Alfrid Langle: Preserving Human Dignity in Suffering

Open lecture of the famous Austrian psychologist Alfrid Langle "Mental trauma". To preserve human dignity in suffering.” Trauma - as it happens Our topic today is trauma. This is a very painful part of human reality. We can experience love, joy, pleasure, but also depression, addiction. And also pain. And that's exactly what I'm going to talk about.

Let's start with everyday reality. Trauma is a Greek word meaning injury. They happen every day. When an injury occurs, we become numb and everything is called into question – relationships in which we were not taken seriously, bullying at work or as a child, when we preferred a brother or sister. Someone has a tense relationship with their parents, and they are left without inheritance. And then there's domestic violence. The worst form of trauma is war.

The source of trauma can be not only people, but fate – earthquakes, catastrophes, fatal diagnoses. All this information is traumatic, it horrifies and shocks us. In the most severe cases, our beliefs about how life works can be shaken. And we say, "I didn't imagine my life like this."

So trauma confronts us with the basics of existence. Any injury is a tragedy. We experience limited resources and feel vulnerable. The question is how to survive and remain human. How can we remain ourselves, maintain a sense of ourselves and relationships?

Mechanisms of trauma We've all suffered physical injuries, cutting ourselves or breaking our leg. But what is damage? It is the violent destruction of the whole. From a phenomenological point of view, when I cut bread and cut myself, what happens to me is what happens to bread. But bread doesn't cry, and I do.

The knife violates my boundaries, the boundaries of my skin. The knife breaks the integrity of the skin because it is not strong enough to withstand it. That's the nature of any injury. Any force that breaks the boundaries of integrity is called violence.

Objectively, violence is not necessarily present. If I'm weak or depressed, I'll feel injured, even if I haven't had much effort.

Consequences of injury - loss of functionality: for example, with a broken leg can not be. And then you lose something of your own. For example, my blood spreads across the table, although nature does not provide for it. And then there's pain.

It comes to the forefront of consciousness, covers the whole world, we lose our ability to work. The pain itself is just a signal.

The pain is different, but it all causes a sense of victimhood. The victim feels naked, which is the basis of existential analysis. When I am in pain, I feel naked in front of the world.

The pain says, "Do something about it, it's paramount." Take the position, find the cause, eliminate the pain.” If we do, we have a chance to avoid more pain.

Psychological trauma is the same mechanism. elsa At the psychological level, something similar to the physical level happens: invading borders, losing one’s own and losing functionality.

I had a patient. Her injury came from rejection.

Elsa was forty-six and had been suffering from depression since she was in her twenties, especially in the last two years. A separate test for her was the holidays - Christmas or birthdays. She couldn't even move and passed the housework on to others.

Her basic feeling was, "I'm worth nothing." She tormented the family with her doubts and suspicions, annoyed the children with her questions.

We found anxiety that she wasn't aware of, as well as the association of anxiety with basic feelings, and we asked, "Am I valuable enough for my children?" Then we came up with the question, "When they don't answer me where they're going in the evening, I don't feel loved enough."

Then she wanted to scream and cry, but she stopped crying long ago – tears were acting on her husband’s nerves. She felt that she had no right to shout and complain, because she thought it was not important to everyone else, and therefore not important to her.

We began to look for where this sense of lack of value came from, and we found that there was a custom in her family to take away her possessions without asking. Once, as a child, she was taken from her favorite purse and given to her cousin to look better in a family photo. This is a small thing, but it is firmly deposited in the mind of the child, if similar things are repeated. In Elsa's life, rejection was repeated all the time.

Her mother always compared her to her brother, and her brother was better. Her honesty was punished. She had to fight for her husband and then work hard. The whole village was gossiping about her.

The only one who loved her, protected her and was proud of her was her father. It saved her from a more serious personality disorder, but from all the significant people she heard only criticism. She was told she had no rights, that she was worse, that she was worthless.

When she talked about it, she felt sick again. Now it wasn't just a spasm in the throat, a pain that had spread to the shoulders.

“At first, I was furious about the relatives’ comments,” she said, “but then my son-in-law kicked me out.” He told my family that I slept with his brother. My mother called me a prostitute and kicked me out. Even my future husband did not stand up for me, who then had affairs with other women.”

She was only able to cry about it in therapy. But at the same time, she could not remain alone - in solitude, her thoughts began to torment her especially strongly.

Awareness of the pain caused by others, her feelings and anguish, eventually led to the fact that during a year of therapy, Elsa was able to cope with depression.

Thank God the depression eventually became so bad that she couldn’t ignore it.

Mental trauma. What's going on? Schema. Pain is a signal that makes us look at the problem. But the basic question that comes to the victim is, "What am I really worth when I'm treated like this?" Why me? What's that for?

Unexpected trauma doesn't fit our picture of reality. Our values are eroded, and every damage puts the future in question. Every injury feels like there is too much going on. Underneath this wave is our ego.

Existential psychology considers man in four dimensions – in his connection with the world, life, self and the future. With a serious injury, as a rule, all four dimensions are weakened, but the most damaged relationship with yourself. The structure of existence is cracking at the seams, and the forces to overcome the situation are fading.

At the center of the process is the human self. It must recognize what is happening and decide what to do next, but a person has no strength, and then he needs the help of others.

Pure trauma is an unexpected encounter with death or serious injury. Trauma happens to me, but sometimes it doesn’t require me to be threatened. It is enough to see how something threatens another person, and then the person is also shocked.

More than half of people have experienced this reaction at least once in their lives, and about 10% then showed signs of post-traumatic syndrome, with returns to trauma, nervousness, and so on.

Trauma affects the deepest layers of existence, but what suffers most is the basic trust in the world. For example, when people are rescued after an earthquake or tsunami, they feel as if the world is holding them back.

Trauma and dignity. How a man descends The injury is particularly severe due to its inevitability. We are faced with circumstances that we must accept. This is fate, a destructive force over which I have no control.

Experiencing such a situation means that we are experiencing something that we did not think possible in principle. We are losing faith in science and technology. We thought we had tamed the world, and here we are, like children playing in a sandbox, and our castle is destroyed. How do you stay human in all this?

Viktor Frankl lived in a concentration camp for two and a half years, lost his whole family, miraculously escaped death, constantly experienced depreciation, but he did not break down, and even grew spiritually. Yes, there were injuries that remained for the rest of his life: even at the age of eighty, he sometimes had nightmares and cried at night.

In The Man in Search of Meaning, he describes the horror of arriving at a concentration camp. As a psychologist, he identified four main elements. There was fear in everyone’s eyes, the reality was incredible. But they were particularly shocked by the struggle of all against all. They have lost their future and their dignity. This correlates with four fundamental motivations that were not known at the time.

The prisoners were lost, and gradually came the realization that a line could be drawn under a past life. Apathy ensued, a gradual mental death began - only the pain from the injustice of the attitude, humiliation remained from the feelings.

The second consequence was taking themselves out of life, people descended to a primitive existence, everyone thought only about food, a place where to warm up and sleep. Some would say it's okay, food first, morality later. But Frankl has shown that's not the case.

Third, there was no sense of identity or freedom. We were no longer human, but part of the chaos. Life has become a being in the herd.

Fourth, the sense of the future disappeared. The present was not thought to be happening, there was no future. Everything was meaningless.

Similar symptoms can be seen in any injury. Rape victims, soldiers returning from war, are experiencing a crisis of fundamental motivation. They all feel that they can no longer trust anyone.

Such a state requires special therapy to restore basic trust in the world. It takes a lot of effort, time and very careful work.

Freedom and meaning. The Secret and Existential Turn of Victor Frankl

Every injury asks the question of meaning. He is very human because the trauma itself is meaningless. It would be an ontological contradiction to say that we see meaning in injuries, in murder. We can hope that everything is in God’s hands. But this question is very personal.

Viktor Frankl raised the question that we must take an existential turn: trauma can become meaningful through our own actions. “What is this for?” is a meaningless question. But “Can I learn something from it, can I get deeper?” gives meaning to the trauma.

Fight, but not revenge. How? Obsession with the question “for what?” makes us especially defenseless. We suffer from something that is meaningless in itself; it destroys us. Trauma destroys our boundaries, leads to loss of self, loss of dignity. Trauma that occurs through violence against others leads to humiliation. To mock others, to humiliate victims, is dehumanization. Our response is to fight for meaning and dignity.

This happens not only when we are traumatized, but when people with whom we identify suffer. Chechnya and Syria, world wars and other events lead to suicide attempts even for those who were not traumatized themselves.

For example, young Palestinians are shown films about the unfair treatment of Israeli soldiers. And they are trying to restore justice to the victims and hurt the perpetrators. The traumatized condition can be carried over a distance. In its reversed form, this occurs in malignant narcissism. Such people enjoy watching the suffering of others.

The question arises as to how to deal with these means other than revenge and suicide. In existential psychology, we use the method of standing next to oneself.

There are two authors, partly opposed to each other – Camus and Frankl. In the book about Sisyphus, Camus calls for making suffering conscious, giving meaning to one’s own resistance to the gods. Frankl’s motto is “accept life no matter what.”

Frenchman Camus suggests drawing energy from his own dignity. The Austrian Frankl is that there must be more. Relationships with yourself, other people and God.

The Power of the Flower and Freedom of View

Trauma is an internal dialogue. It is very important in case of injury not to let yourself stop. It is necessary to accept what has happened in the world, but not to stop the inner life, to preserve the inner space. In the concentration camp, simple things helped to preserve the inner meaning: to look at the sunset and sunrise, the shape of clouds, an accidental flower or mountains.

It is hard to believe that such simple things can nourish us, we usually expect more. But the flower was proof that beauty still exists. Sometimes they pushed each other and showed with signs how beautiful the world was. And then they felt that life was so valuable that it overpowered all circumstances. In existential analysis, we call this fundamental value.

Another way to overcome terror was to have a good relationship. Frankl wants to see his wife and family again.

Internal dialogue also allowed us to create distance from what was happening. Frankl thought he was going to write a book, and he started analyzing it, and that kept him away.

Third, even when external freedom was limited, they still had internal resources to build their way of life. Frankl wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man except the opportunity to take a position.”

Being able to say "Good morning" to a neighbor and look him in the eye was not necessary, but it meant that the person still had a minimum of freedom.

The position of a paralytic bedridden implies the minimum of freedom, but one must be able to live it. Then you feel like you're still a person, not an object, and you have dignity. And they still had faith.

Frankl’s famous existential twist is that he turned the question “what is this for me?” into “what does this expect of me?”—a twist that means I still have freedom, and therefore dignity. So we can even make our own ontological sense.

Victor Frankl wrote: “What we were looking for had such a profound meaning that he attached importance not only to death but also to dying and suffering.” The struggle may be modest and inconspicuous, not necessarily loud.”

The Austrian psychologist survived, returned home, but he realized that he had forgotten something to enjoy, and he learned it again. And this was another experiment. He himself could not understand how they had survived all this. He realized that he was afraid of nothing but God.

To sum up, I really hope that this lecture will be of some use to you.

There are always small values if we are not too proud to see them. And the words of greeting to our companion may well be a manifestation of our freedom, which gives meaning to existence. And then we can feel like people. published

P.S. And remember, just by changing your consciousness – together we change the world!

Source: www.pravmir.ru/travma-kak-sohranit-dostoinstvo-v-stradanii/#ixzz3UqicmvNn