Editorial
Triggering Cascade, Trauma Imprinting, and Total Reactance
Author Affiliations
1 Visiting Professor, Department of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-onDon, Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Corresponding Author
Sam Vaknin, Department of Psychology and Finance: , Southern Federal University, Rostov-onDon, Russian Federation
Citation
Vaknin S. Triggering Cascade, Trauma
Imprinting, and Total Reactance. J psychiatric
Stud. 2020 Jan;1(1):102
© 2020 Vaknin S. This is an
open-access article distributed under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 international License, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the
original author and source are credited.
Introduction
“Triggering cascade” is when a seemingly minor trigger results in vastly disproportional
trauma. Painful memories, replete with the attendant negative emotions, are walled behind
mental barriers: combinations of dams and firewalls.
Sometimes even an innocuous mishap or a merely unpleasant event rupture these
defenses and decades of hurt are released in an avalanche that, at times, can be life
threatening.
Narcissists and psychopaths are dream wreckers they are particularly adept at
provoking triggering cascades by aggressively and contemptuously frustrating both
individual and social expectations, cherished and life-sustaining hopes, deeply held beliefs,
and ingrained fantasies and values.
Their lack of empathy, innate, goal focused cruelty and ruthlessness, absent impulse
control, and mind boggling recklessness create a whiplash of shock and disorientation
coupled with agony and a pervasive feeling of being existentially negated. Intolerable angst
is the inevitable outcome.
Total Reactance
characterizes Psychopaths, Borderlines, trauma victims (PTSD and CPTSD), and people
with mood disorders and impulse control issues. They escalate every conflict, however
minor or imaginary, to the level of nuclear, apocalyptic, all-annihilating warfare and make
disproportionate use of every weapon in their arsenal simultaneously. Defiance, posturing,
hostility, aggression, recklessness, and abuse are part and parcel of these recurrent pitched
battles with one and sundry: all bridges are burnt and relationships are shattered hurtfully
and irrevocably.
In contrast, the reactions of healthy people are differential, in kind, and proportional,
weighing the consequences and correcting course every step of the confrontation.Trauma Imprints
Everything and everyone involved or present in the stressful event, however
tangentially. Places, people, smells, sounds, circumstances, objects, dates,
and categories of the above, all get “stamped” with the traumatic experience.
Trauma imprinting is at the core of PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), CPTSD (Complex
PTSD), and triggering.
Triggers are places, people, smells, sounds, circumstances, dates, or objects that are
reminiscent of the same classes of stressors involved in the original trauma and evoke them
