Unraveling intrusions
Thesis Patricia Dashorst (2023)
‘Intrusions’ are spontaneously, involuntarily intruding images or thoughts of a traumatic event. Shocking experiences are often the trigger, for instance in the context of violence, disasters or war. In her thesis, Patricia Dashorst shows that people can also have intrusions about events they did not experience themselves.
In most people, intrusions of a shocking event are present for only a short period of time. In others, they remain intrusive for longer periods or appear later in life and can then be symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Clinical observations show that intrusions can also relate to situations where one was not present in person. Psychiatrist and systemic therapist Dashorst studied intrusions in about 100 people born after World War II. These were patients who were in treatment because of symptoms associated with growing up as a child in a family with parents who had survived atrocities in World War II. In the group studied, intrusions about self (direct) and non-self (indirect) experienced events were found to be equally frequent and to have similar characteristics. A difference was found in fantasy proneness as a personality trait, which was found to have a unique and strong correlation with indirect intrusions.
The patients studied by Dashorst had parents who had survived World War II. The indirect intrusions the (adult) children struggled with were related to gruesome scenes, such as atrocities in Nazi concentration camps, gas chambers, Japanese internment camps and deportations. Visual images of dying people, corpses, violence, humiliation, disease, starvation and being separated from family members were described. As an example from her own clinical practice, Dashorst cited the son of a Holocaust survivor. He recounted intrusions with detailed depictions of children being murdered in gas chambers. Often the intrusions contained emotions such as anxiety, fear and vulnerability and were usually told from the first-person perspective.
The occurrence of intrusions indicates how great the long-term consequences of negative events can be, even for non-primarily affected people. Dashorst: ‘It also makes the research relevant for now, because of the far-reaching consequences of war. There is no reason to assume that children of survivors of other wars, for example those from Afghanistan, Syria, Rwanda, Ukraine, Israel, or children of victims of domestic or work-related violence will be protected from it.' And that includes children yet to be born.
Uitgever
ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre