Thresholds

The journey toward trauma recovery

CHANGING FLAWED PERCEPTIONS
BEGINS JOURNEY TO RECOVERY

Survivors of trauma tend to remember the traumatic situation in an unchanged way; their initial perception of the event is the way they continue to view it, as if the traumatic event were frozen in their memories. The healing process involves thawing those memories and looking at them realistically. Because the memories have a very negative focus, the goal of cognitive restructuring is simply to look at the original trauma in a different light.

For example, a SEAL (Navy special warfare teams who are highly trained to work behind enemy lines) whom I was treating was the assassin for his SEAL team; he was an excellent shot. He called himself a "murderer." In discussing the concept of a "murderer" with him, I suggested that in fact he was a "killer," a less pejorative and more accurate term. What he was doing was not illegal and was in fact not only condoned but ordered by his seniors. It was a major breakthrough in therapy when he started to call himself simply a "killer" instead of a "murderer."

The first step a client seems to go through in cognitive restructuring is one of confusion. That is a very positive sign that he or she is beginning to doubt the original perceptions of the situation and is realizing that perhaps the trauma has other aspects that have been ignored, forgotten, or devalued. I make a point of letting my clients know why this confusion is a good sign, a sign of change. When dealing with survivor guilt, it is important to find out what kinds of words people use to talk to themselves when they are thinking about the trauma situation, and to help change these words.

Tom Williams, "Diagnosis and Treatment of Survivor Guilt", Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders: a handbook for clinicians (ed. Tom Williams, Psy.D., published by Disabled American Veterans)

Comment:

Cognitive Restructuring and
the Heroic Journey

by Reg Harris

Copyright © 2000 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.

I describe the Heroic Journey pattern as a process of disintegration and reintegration. During the "challenges and temptations" stage of the journey, weak, ineffective, or restrictive attitudes, perceptions and behaviors are literally stripped away from the initiate. These elements constitute the "story" or "personal myth" the initiate has constructed for him- or herself; it is the framework for living and perceiving life. The Journey disintegrates this personal myth so that a new, more effective myth can be built in its place.

It seems to me that what Dr. Williams describes in this excerpt on treating PTSD parallels, in many ways, the pattern of the Journey. As he wrote, "the healing process involves thawing [the memories of the trauma] and looking at them realistically." His goal is to look at the original trauma in a different light, which could mean helping the client build a new "myth," a new story about the trauma which allows him or her go to on with life.

He also describes the first step a client seems to experience in cognitive restructuring as confusion. In the Journey context, confusion is natural because the old "myth," which is what the initiate has used for construction meaning and sense in life, is disintegrated. As a result, there is no framework, and the initiate is, essentially, floating, confused, until the new structure can be built. In PTSD therapy, helping the client through this healing process of cognitive restructuring is the therapist's job. In the Journey, helping the initiate through this process is the job of the mentor.

This excerpt also points out the importance of words. I naming experience, we give it shape and meaning. When we can rename it, we can see it in a different way, give it new meaning. Thus, we give it new meaning in our lives.

The call to the journey is, more or less, a traumatic experience. It shakes up our known world by introducing an unknown and incompatible element. We must either restructure our personal myth to explain or assimilate the disruptive element, or we must protect ourselves from it with repression, denial or other defense mechanism. Relying on the defense mechanism is a short term remedy. The trauma, like a psychic boil, will fester and grow until we lance it with conscious awareness ("thawing the memory," as Williams writes) and start the healing process by rebuilding our personal myth to assimilate or accommodate it.

This is the process of life, which the Heroic Journey describes: a continual process of establishing psychic equilibrium, having that equilibrium upset, and reestablishing equilibrium on a higher or more inclusive level. We can view literature and film in this way, as a real experience rather than an exercise in literary understanding and analysis. Tim O'Brien wrote in The Things They Carried that "Our stories can save us." 

This is how the save us. By telling, retelling and restructuring our stories, we "thaw the memory," we return to the source of the trauma/call and work on it until we make it part of our myth. Otherwise, the pathogenic traces of the trauma/call fester and keep us from moving on with our lives. As writer Russell Banks said in a radio interview, "They say you can't go home again, but you have to go back just so you can leave."