Trauma
"The man who has no imagination has no wings." - Muhammad Ali
Imagination is one of the great gifts of being human. It gives us profound joy and is like the exotic spices that turn a tasteless meal into a delight. If you've ever witnessed young children turn a trip to the dentist, a dusty walk, or a daily chore into an adventure, you've seen the power of imagination. It gives hope, helps us to forget troubles and focus on what really matters and prevents us from taking life too seriously. This playful capacity of humans brings us into our hearts and connects us with each other. Imagination helps us to create and express our inner world or something beyond ourselves.

"Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships." ― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Imagination
Imagination is one of the great gifts of being human.

The imagination is deeply affected by trauma, and while trauma impacts everyone differently, interestingly it can be both positive and negative.
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere." - Carl Sag

Features of the traumatised imagination


Trauma has a major impact on the imagination and memory. A traumatic experience shatters your sense of self and the world. Without the solidity of feeling secure, and the baseline of safety in your world, everything else is compromised. The effects of trauma such as hyper-vigilance, lack of sleep, physical deprivation, negative psychological outlook, emotional shutdown and numbness, of having an overly alert nervous system, or being unable to relax, have a profound impact on your quality of life.

Early childhood trauma even causes changes in the developing brain and later brain deficits.The first stage is the disruption of chemicals functioning as neurotransmitters, leading to greater stress responses in people and it has an impact on critical neural growth during important periods of childhood development.

Some common features of a traumatised imagination are numbing, psychic shut down - which limits creative expression, stuck modes of thinking, and high states of fear and adrenalin.

A traumatic experience shatters your sense of self and the world.

Trauma can also lead to:
  • Dissociation (splitting off or being disconnected with severed connections among your thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, and sense of identity),
  • Depersonalisation (a dream like feeling of being disengaged from yourself and your surroundings) and,
  • Derealisation (feeling that your surroundings are not real).
One of the world's foremost experts on trauma, Bessel van der Kolk says that traumatised people feel chronically unsafe inside their bodies and can get stuck in negative cycles.
"Many of my patients have survived trauma through tremendous courage and persistence, only to get into the same kinds of trouble over and over again. Trauma has shut down their inner compass and robbed them of the imagination they need to create something better."
Our intuition, gut feelings or instinct, alert us to what is safe and life sustaining. We are constantly receiving subtle messages to do with the needs of our body and wellbeing all the time. If we are cut off from these messages due to unprocessed trauma and the associated emotions, we don't register these signals.