When people go through traumatic experiences, they often develop somatic symptoms that are the bodily expressions of deep psychological issues resulting from the trauma. This article analyzes the effects of trauma at the level of protocol with special attention to tortured individuals who have wounds that were intentionally and repeatedly inflicted by another. The author describes how such trauma is embodied in the subsymbolic mode, which involves the affective, somatic, sensory, and motor modes of mental processing. She shows how a traumatic experience in adulthood deeply impacts and changes the protocol level of the victim's psychological script. Special attention is given to the experience of violence and how intrapsychic and interpersonal changes resulting from trauma are represented in the therapeutic relationship through a subsymbolic mode. The author also describes how these understandings can be used in therapeutic work with traumatized individuals to help them change not through a cognitive process but through an actual relational experience.
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