How is your doctor and psychologist treating your stroke trauma? My stroke is central to my identity but in a positive way, it focused my life.
http://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/06/the-lingering-burden-of-seeing-past.html
Horrific experiences often cast a pall upon our lives, but for some people it’s worse than others. A new study in Applied Cognitive Psychology
explores a key reason for this difference known as “event centrality” –
when we consider an experience to be core to our identity, the trauma
that follows is typically more serious and longer lasting.
Ines Blix and her colleagues surveyed 259 ministerial employees caught
up in a particularly grim piece of Oslo history: the July 2011 far-right
terrorist attack upon government ministries. At one, two and three
years after the attack, the participants reported the severity of their
post-traumatic symptoms, such as feeling jumpy, continually vigilant, or
numb and closed off from others. They also reported the degree to which
the terrorist attack was central to their lives, for example through
their agreement or not with statements like: “This event has become a
reference point for the way I understand myself and the world.”
Participants who considered the terrorist event very central to their
life one year after the attack experienced higher levels of trauma, both
at that time and through the subsequent years. However, they recovered
at a faster rate from the trauma, meaning the greater severity of their
symptoms compared with the other participants reduced as time went by.
This likely reflects the fact that they had more recovery to do.
Essentially, seeing a traumatic event as definitive to your life fixes a
particular trajectory: Blix’s team characterise this as ‘launching’ the
trauma.
It’s not just that event centrality reflected how much the participants
were caught up in the carnage – when the researchers controlled for
whether the person was injured themselves, had witnessed killings, or
seen dead bodies, the association between event centrality and trauma
severity held true.
There was also some evidence that trauma and event centrality remain
intertwined longer term. The two measures were in general highly
correlated and in most participants both eventually declined. This might
just be a coincidence and the two factors aren’t linked, but arguing
against that, it’s notable that when event centrality increased at the
2013 assessment (two years after the event), trauma recovery also tended
to stutter. However, even if the two measures really are linked, we
still don’t know whether centrality exacerbates trauma or trauma
exacerbates centrality.
These new findings add to previous work, such as an earlier study
on post-traumatic stress in Vietnam veterans that found higher rates in
those vets who attended the experiment wearing medals and other
regalia, suggesting that the war was more central to their identities.
It’s important to to understand how victims think about their traumatic
experiences – their ”mental models” of the event – because these models
can be interrogated and changed. For example, in a study published last year,
a course of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy successfully helped a
group of women who had suffered abuse to reduce both event centrality
and traumatic symptoms. This new Norwegian study suggests that it may be
better to target such treatment early, to help survivors reject the
idea an event is life-definitive and prevent it launching them down a
path of greater trauma.
_________________________________
Blix,
I., Birkeland, M., Solberg, Hansen, M., & Heir, T. (2016). The
Launching and Ensnaring Effects of Construing a Traumatic Event as
Central to One's Identity and Life Story Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.3224
Use the labels in the right column to find what you want. Or you can go thru them one by one, there are only 29,116 posts. Searching is done in the search box in upper left corner. I blog on anything to do with stroke.DO NOT DO ANYTHING SUGGESTED HERE AS I AM NOT MEDICALLY TRAINED, YOUR DOCTOR IS, LISTEN TO THEM. BUT I BET THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO GET YOU 100% RECOVERED. I DON'T EITHER, BUT HAVE PLENTY OF QUESTIONS FOR YOUR DOCTOR TO ANSWER.
Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.
What this blog is for:
My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.
Thursday, June 2, 2016
The lingering burden of seeing a past trauma as central to your identity
Labels:
doctor question,
identity,
psychologist,
trauma
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