Some of what I’m dealing with.
From “Trauma and Human Existance”, Robert Stolorow, 2007.
In agreement with Krystal (1978), I view trauma as, in essence, an experience of unendurable affect. Furthermore, as shown in this vignette, the intolerability of an affect state cannot be explained solely, or even primarily, on the basis of the quantity or intensity of the painful feelings invoked by an injurious event. Trauma is consituted in an intersubjective context in which severe emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held. In such a context, painful affect states become unendurable–that is, traumatic.
It cannot be overemphasized that injurious childhood experiences in and of themselves need not be traumatic (or at least not lastingly so) or pathogenic, provided taht they occur within a responsive millieu. Pain is not pathology. It is the absence of adequate attunement and responsiveness to the child’s painful emotional reactions that renders them unendurable and thus a source of traumatic states and psychopathology. This conceptualization holds both for discrete, dramatic traumatic events and for more subtle “cumulative traumas” (Khan, 1963) that occur continually thoughout childhood. Whereas Khan conceptualized cumulative trauma as the result of recurring “breaches in the mothers role as protective shield” (p. 46), I understand such ongoing trauma more in terms of the failure to respond adequately to the child’s painful affect once the “protective shield” has been breached. A parent’s narcissistic use of the child, for example, may preclude the recognition of, acceptance of, and attuned responsiveness to the child’s painful affect states.
Lacking a holding context in which painful affect can live and become integrated, the traumatized child, as in my illustrative vignette, must dissociate painful emotions from his or her ongoing experience, often resulting, psychosomatic states or in splits between the subjectively experienced mind and body. Even if able to remember the traumatogenic experiences, the child may remain plagued by tormenting doubts about their accuracy or even about the reality of his or her experience in general, a consequence of the absense of validating attunements — the lack that I am contending lies at the heart of emotional trauma. The traumatized child will fail to develop the capacity for affect tolerance and the ability to use affects as guiding signals; painful affects, when felt, will tend to engender the eruption of tramatic states (Socarides & Stolorow, 1984/85).
Wheee! This is some fun stuff we got going on inside of us.
