The Existential Challenges of Stress, Trauma, and Psychopathology and Their Integration to the Self: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective

Abstract In much current research on stress, trauma, and psychopathology, there is a converging interest in the role of the stress response in engendering trauma, emotional dysregulation, and mental illness. Both the acute stressors known from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the early-life, persistent stressors involved in complex PTSD, may create a stress response that is not properly downregulated. This leaves the person in a permanent state of high arousal and hypervigilance, common characteristics of many psychiatric disorders. It is suggested that such stressors are examples of the challenges that confront everyone: trivial, optimal, or overwhelming. Trivial challenges are mundane, optimal challenges invite learning and development, and overwhelming challenges may lead to trauma and mental ill-being. For a promising perspective on life’s challenges, we turn to Self-Determination Theory (SDT). In SDT, mental health and human flourishing derive from the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: for autonomy, competence and relatedness, as well as from the integration of experiences and challenges to the self. It is proposed in this paper that the overwhelming challenges involved in trauma and psychopathology are experiences that frustrate or thwart psychological needs and thus fail to integrate to the self. Such experiences may still be internalized, albeit as “introjects”—“thrown in,” swallowed whole, not digested properly. They remain outside of the self, exerting pressure on it through guilt, shame, ego-involvement, pride, etc., in the process producing much anguish and mental pain. Thus, as challenges are part and parcel of the human experience, trauma and psychopathology appear as outcomes of human development, rather than as essentially incomprehensible aberrations.