Coping With Trauma -- Final Excerpt

A final excerpt from Coping With Trauma:

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Finding your way out of meaninglessness is a major step, but there is another -- finding hope. My mentor, Paul Pruyser [Pruyser PW: Maintaining hope in adversity. Bull Menninger Clin 51:463-474, 1987], saw early attachments as the wellspring of hope: "hoping is based on a belief that there is some benevolent disposition toward oneself somewhere in the universe, conveyed by a caring person." He must have been right; hopelessness is a glaring result of trauma in relationships with caregivers. But the search for benevolent attachment is rarely squelched, even in those who have suffered dire childhood trauma. The quest for secure attachment and hope thus conjointly lay the foundation for coping with trauma:

I suggest that hoping may be a third basic type of response that does not have the
vehement aggressivity of fighting nor the limp abdication of fleeing. If
hoping is developmentally based on having experienced the mutuality of trust and
having received some benevolent care, a person may be prepared by such
experiences for meeting adverse circumstances with quiet courage rather than in
a competitive fighting posture or in meek retreat. The fight and the
flight responses are reflex actions programmed in the limbic system; hoping
is a much more thoughtful response that presupposes consciousness, freedom, and
choosing, and is surely organized at cortical levels of brain action. [Ibid, p. 472]

Beyond fight or flight, there is hope.

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Source information:
Jon G. Allen, Ph.D., Coping With Trauma: A Guide to Self-understanding, American Psychiatric Press, Inc., 1995