that content is "worked through."
The phenomenology reported with this kind of story aligns nicely with this notion of content. In particular, these reports often describe that some feeling, or bolus of feeling-and-belief, was lurking underneath the surface level traumatic responses, which can eventually be relatively cleanly excised, resolving the entire traumatic pattern. (See more below re metabolism and releases.)
To be clear, reports of this kind of "underlying clump of content" often don't mean that a person is continuously in distress, or that there's continuously available loud sensations in that clump. Often some cluster of feeling might only be available when elicited or triggered, or might be available to introspection usually only as a blockage. In any case, in these reports and models, there is a generator which persists, agnostic of the specific phenomenology, or how sensationally active the somatic correlates of the generator are.
Note that often the surface level presentation of some psychological content might be fairly subtle, and that the metabolism of content, while often intensely emotive, can also be progressive and relatively gentle.
This is not the only kind of story one encounters being called "healing," and many stories about trauma and healing will take features a la carte from various models in the broader culture. I'll discuss various different models in use and in the discourse throughout this section. Note also that these sorts of "models" are much more like intuition pumps for practitioners (and often for eg. therapists) rather than nice predictive causal models in the sense we would use ordinarily in "science."
Metabolism​
Most of these models refer implicitly or explicitly to a notion of psychological or emotional metabolism, also commonly eg. "processing emotions."
Indeed, let's say, one has a varied palette of emotions or moods, and correlated clusters of perception and behavior. And, distinctly, emotions pass! Emotions and "psychological states" clearly have something to do with external circumstances, but also with our relationship to them. In any case, most often, emotions arise in response to some circumstance, and then decay or are replaced, variously organically, smoothly, abruptly or chaotically.
This sort of process is stereotypically glaring when observing children, who can be inconsolable one minute, and peaceful or excited literally the next minute. Adults still have this basic pattern of arising-and-decay, and it's very difficult to imagine what a person would be like if they were missing either half of that cycle.
Besides someone being aroused more readily or more intensely, some people often hold on to emotions for longer than others. As well, some emotions are more intense or sustained, and decay with greater difficulty.
Hence we have this basic notion of "metabolism," agnostic of the mechanisms or almost any of the phenomenology.
Many modern western theories of trauma and healing make claims along the lines that trauma is due to interruption in the natural process of emotional metabolism. The claim here often goes like: "when things are going well, disturbance, regardless of how intense, passes through the system with enough time. What distinguishes trauma is that for whatever reason this process fails or stops, and the disturbance forms a cyst of dysphoria which festers and inflames the rest of the body-mind."
Often in these sorts of models, emotional metabolism is believed to require some appropriate social-emotional context; stereotypically this is described from the perspective of a child, and so the corresponding "healthy" context is connection with a warm and compassionate caregiver.
(See also briefly re some empirical critiques of this sort of perspective.)
Also common here then are claims that this context can be reenacted (in some sense) with a therapist performing some narrow subset of role of a caregiver, or of a person being able to "reparent themselves," simulating this kind of social-energetic quality "internally." Similarly there are reports from eg. fairly traditional religious adherents of getting this quality1 from eg. worship of Mary2, or Guan Yin.
Releases and Openings​
"Purification"​
Misc phenomenology of "healing"​
Other kinds of theories​
"Positive" healing​
"Integration"​
Content in traditional systems​
Footnotes​
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See also from Jake Orthwein on Twitter:
My first experience of doing IPF directly gave rise to the intuition that attachment-related injuries are in fact basic injuries of existential meaning, experienced (in theistic terms) as alienation from god
(I had some similar experiences spontaneously working with the image of a Bodhisattva.) ↩ - ↩