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Summary of 87 pages for the course MGG2602 - Sexual Trauma at Unisa (EXAM Notes)
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MGG202X – Sexual Trauma Exam SummariesTHEME ONE - DEFINING STRESS, CRISIS AND TRAUMA
Stress:
♦ The strain we feel at different times in our lives or in different situations.
♦ A set of external forces impinging on an individual (unemployment, high crime rate)
♦ A set of psychological and physiological reactions experienced – sweaty hands,
racing heart, negative self-talk.
♦ Nerves, anxiety, panic, tension, pressure.
♦ Stress should be considered an opportunity for growth; the spark that pushes us to
challenge the situations we find ourselves in and to find new ways of coping.
The extent to which the individual experiences stress depends on:
♦ The event itself
♦ The individual’s personality
♦ The individual’s ability to cope
Crisis:
♦ A normal reaction that an individual has to a difficult experience that they have not
had to face before.
♦ When a person is in a crisis they feel confused, overwhelmed and unable to cope.
♦ It may be an external event - work related, losing money; or an internal event caused
by development – becoming a wife etc.
♦ Crisis can be a turning point – an opportunity for an individual to discover and use
inner strengths to adjust to a changing world, find relevant supportive resources and
learn new skills that can be generalised to resolve future crises.
Trauma:
♦ Situations “in which the victims are rendered powerless and great danger is involved”
♦ A profound deviation from normal life experiences
♦ Sudden, overwhelming and unanticipated.
♦ Individual experiences fear, helplessness. Loss of control and extreme powerlessness.
♦ The trauma inducing situations suggests a threat of injury or death of the person or
others around them.
♦ Expected loss – parent, job. Loosing several family members, or an accident, natural
disaster = unexpected, overwhelming, out of the ordinary.
Judith Herman: “Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but
rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptions to life”
♦ Involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or close personal encounter with violence and
death.
♦ Individual feels helplessness and terror
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,MGG202X – Sexual Trauma Exam Summaries
The effects of trauma:
♦ Because of intensity and magnitude, trauma overtaxes the human’s ability to cope.
♦ May damage the mental health.
♦ Traumatised people feel and act as though their nervous systems have been
disconnected from the present.
♦ Person is left with a persistent expectation of danger, an imprint of the traumatic event
that does not want to fade and a numbing response of giving up that becomes
generalised.
♦ Impact of trauma on psyche has major influence on the individual’s normal ways of
thinking and feeling – so previous coping mechanisms are no longer effective /
functional.
♦ Traumatic events may impact on the person’s personhood, individuality and humanity.
The impact of the trauma may be aggravated by the insensitive handling of those
who deal with them after their traumatic event.
Different kinds of trauma
Caused by nature – natural disaster: flood, fires, hurricanes
Caused by humans – an atrocity – man made catastrophes: war, terrorism, bus disasters, civil
unrest
Unintentional violence – car accident, culpable homicide
Intentional violence – physical assault, sexual assault, domestic violence, hijacking – all of
which encompasses forms of victimisation involving a threat to life, health and limb. Sexual
trauma falls within this category.
Direct vs indirect trauma
♦ Traumatic event may affect witnesses and those who have direct contact with the
direct victim = indirect traumatisation. Any person who witnesses a death, rape,
assault of another is at risk of being traumatised.
♦ Symptoms experienced by victims of indirect trauma can be identical to those of the
victims of direct trauma.
♦ Policeman, journalists, helping professionals – need to take precautions against this;
have access to debriefing sessions
♦ Loved ones and family members / children of victims of trauma also can suffer indirect
trauma.
♦ An individual can be both a direct and indirect victim of trauma. i.e. child witnesses
mother being raped (indirect) whilst being held hostage during a robbery (direct)
Single vs Multiple trauma
Single event – armed robbery / loss of a limb / cancer
Multiple – a person who has been hijacked several times.
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,MGG202X – Sexual Trauma Exam Summaries
Continuous vs complex trauma
Continuous traumatic stress:
♦ where people are exposed to on-going trauma. i.e live in areas of high levels of
violence and constantly exposed and constant threat.
♦ They appear to develop a ‘numbing’ response to any new or additional traumatic
events, making it more difficult to detect they are traumatised.
♦ May be mistakenly regarded as being lethargic / depressed. As they don’t understand
what is happening to them – they don’t ask for help.
Complex trauma:
♦ situations in which victims experience prolonged repeated traumatic events; usually a
relationship between the victim and the offender .
♦ Marital rape / child who is sexually abused by parent.
♦ Very damaging – victim is under the control of the offender and cannot escape for
extended periods
People respond differently to all experiences of stress / crises. What is stressful to one person,
may be regarded as a crisis by another, and as trauma by another.
There is a hypothetical continuum that plots stress, crisis and trauma and demonstrates the
increase in intensity from stress to trauma. Each person perceives his or her individual
experiences in a unique way and practitioners should never use their definition of stress crisis
and trauma, but the client’s definitions.
Defining Sexual Trauma
i. It’s a trauma of a sexual nature
ii. The trauma creates emotional turmoil for the survivor
iii. The trauma may impair the trauma survivors functioning in certain areas, such as self-
esteem, relationships and others with sexuality.
iv. These problems may only manifest much later, when the4 survivor develops an
understanding of the wrongness of the activities he or she participated in, given that
his or her participation my even have been passive.
♦ Sexual trauma often involves not just one single event, but a series of events.
♦ Sexual trauma affects a person’s sexual adjustment, wounds their soul, and impacts on
many areas of his or her social functioning, creates havoc with health (HIV after rape)
Critical issue: the extent to which a person is affected by an unanticipated outcome. It is
trauma when it is unanticipated, the victim experiences a sense of powerlessness and has to
deal with perceived threats to the self of loves ones.
Rape and child sexual abuse
Physiological origins of sexual trauma
Theories – impotence, cancer of the genitals, HIV, infertility – all create a sense of
helplessness, they are unplanned and unexpected, thereby creating confusing in the lives of
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, MGG202X – Sexual Trauma Exam Summaries
their victims. They impact on self-esteem, relationships with others, sexuality and can be life
threatening (HIV, Cancer)
Female Genital mutilation – a traditional practice in some African cultures – may result in
sexual trauma.
The impact of Trauma
♦ Trauma is a blend of different behaviours, feelings and physical responses.
♦ You cannot stereotype survivors with a set of responses.
♦ Symptoms should always been seen as normal responses to abnormal situations.
♦ Vast variables at work when individual is traumatised: age at the time of incident,
relationship with the perpetrator; their gender; duration of trauma, amt. of violence
involved, psychological history, perspective of the trauma.
The body’s response to an abnormal amount of stress
♦ Threat arouses the sympathetic nervous system, causing an adrenalin rush, and the
threatened person to go into a state of alert;
♦ Invokes feelings of fear and anger, person becomes poised for strenuous action to
fight or to escape the threat.
♦ When the person is unable to resist, escape, then a traumatic reaction occurs. Person’s
self-defence system becomes confused and disorganised, resulting in person having
prolonged changes in physical arousal, emotion, cognition and memory.
♦ These individuals startle easily and usually have strong reaction to stimuli that may be
associated with the traumatic event. The increase in arousal effects sleep and wakeful
times.
Responses to fight and escape described as approach and avoidance (Roth & Cohen)
Processes may be unconscious, conscious or both.
Approach enables the person to be prepared for the acute stressful event.
♦ They enable the person to gather information necessary to take action and provide
an opportunity for affective release.
♦ This response allows individuals to integrate the experience into their perceptions of
themselves and the world; it also produces difficulties as it increases the experience of
negative effects, to a potentially dangerous level, resulting in the person having
heightened anxiety reactions and non-productive worry.
Avoidance reduces the emotional impact of the event;
• It protects the individual from becoming emotionally overwhelmed and dysfunctional.
• But it may result in blocking out of information needed to lead to productive action.
• Prolonged use of the avoidance strategy tends to create emotional numbness and
avoidance of certain aspects of the self and of life.
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