What It Is
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) generally occurs when an event involves serious injuries or threats to physical integrity for oneself or others and causes feelings of fear, horror, and helplessness in the person who experienced or witnessed it, and when a condition of significant distress manifests immediately after the traumatic event or after several months, which can generate important limitations in the person’s social, work, and family functioning
PTSD is a serious disorder that, in its chronic forms, stems from the inability to integrate the traumatic experience with the person’s vision of themselves and the world. It is an event so severe, unusual, and incomprehensible that it cannot be processed like all other events.
From this inability to process derives the fact that the memory cannot be “filed” in memory, in the form of images and narratives, as happens with other memories, which can be recalled, examined, and then “stored” again in memory.
The traumatic event remains outside the “archive” and the person, while unable to recall and, so to speak, handle it, risks stumbling upon it instead. The re-emergence of the traumatic memory, therefore, will be sudden, unexpected, and traumatic again.
Not being processed, furthermore, the traumatic memory does not present itself in the form of narration but in the form of Body Memory that can be reactivated both in the presence of events that recall the original danger situation and due to intense emotions or stressful situations.
“TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES ARE NOT REMEMBERED, BUT RELIVED”
If a partner has suffered sexual trauma, one can therefore understand how the situation can be very difficult to manage both for the individual and for the couple. The entire sphere of sexuality, in these cases, will be a very delicate area for both members of the couple.
The traumatized person might develop feelings of guilt and fear, and the partner might feel shame for experiencing desires that conflict with their companion’s well-being.
For this reason, it can be useful, in addition to helping the traumatized person process what happened (for example through an innovative intervention), to consider specific help for the couple, so that the sexual sphere can assume the positive connotation it deserves.
