Definition (Glossary of Applied Metapsychology International)
A specific event that someone experienced as painful or deeply upsetting. Working in a person-centered context, something is traumatic if a client says that it is. The facilitator does not judge or evaluate the client’s experience. It is an incident that is wholly or partially repressed and that contains a greater or lesser degree of pain, felt, created, or received, and contains emotional charge.
So that's what makes an event, a situation, a relationship or an incident traumatic; Life is made of “moments when”. Imagine each of these moments as a cycle of activity. Every cycle has an intention, whether conscious or not: to have fun, to be loved, to be safe, to succeed, to get somewhere, to be healthy, to have a good boss, to be patient with your children, etc. Finishing, closing the cycle is crucial. We are not well when we have many incomplete cycles. This explains, in part, why what is difficult or even traumatic for one person, is not necessarily so for another.
How to become better? How to deal with the past in a deep and real way? Fulfilling the intention we had is one way to complete the cycle. We can also consciously end the intention. When this is not possible, which is often the case in our lives, Traumatic Incident Reduction (RIT) is another way to close the cycles. It helps to regain full awareness of the incidents and the intentions you may have formulated during them and to let go of the incident. It is no longer unfinished business and it is no longer traumatic.
Since it is emotionally difficult to be triggered, to relive these situations during the sessions and to examine the contents of our mind in a systematic way, it is easy to convince ourselves not to do this work. It's normal, it's a defense mechanism. But what is the consequence? We continue to be reactivated to varying degrees in everyday life. The alternative is to do the work in the safety of well-supervised sessions, in order to be freed from reactivations over which we have no control on a daily basis.
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