It is perfectly normal to experience grief and anguish after traumatic events. You’ll tend to replay the incident over and over again in your mind, second-guessing your actions and wondering what you could have done differently. This tends to dissipate naturally over time, however. If you have been involved in a violent altercation and experience recurring emotional effects for more than a week or two, it is a good idea to consider professional counseling to facilitate a healthy recovery. The faster you regain your equilibrium the better.
Unfortunately, many guys don’t get the help they need. One theory is that while society seems to presume that women will experience emotional issues after a violent experience such as a rape, men are often expected to take horrendous violence in stride and not let it affect them psychologically. That’s just silly. While you may feel embarrassed or unmanly for seeking help to deal with emotional issues after a fight, it’s important to get it if you need it. Even Special Forces soldiers, the world’s elite fighting corps, seek psychological counseling after their missions as the situation warrants. There are things that ordinary, well-adjusted people simply aren’t meant to experience. Dealing with that sort of stuff often takes help.
For most people, the emotional effects of violent incidents tend to subside after a few weeks. If symptoms last longer than a month or two, you may need a professional diagnosis to see if you have developed a psychiatric disorder such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a psychological condition caused by exposure to or confrontation with highly stressful experiences, typically involving participation in or witnessing of death or serious physical injury. This stressful experience, when combined with feelings of intense fear, helplessness, or horror may lead to PTSD, particularly when the experience is caused by another person such as in a violent confrontation.
These problems can occur whether you win, lose, or merely witness the violent encounter. They can appear after you have taken direct action to harm another person as well as when you have chosen not to get involved.
Symptoms can include re-experiencing phenomena via nightmares and flashbacks, emotional detachment (or hyper control), sleep abnormalities, irritability, excessive startle (hyper vigilance), and uncontrolled rage, among other indicators. Experiences likely to induce this condition include most any form of combat or violent physical attack, rape, emotional abuse, or even catastrophic natural disasters (for example, hurricanes, earthquakes). PTSD often becomes a chronic condition but can usually improve with treatment or, rarely, even spontaneously. There is also the possibility of other psychiatric disorders that may be experienced simultaneously.
Despite the seriousness of these symptoms, most people who experience traumatic events will not develop PTSD. It is possible, however, to have a delayed onset of PTSD years or even decades later. Delayed triggers usually come in the form of life-changing events such as the death of a relative or close friend or diagnosis of a serious medical condition.
The good news is that PTSD and other psychological trauma associated with violence have been thoroughly studied. There are varieties of clinical techniques that mental health professionals and clergy members can use to help victims make a full recovery. With counseling, survivors of traumatic events are able to confront their memories and emotions while working to de-link them from any kind of physiological response.
Autogenic training techniques and structured debriefing sessions are helpful in this process. Similar to biofeedback techniques, autogenic training teaches your body to respond to your verbal commands in order to achieve deep relaxation and reduced stress. These commands help you control your breathing, blood pressure, heartbeat, and body temperature when you want to. Structured debriefing is a psychiatric intervention that follows a trauma episode to promote recovery and minimizing disruption.
For most people, the emotional effects of violent incidents tend to subside after a few weeks. If symptoms last longer than a month or two, you may need a professional diagnosis to see if you have developed a psychiatric disorder such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The important thing is to get help if you need it. Don’t worry about what others might think. Do what’s necessary for your continued health and well-being.
Understanding Critical Incident Amnesia
Traumatic situations are frequently associated with memory impairment, a condition commonly described as “critical incident amnesia.” The greater the stress, the greater the potential of memory problems as victims have difficulty in transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory. There are several root causes for this phenomenon, including sensory overload, tunnel vision, and adrenal stress.
Combatants frequently encounter post-incident amnesia immediately after a traumatic experience, failing to remember the majority of the information they observed during the encounter. After a healthy night’s sleep, there is usually a significant memory recovery, resulting in an ability to remember a majority of what occurred. You will have the most reliable memories of what occurred at this period. Alcohol interferes with REM sleep; you may sleep more, even easier, but it won’t be as deep or as effective, so stay away from alcohol right after the incident. Sleeping pills and other medications affecting the quality of your sleep should be avoided as well, unless prescribed by your doctor.
The most complete memory recovery will happen within about 72 hours, but it will inevitably include at least partially reconstructed (and therefore somewhat contaminated) information. Inevitably, an individual who has experienced some level of memory loss will discuss the event with others and seek retrieval clues from external sources such as media reports.
Human memory is a fallible process. It includes active construction in which prior experiences, knowledge, beliefs, prejudices, and expectations are constantly shaping, filling in the gaps, and potentially distorting our perception of what actually occurred; a reason that eyewitness testimony is not always reliable. Since memory is a product of perception, it can become distorted whenever our perception becomes distorted or disrupted.
It is perfectly normal to experience grief and anguish after traumatic events. Exposure to highly stressful experiences when combined with feelings of intense fear, helplessness, or horror may lead to serious psychological trauma. Symptoms can occur whether you win, lose, or even witness a violent encounter. If you have been involved in an altercation and experience recurring emotional effects for more than a few weeks it is a good idea to consider professional counseling to facilitate a healthy recovery.
Vision is a huge contributor to memory because it is the primary mechanism by which we observe the world around us. Hearing, touch, taste, and smell play a role too, of course, but not to as great a degree in most people. Under extreme stress, visual exclusion or tunnel vision narrows our field of view by as much as 70 percent. Similarly, stress-induced pupil dilation can disrupt our ability to focus (especially on close objects), degrading our depth perception. Since the visual field is disrupted or narrowed, the amount of information we collect from it will be incomplete.
We are constantly bombarded by stimuli from the world around us, much of which is disregarded as unimportant and not transferred from short term to long term memory. Even in individuals with so-called “photographic memories,” focused attention is required to ensure that transfer. Focused attention to certain stimuli can preclude attention to others, resulting in a flashbulb-like effect where only certain aspects of an event are actually remembered (for example, something new or unusual).
Immediately after a traumatic incident, much of what occurred is still in the brain, but it has not been processed in such a manner that it can be retrieved. One of the key factors in being able to access such information
