Lisa Marchiano: Traumatic Memories and Ordinary Struggles

Lisa Marchiano, creator of The Jungian Life podcast and a leading contemporary Jungian Analyst, writes in Psychology Today about the common focus on uncovering traumatic memories and how their search can sometimes serve as a distraction. She encourages us to be curious and to explore our equally legitimate ordinary struggles with compassion toward ourselves.

Below are selected excerpts; the full article is linked at the end::

Lisa writes: "Since the days of Freud, psychoanalysis has invited us to look to our past to understand aspects of our current suffering. Consideration of a patient’s childhood remains a major component of depth psychological work. One of the paradigmatic beliefs of a depth psychological approach is that childhood experiences—particularly traumatic ones—can shape our emotional lives and affect our adulthood, often in ways we are not consciously aware of and don’t understand. This initial intuition of early psychoanalysts has been borne out by research. We now know that adverse childhood experiences such as abuse, domestic violence, neglect, and parental mental illness correlate with higher risk of future problems in adulthood, including alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicidality."

"The trauma hypothesis—that adult difficulties can be traced to adverse childhood experiences—is demonstrably valid. At the same time, it has morphed into the dominant story we often tell ourselves about any distress we experience. These days, we’re more likely to be encouraged to look for forgotten childhood trauma by social media influencers than by poorly trained therapists, but the potential downsides remain. The temptation to seek buried memories may do us a disservice by delegitimizing psychological suffering that doesn’t have its roots in childhood trauma or sending us on impossible errands to find the biographical antecedents of our difficulties. Ordinary struggles caused by ordinary disappointments, temperamental mismatches between us and the environment, or even our own heritable neurotic tendencies don’t have the same dramatic panache as anguish that originates in trauma. And yet, these forms of distress are just as legitimate, just as important, and just as worthy of compassion, curiosity, and treatment. Exploring painful aspects of our childhood can deepen self-understanding and bring healing, even when these more ordinary difficulties do not rise to the level of trauma."

"Most of us experience mental distress sometimes. Perhaps it is difficult for us to accept that suffering is an ordinary part of being human. There is something appealing about believing that our difficulties exist for a reason, and that without this explanatory root cause, we would exist in a natural state of happiness. But our suffering is important even when it doesn’t have a dramatic origin story. We owe it to ourselves to take our suffering seriously—to be curious about it, and to cultivate compassion toward ourselves even when there is no extraordinary event that explains it."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-archetypal-angle/202604/is-searching-for-memories-of-childhood-trauma-helpful

Image by Aurelius Wendelken