Sam Vaknin
Professor of Clinical Psychology
Title: Triggering Cascade, Trauma Imprinting, and Total Reactance
Biography
Biography: Sam Vaknin
Abstract
Total reactance characterizes Psychopaths, Borderlines, trauma victims (PTSD and CPTSD), and people with mood disorders and impulse control issues. They escalate every conflict, however minor or imaginary, to the level of nuclear, apocalyptic, all-annihilating warfare and make disproportionate use of every weapon in their arsenal simultaneously.
Trauma imprints everything and everyone involved or present in the stressful event, however tangentially. Places, people, smells, sounds, circumstances, objects, dates, and categories of the above, all get "stamped" with the traumatic experience.
Aim & Objectives: To study the Triggering cascade" is when a seemingly minor trigger results in vastly disproportional trauma.
Material & Methods: Trauma imprints everything and everyone involved or present in the stressful event, however tangentially.
Results: Additionally, one of the primary hallmarks of trauma is the overall feeling in our brain and body of “too much, too fast.” Right now, if we take a moment to check in with ourselves, we can all feel the reverberation of how the pace of this crisis response shows up in our individual bodies. Since the individual and the collective are interconnected, the trauma hallmark of “too much, too fast” is also being magnified in the chaos and instability of the world around us.
Conclusion: These are all normal, biologically rooted responses to coping with trauma, and also strategies for surviving in the midst of ongoing, overwhelming experience with an unpredictable outcome. Unearthing archived trauma wounds, those that were previously known as well as those that are just emerging in our consciousness for the first time — while simultaneously being faced with a pandemic that prompts an immediate response — places a tremendous demand on a survivor’s whole being.