Irene recently came to therapy because her anxiety had been revving up, resulting in sleepless nights, difficulty concentrating, and isolating. “I can’t tolerate all of the meanness in the world,” she said. For years, she had been markedly distressed by the political climate, and the recent war in Ukraine has made that worse.
Further probing revealed that Irene (not her real name) had survived a personal war. Growing up, she had been emotionally abused by her mother. “She called me stupid and told me how worthless I was,” Irene disclosed. As she confessed her secret, an out-of-place smile appeared on her face, but not before a fleeting expression showed her true emotion. Her wrinkled-up nose and protruded lower lip—the facial expression emotion researchers refer to as the “gape face”—betrayed her unconscious disgust toward her mother.
As trauma psychotherapists, we know that helping patients process painful emotions is crucial for recovery. However, research shows that disgust is often overlooked in therapy, to the detriment of the patient. Disgust is important to understand for trauma treatment, especially in the face of current events like the pandemic, political unrest, the rise in hate crimes against people of color, and war.
Named by neuroscientists as one of humans’ first evolving emotions, disgust is a natural response to poisonous stimuli like rotten foods, infectious diseases, and unsafe environments. In this way, disgust helps us ward off illness and danger. However, what many people don’t realize is that this emotion also arises when we’re violated, oppressed, and abused—all forms of trauma that can lead to anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
For trauma survivors, disgust exerts a force to be experienced (named, felt, listened to, and released). But when people come in for therapy, they don’t disclose their disgust by name. They can’t, because it’s buried by defenses to block it from conscious awareness. All that the survivors feel are symptoms like anxiety, depression, and low self-confidence.
[To read the rest of this article by Hilary Jacobs Hendel and Julie Fraga, click here.]
[Images: Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Ümit Bulut on Unsplash.]
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