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LACT workshop extract
To go further on post-traumatic stress disorder, it should be noted that not all traumas necessarily trigger post-traumatic stress (PTS). In the Palo Alto approach, we have extremely effective protocols for PTS situations. Here is some information on what post traumatic stress is.
Someone with PTS is a bit like a Vietnam veteran who says, “the war is over for history, but it's not over for me”.
He's someone who emotionally is still in the traumatic event.
But, as I just said, not every traumatic shock necessarily involves SPT. “The world breaks us all, but some grow stronger where they were broken,” Hemingway reminds us. Man is even genetically programmed to become stronger from the difficult experiences and difficult trials he lives... When there is a shock, psychopathological disorders are essentially of 3 orders:
- There is adaptation disorder : the shock has just taken place and therefore there is adaptation disorder or stress generated by the new situation created by the shock.
- There is acute stress : in a window of time that can go up to 4 weeks after the traumatic event (the shock), manifestations of acute stress, beyond the stress of adaptation, are maintained. This will result in inability to work, to cope, very significant fears and incoherent speeches that appear beyond the efforts that the person made to emotionally overcome the situation.
- Finally, there is post-traumatic stress : beyond this 4-week time window, all the manifestations of acute stress seem to persist and have settled into the person's daily life. As if the event was still rooted in the present, with no visible improvement...
The whole issue of the psychological support that must be provided to an individual affected by trauma is therefore to see how to bring out resilience in relation to the trauma. If we take the example of women, like you here, you may have had children, and necessarily under epidural...
When you ask a woman who has just given birth without an epidural if she is ready to have another child, she says: absolutely not!
the pain is such that you can't even imagine that all of this could happen again… And then, of course, nature does things well. In general, over time, childbirth remains a memory but no longer with the emotional burden of pain present. With time, the woman can talk about it, something has happened to her, it's in the past. That's resilience. It's about transforming the wound into a scar and putting the past back in its place, that is to say, in a way, archiving the past in the past. Thus, it is to no longer have the terrible and varied emotion that is associated with shock. What do we usually try to do when we have suffered a trauma? Several of the most used strategies:
- Most often, in general, we seek to erase the event . That's a completely unsuitable strategy, even though we do it in spite of ourselves, without doing it on purpose. This is what will feed the painful cocktail of fear, rage, anger, guilt, something that has often been an existential ordeal, there is something very existential that brings us back to our limits. We are trying to make something that cannot be erased. It happened. In doing so, we put ourselves in check (the memory comes back by itself and reminds us that the shock took place when we want to believe that it did not take place), and in this way, in spite of ourselves, we makes the trauma more present, it is updated. This is what is problematic.
- Along with the attempt to erase or forget the event, one also tries to control one's thoughts , so as not to think about it, which can give the illusion of forgetting the event. But thoughts are emotions: when they come, they come, spontaneously. And wanting not to think about something is already and still thinking about it, which further feeds the feeling of failure and rekindles the trauma itself.
- We will also be able to try to avoid all the situations that could be associated with the trauma , always in the same logic of making it erasable.
- And when we can't do all these things, then we go, to relieve ourselves, to complain, to be reassured, to ask for help .
In the case that we have exposed to you, there was a collective traumatic episode, because everyone agrees that there was something originally that was extremely complicated to live with. Following that, we were able to complain, we were able to be reassured precisely through the "White Knight" - the one who wanted to help and relieve everyone and who became the group's spokesperson, in particular - we were able to ask for help, etc. But in fact, no one can recover from this experience, and it is very largely due to the fact of being stuck in this complaint, in this delegation and in this request for reinsurance. This is what we will have to break, neutralize, if we want to be able to rebuild something else with this team.
- And then, finally, obviously, as we complain about such a difficult situation with such lasting consequences, we look for meaning , when we can't find solutions. And what doesn't help is when you manage to find meaning in something that doesn't necessarily have any.
As part of our intervention on this team in a situation of collective post traumatic stress, our response was to identify a blocked situation, to make an operational diagnosis with all the people who were involved in the situation, incorporating a little more the hierarchical line in particular. And depending on the result, we made sure, thanks to the diagnosis, to be able to block all these attempts that were ineffective to relieve the pain, and to then be able to offer a system including individual interviews, executive coaching and a team seminar. .
