Primary or primary injury is unresolved trauma. It illustrates and highlights the vulnerability of attachment, the vulnerability of this essential link between the child and his parents; is the betrayal of unmet and dissatisfied emotional needs. This pain, which originates at an early and unresolved age, is something we try to anesthetize in adulthood, but that somehow still conditions us.
One of the most common terms in the world of psychology, and especially from the point of view of psychoanalysis, is the figure of the wound, as well as trauma, Freud showed us that these psychic wounds go from the outside in. They occur in our nearest environment, especially in our childhood, so far from dissolving over time, does this original wound survive, remain dormant and enter into our being creating layers and layers on which to gravitate in any realm of our lives?
- While Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud revealed for the first time the significance of early experiences in the development of our personality.
- A decisive book on this same subject was published in the 1990s.
Nancy Verrier, author of the book, highlighted key ideas about the broken bond, the perinatal affliction inflicted, or the generally unconscious wounds that humans tend to bring to maturity due to a vacuum-inhabited childhood.
Human beings have a need that goes beyond food, when a child is born he needs to feel protected, surrounded by affection and supported by affection, love gives birth to us and nourishes us. Love helps us grow, to grow safely in an empathetic environment, where we can explore the world knowing that we are important to someone.
Thus, when a psychologist or therapist receives their patient, they will also try to create an environment where empathy and closeness are always evident and palpable, people need this type of nutrients, because if we don’t notice them, if we don’t notice them. see them or not feel them, our brain reacts almost instantly, suspicion, fear and tension appear.
This is exactly what a child experiences when he or she does not receive a secure attachment. Primary injury occurs when parents are not emotionally, psychologically and/or physically accessible. Gradually the spirit of this baby, this child of a few years, is invaded by anxiety, hunger, emotional desire, emptiness, loneliness, loss and unprotection.
We can understand the primitive wound almost as an evolutionary sacrilege. This d?Hominization process? Where every human being passes, first and foremosm, a solid exchange of affections and a constant closeness between mother and son, we cannot forget that a baby arrives in the world with a still immature brain, and that he needs it. skin and that strong attachment to continue to grow and form an exogestation to promote the continuity of its development.
If something fails in this process, if something happens in our early years of life, an invisible and deep fracture appears, a wound that no one sees, the same one that (perhaps) will invalidate us in the future in various aspects of our lives. . We’ll dig deeper into it below.
There is a very interesting book that is considered the gold standard in the study of attachment. This is the Attachment Manual, by psychologists Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver. In this work, we are reminded that the very end of the human being is self-realization. Our goal is to transcend, promote security to foster our personal and emotional growth, thus enjoying a full life with ourselves and with others.
One of the most important conditions for this to happen is to have a safe, mature, close and intuitive attachment to our needs in our early years, now if this does not happen the primary injury appears and, with it, the following effects :
The most appropriate thing in these cases is to seek professional help, in recent years therapies such as EMDR (desensitization and reprocessing by eye movements) have become increasingly important, a technique in which different types of stimulation and information processing are combined so that people can shed light on the traumatic experiences they have suffered in childhood to talk about them , recognize them and manage them better.
Similarly, it is also worth mentioning these basic strategies that are generally used to deal with and heal our primitive wound and would be:
Finally, experts in the management and treatment of primary wound and trauma recommend forgiveness, forgiving our parents does not free them from guilt, but it allows us to free ourselves from their figures, it is to accept what happened, is to assume the reality of all that we have suffered, but being able to offer a forgiveness that allows us to cut off the link of pain to move forward much faster. Free from pain, anger and memories of the past.
Let us think about it, the subject of primitive wounding is certainly of great interest and worth understanding this complex psychological reality.