The aim of this master thesis was to investigate whether cessation of (high, medium, and low) exposure to trauma is associated with traumatic stress symptoms, physical symptoms, and alexithymia in young adults. The survey was conducted on a sample of 188 participants (38.3% men, 61.2% women and 0.5% binary people). Participants completed 4 measurement questionnaires: Brief Betrayal Trauma Questionnaire, Trauma Symptom Checklist-40, Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire, and Client Health Questionnaire-Physical Symptoms. Correlation analyzes were performed on the basis of the obtained results. Due to the lower representativeness of the sample, generalization may be questionable. Findings indicated that there isn’t a statistically significant correlation between trauma with high, medium, and low betrayal levels and general levels of alexithymia in young adults. However, there is a small association between exposure to trauma with a high level of betrayal (sig < 0.05) for difficulties in general evaluation of recent positive and negative emotions in young adults, and a small association between exposure to medium betrayal trauma and, difficulties in general evaluation of recent positive and negative emotions and general difficulties in evaluating emotions (sig. < 0.05). The results also show that there is an association between the trauma exposure score with high, medium and low betrayal scores and the presence of physical symptoms in young adults. The correlation reached a correlation of 0.322 and 0.403 at the 1% risk level for the high and medium betrayal exposure levels, and 0.166 at the 5% risk level for the low betrayal trauma exposure level. We also found that there was an association between exposure to high-, medium-, and low-betrayal trauma and symptoms of traumatic stress, including dissociation, anxiety, sexual abuse index, sleep disturbances, sexual problems, and depression. The research also found that there were statistically significant gender differences in the rate of exposure to high betrayal traumatic events, meaning that women are more likely to be exposed to high betrayal traumatic events.
The results confirm that betrayal trauma is associated with psychological and physical well-being, and that some features of alexithymia nevertheless occur in individuals' lives. In the future, it would be interesting to further investigate how the experience of emotions or their regulation affects a person's self-perception in stressful or traumatic situations.
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