This article is the second in a series identifying the impact of trauma.
In the first article, we identified physical effects.
Here, we examine immediate and long-term cognitive effects.
What Happens At First Immediately following a traumatic experience, the most common cognitive symptoms are...
1) Intrusive thoughts, or thinking about the trauma when she doesn't want to and not being able to turn it off.
So in the middle of dinner with the family, something happens that reminds her and suddenly, she is thinking about the trauma again.
2) Having flashbacks of the trauma - this means that for a few minutes or even longer, her experiences shift and it is unclear what reality is.
Is she standing on the sidewalk, heading toward the coffee shop, or back in her childhood bedroom, where the abuse took place? 3) Memory lapses-for example, she stops in the middle of an explanation, completely forgetting the story she was about to tell or the conversation she had yesterday, or an hour ago.
4) Difficulty focusing or concentrating - most people who survive trauma just want to feel normal again and often return to work or other activities to try to get that sense of normal back.
But nothing is normal.
They can't seem to focus on what they need to focus on; instead, they wind up thinking about what happened.
Long-Term Effects Over time, what triggers a trauma survivor's memories and flashbacks is not so dramatic and obvious.
As the triggers become more subtle, the survivor of trauma reacts to those triggers without even being aware that she has been triggered.
What can happen, then, is that the trauma survivor increasingly begins to see the world as dangerous and spends more time thinking about worries and fears than positive things like pleasure or beauty.
Traumatic Memories From research, it has become clear that we do not store traumatic memories the same way we do our normal ones.
Ordinary events in our lives are stored verbally so if we tap into them, we can easily use words to describe them or tell their story.
"Traumatic memories are experienced as emotions, sensations and physical states.
They are like an undigested lump of personal history, stored separately in a primitive compartment and unintegrated into the survivor's verbal and cognitive understanding of himself.
At the same time, in some situations, especially with cases of childhood sexual abuse, there can be partial amnesia, and sometimes an entire childhood is obliterated to conscious recall.
" -Belleruth Naparstek, Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal The younger the person was when traumatized, particularly if the experience of trauma was prolonged and repeated over time, the more likely it is that as an adult, the trauma survivor will experience amnesia for those experiences.
Over time, however, memory fragments begin to come back, popping into her mind suddenly, out of nowhere.
And these aren't full-blown stories, they are pieces of memory...
Not, "I was going to the store, a car ran a red light, I saw heading toward me and suddenly, felt him crash into me...
" but the shiny red color of the car, followed maybe days later by the memory of the sound of the crash or the EMT workers asking if she was okay or the sky as she was carried from car to ambulance.
Other Cognitive Symptoms 1) Distortion in the survivor's sense of time 2) Distractedness, which can make it hard to pay attention to what is happening right now, or remember details and can make the survivor seem flaky or spaced out.
These are all reactions to or coping skills based on terror.
Bruce D.
Perry, M.
D.
, Ph.
D explains that therapy using only a cognitive approach, based on problem-solving techniques, is insufficient for dealing with terror-driven behavior.
"This is why imagery, with it's subverbal, calming voice tone, soothing music and nonverbal reassurances of safety, aimed straight at the aroused lower brain, is far more effective with traumatized people.
" -Belleruth Naparstek, Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal