I want to talk about why a psychologist should not position himself as a “knowing master” and how trauma becomes trauma. Tell me, why am I so anxious? Tell me, why am I so depressed? Tell me, why am I so unsure of myself? Tell me, why am I “like this”? The biggest and most important mistake people make is to believe that in the psyche there is a pattern of cause-and-effect relationships that is familiar to us: first some “cause”, and then a “consequence” generated by this cause. But in the psyche everything works differently, because... Time there does not act linearly. I will explain this using the example of how an injury becomes an injury. Trauma only becomes trauma in hindsight. This is a kind of “record” in the psychic field, which becomes “trauma” only when it is actualized by something from the future. Something from the future starts the process of updating that record in the psyche, which at that moment constitutes trauma. An example to understand the process: you are 7 years old, you decide to play football with the children, in the process you fall, badly break your knee, and sit at home for a long time. A few years later, you walk past a football field and begin to feel pain in your knee; from that moment on, the pain begins to appear in it periodically and prevents you from walking, sleeping and running. This is an example about physical trauma for clarity, it is of course far from ideal, but it demonstrates the principle. Another example: a girl Anna was beaten as a child by her father, who called her Anyuta, when she was 7 he died, no one in the house spoke about what he was like did not speak, the topic was not discussed. The girl turned 30, and one day a neighbor in the stairwell called her Anyuta, on the same day she had a nightmare and suddenly became afraid to leave the apartment, panic attacks regularly began to overtake her in the entrance. There can be a lot of examples. A mental record may not become a trauma if there is no encounter with something that, through an associative series, actualizes this record. You probably know many examples where people faced the same difficulties, but they had completely different effects on them. Example: two people (strangers) went through a school period when they were considered outcasts and no one talked to them, but one grew up and remembers this period as one that tempered him and made him stronger, and the other, as a period due to which he suffers from social phobia . You may object: “well, the first one probably had good parents and supported him!” Yes, his parents could be like that, but it's not about them at all. After all, “kind and supportive parents” can produce different “effects”; they make some people strong, others lazy and spoiled egoists. The point is not about those who were nearby (although the support of loved ones is certainly always very important), the point is whether there was something that had an actualizing effect on the “recording” or not. What is important about this understanding? It shows us the singularity of each case in practice. There are no identical subjects, no identical stories of trauma. The same symptom in different people has a different history of formation, different reasons for its formation. Not all psychologists are ready for this, as it deprives them of the position of dominance that the clients themselves give them. After all, many people believe that psychologists “know everything in life,” but this is not so. Many (oh, how many) psychologists sin by imposing their projections on situations about which they learn, make diagnoses, name absolutely accurate antecedent causes, etc. A psychologist should not “know”, a psychologist should “be able to”. A psychologist should not know what and why is happening to people, he must be able to figure out what and why happened to a specific subject. And people who decide to understand their mental state and turn to a specialist must understand that they will only learn the truth about themselves next to someone who does not know anything about them for sure. I invite you to face-to-face and online sessions on psychoanalytic therapy, to understand your unique case, the unique history of your symptoms. Leave a 👍🏻 if you were interested) it helps.