Exposure to life-threatening and violent events is relatively common in a significant portion of the population. Efforts aimed at understanding responses to traumas have also focused on the contribution of personality factors. The way people process the stressful event is of paramount importance for the determination of trauma. The brain does not store records of facts; rather, it keeps traces of information that are later used to recreate memories, which do not always express a completely faithful picture of the past experience. Whenever a traumatic event is retrieved, it may undergo cognitive and emotional changes. We postulate that therapists must go beyond the traumatic event itself and work with the internal dialogs that maintain the pathological relationship with the past episode. Therapy based on exposure and cognitive restructuring may help trauma victims experience psychological growth from their negative experiences, by fostering resilient internal dialogues.
Traumatic memory; psychological dynamics; psychotherapy; resilience; post-traumatic stress disorder