"I remember checking on my mother to see if she was still breathing." How a relationship maintains, regulates, and helps resolve traumatic experiences: relational family integration

• Main Authors: Katarina Kompan Erzar, Christian Gostečnik, Tomaž Erzar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Slovenian Psychologists' Association 2005-12-01
• Series: Psihološka Obzorja
• Subjects: emotional trauma; families; affect regulation; secondary traumatization; attachment behavior
• Online Access: http://psiholoska-obzorja.si/arhiv_clanki/2005_3/kompan.pdf

Traumatic experience is one of the most devastating experiences the family can endure. In order to understand why an experience maintains its traumatic nature we must take into account that trauma could be used as a powerful regulative mechanism in the family system precisely because of its organic component. For the first time in the history of psychology, this enables us to connect interpersonal relations with a person's organic nature and to establish that this nature is subordinated to the relationship or space between "I" and "you," which opens an extensive area and continually makes new discoveries possible. In the following vignette we will see that family systems, marked by trauma, develop very specific affective dynamics for affect regulation, which maintains the trauma. Trauma is transferred into interpersonal relations through basic affect and through the development of attachment; traumatic experiences remain present and powerful through multiple generations. The discovery of a new perspective on trauma lies in the fact that a trauma, for which no one takes responsibility, remains unmanageable.