personal therapy
To understand why we have the thoughts and emotions we do, we must understand the personality we have developed throughout our life.
Without this understanding, we will never be able to build a healthy psychological life.
Your personality is who you are as an individual. It is how the total sum of all your life experiences shaped you into who you are. Your family environment, your culture and society all played a central role in the development of your Personality.
In short: Personality is who you Learned to be.
The health of your Psychological Experience is rooted in the behaviors of your Personality. These behaviors are called Mechanisms, which means that your Personality, like that of all individuals, is made up of a vast collection of Mechanisms. You have mechanisms through which not only do relate to the people, circumstances and events in your life, but also how you relate to yourself. This last type of relationship is the most important because it involves what you think and feel about yourself, which is your Self-Worth.
Mechanisms can be simple and superficial, like your Reactions and Opinions, and also quite profound and complex, like your sense of Justice and Morality.
Trauma is an example of a profound and complex mechanism.
Trauma is a Psychological Mechanism, a collection of behaviors that developed at some point in our lives as a response to an intense and violent experience. It is how our psyche protected itself from that experience, the tools it developed to cope with it and how it avoided sustaining psychological harm.
I will give you a personal example:
I grew up with parents who were emotionally abusive toward each other, and it wasn't uncommon for them to shout, slam doors, or break windows and walls when their fights became violent.
The Trauma that such episodes developed in me was that, as a child and even later in my adult life, every time I heard someone shouting or a loud, sudden noise, my trauma would react, and I would immediately experience negative emotions like fear and anxiety—emotions I felt as a child when I heard my parents fighting.
Because a Traumatic experience develops deeply rooted mechanisms in our Personality, we carry it with us throughout our lives in everything we do, even if the experience that produced the Trauma ceased to be part of our daily life a long time ago.
This is one of the causes of our unhealthy psychological experience.
Work in our sessions consists of building an understanding of our Personality so that we can learn about our own Traumas and the Mechanisms we have developed to cope with them. We do this not only to learn about the Mechanisms we carry but, more importantly, to begin dismantling them from our lives in order to live a Healthier Psychological Experience today.