Identity Oriented Psychotrauma Theory

Original Editor - Andrea Sturm

Top Contributors - Vidya Acharya, Kim Jackson, Tarina van der Stockt, Tony Lowe and Jess Bell  

Identity Oriented Psycho Trauma Theory (IoPT)

Professor Dr. Franz Ruppert developed the theories and practice of Identity oriented Psycho Trauma Theory (IoPT) over the last 30 years. This framework was developed using existing theories and experiences gained through individual and group therapy sessions. He has written many books on this topic and currently, six of these books are available in English. "Prof. Dr. Ruppert has devoted his time to understanding the living human organism (LHO), how trauma affects the whole LHO and how to recover from the effect of trauma to gain a healthy self and a healthy will, despite traumatisation."

Healing from either physical or mental disorders needs a goal. According to Prof. Dr. Ruppert this "equates to fully and completely living one's own identity, so that we can express and realise what is at the core of our being". In order to be in touch with our own identity we "need a healthy self, a free will and to be in close emotional contact with our body".

What is Understood as ‘Identity’ in IoPT?

Identity Means:

• A healthy ‘I’ (in the sense of a psychological ‘ego’ as an executive function of the human psyche)
• With my own free will
• With all my senses
• In contact with my body
• With my own feelings
• With my own words
• In all my relationships

What Does ‘Healthy I’ Mean in This Context?

• Being present, but not dominating
• Being flexible in altering situations
• Being realistic what is possible and what not
• Being able to accept surviving parts and traumatised parts of my psyche
• Taking responsibility for a healthy identity-development
• Having a free will on one’s side

Psychotrauma Produces the Need and the Habit for…

• Looking for substitute-identities (e.g. a professional role to hide behind)
• Accepting attributions without doubts
• Inappropriately clinging to another person (e.g. to a partner, an own child, a therapist, an ‘authority’)
• Hiding one’s I behind a ‘We’ (relationship, family, company, ‘system’, nation etc.)
• Identifying with the behavior of perpetrators (e.g. with the violent mother or father). This could mean in the case where you were treated badly in your early life you could treat yourself (or others) badly later as well. The same would be true if the existential needs of being loved, protected and wanted were being ignored, or when someone has experienced destructive, violent or abusive behaviors.

The More Extreme the Psychotrauma Was, the More Urgent Is the Need for…

• re-defining oneself (e.g. ‘It didn’t affect me!’)
• self-denial (e.g. ‘I was not beaten / sexually abused!’)
• disengaging the ‘I’ from the body (e.g. ‘My body is sick!’ ‘My body needs to be fixed by a specialist!’)
• dissolving the ‘I’ (e.g. through drug usage or withdrawing into a state of confusion)

The Surviving I-States Turns …

• individuals into split personalities, who experience this as normal and their true identity
• humans into objects, who accept this as their identity
• Men and women into functioning machines, without any connection to their healthy ‘I’ and their body
• Originally loving babies into egoists and psychopaths in later life

Healthy Identity

• Is the sum of all conscious and unconscious life experiences
• Including beautiful days as well as the trauma
• You can‘t leave anything out without denying yourself.

"IoPT therapy is based on a specific understanding of trauma, and psychological splitting as the means of surviving trauma".

The diagram shows the split structure of the psyche after a trauma. Trauma is a situation that pays no attention to individual identity, and the cost is a loss of self, a loss of identity. This is why Dr. Ruppert's approach is called Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Theory

Every person has a history of trauma, called a trauma biography. The traumas we go through have major influence on who we become later in life, it also affects how we deal with trauma later in life, and influences our relationship and abilities. Every traumatic event later in our life carries the re-traumatisation seed of the original trauma.

Perpetrator - Victim Dynamics Within a Person’s Psyche

• A person becomes a perpetrator if he/she harms someone else (violence, murder, theft, betrayal, dishonesty) or does not give the necessary support (lack of food, contact and love).
• A person becomes a victim by experiencing harm to his/her body and psyche (from natural disasters, or other human beings)
• Someone can be a perpetrator both consciously and unconsciously.
• The harm inflicted or experienced can be small or big.
• People can be perpetrators towards themselves. (e.g. self-destructive behaviors like substance abuse, highly risky lifestyle, ignoring his or her own needs, …)

Harm as a Traumatic Experience

• The victim feels helpless and powerless
• His or her stress reactions (fight or flight) could persist and make the harm even greater
• Blocking, freezing, dissociating, and splitting behaviors are for survival and called psychic emergency reactions

Victim-Perpetrator-Splitting

• Splitting off victim-experiences creates perpetrator attitudes in the victim as survival-strategies

• Numbness towards oneself makes a person unempathetic towards other people
• Victims can also become perpetrators, being not aware of their victim and their perpetrator attitudes/behaviours
• Victims become perpetrators towards others when they can‘t feel and realise their own trauma
• In one person victim- and perpetrator-attitudes can alter from moment to moment
• Self-destruction and destruction of others go hand in hand.

Possible Consequences of Perpetrator-Victim Splitting

• Their bevaviour swings between victim- and perpetrator attitudes
• Feelings alternate between powerlessness and rebellious fury
• Aggression and depression is seen as normal in relationships
• Personality disorders, Psychosis, Schizophrenia, Delusion, Self-destruction, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Suicide
• Chronic diseases, e.g. autoimmune diseases, cancer
• Criminal behaviour
• A vicious cycle causing more and more people to be sucked in
• A vicious cycle that goes on for generations
• Violence, murder, incest and sexual abuse become normal
• The consequence is the traumatisation of a whole bonding system that is dominated by trauma
• Revenge insues against innocent others
• Illusions of love as a fragile basis for living together with others

How to Overcome the Victim Attitude

• Acknowledge being a victim, i.e. feel your own trauma
• Perceive and accept the harm that has been done to you
• Feel compassion for yourself
• Claim compensation from the person who was/is the perpetrator
• Renounce the need for revenge

How to Overcome the Perpetrator Attitude

• Acknowledge the facts and deeds
• Accept guilt and responsibility
• Feel the shame about the harm that was done to others
• Feel empathy towards the victim
• Offer compensation, by making appropriate amends
• Renounce the need for lifelong atonement

Living Beyond Perpetrator-Victim Attitudes

• Leave systems that are caught up in perpetrator-victim-dynamics
• Make healthy contact with yourself, create healthy autonomy and clear boundaries
• Work on self-respect and the ability to deal with conflicts
• Live in constructive relationships that are fulfilling symbiotic needs
• Create win-win instead of win-lose-situations
• Find out what healthy anxiety, rage, and love are

Many Traumatised Humans Together Create a Traumatised and Traumatising Society

These are only a few ‘symptoms’ of traumatised and traumatising societies:

• Different forms of drug abuse and addictive behaviours
• High rates of chronic health problems and a health care system that produces new health traumas
• High rates of mental illness, and a psychiatric system that is traumatising
• A high suicide rate
• Pornography, prostitution, criminal gangs
• A highly competitive educational system
• A highly competitive economic system
• A rich few, and a mass of poor people
• An economy that produces systematically losers
• Manipulation of thinking by the mass media
• Racism and prejudice in all its forms (race, gender, colour, religion)

Resources

You can find more information and useful resources on Dr. Ruppert’s website: https://www.franz-ruppert.de/de/9-startseite/64-general-information-in-english