Projection is a conceptual look on an unconscious trauma response clinically known as trauma re-enactment. Trauma re-enactment refers to a victim’s compulsions and tendencies to replicate situations and reenact aspects of the original trauma as a contemporary experience in order to master, assimilate, integrate, and resolve the initial trauma in the past. Trauma reenactment is an outward expression of a victim’s inability to psychologically escape from their traumatic past.
While staged trauma reenactments in a therapeutic setting can benefit a victim in her healing process, this look reveals how trauma reenactment as a trauma response often leads to re-traumatization and re-victimization.
Lacking the internal resources, perspective, and introspection it takes to change the narrative and create an alternative and empowering ending, the initial trauma survivor is left with her hands tied behind her back, re-victimized in yet another traumatic experience. Without conscious intervention, processing, and healing, her sense of helplessness and powerlessness is perpetuated and she remains stuck in an endless pattern of re-victimization.
Trauma re-enactment serves as a powerful force in the fabrication of a victim's reality, post-abuse, and is a result of unprocessed psychosomatic trauma and victim-blaming and shaming narrative frameworks that are internalized from perpetrators and messages surrounding sexual abuse, sexual assault, and rape in our culture.
