Infective Messages: Definitions, Processes, and Implications for Trauma, Identities, Internal Conflicts, Psychotherapy, and Research.

Background Throughout life, individuals are bombarded by countless emotion-generating messages. Certain of these messages, for example, some insults, admonitions, rejections, challenges, or insightful declarations, can be viewed as "infective." Infective messages shock, puncture, adhere, disturb, and generate discernable host responses that assimilate, accommodate, or repel the intruding messages. Messages originating in one's own mind can stimulate psychological equivalents of autoimmune responses. Sometimes, these messages produce enduring psychological changes. Infective messages may traumatize, organize, or therapize. The aims of this article are to consider how infective messages a) relate to their messengers (vectors), structural characteristics, and recipient (host) factors; b) might contribute to trauma, personal identity formation, psychological conflicts, and emotional self-regulatory and cognitive heuristics; c) might inform the conduct of psychotherapy; and d) suggest future research. Methods Clinical observations were augmented with selective literature reviews. These sources contributed to perspectives regarding how certain messages might become infective; contribute to trauma, complex aspects of identity formation, and inner conflict; and inform the conduct of psychotherapy. Results Infective messages are commonly characterized by short, cogent communications emanating from credible sources that fall on vulnerable recipients' receptive, dispositional feeling states. These infective stimuli trigger reactive and defensive emotions and associated behaviors reflecting responses to significant threats or benefits relative to the individual's deepest needs, motivations, and values. Defensive overreactions may occur in response to messages to which individuals have been previously sensitized. Infective message contents appear to assimilate into constantly evolving, dynamic autobiographical brain maps consisting of highly specific neuronal networks that range from the brainstem through limbic structures to multiple cortical areas. Autobiographical maps built from message-injected contents may transform, akin to the incorporation of retroviruses or prions, to encode personal identities as aspects of the self. Contrasting maps may exist semi-independently of one another, continuously evolving, interacting, combining, dividing, conflicting, and contending with one another for attention. Achieving attentional awareness, such maps help structure how individuals conceptualize and communicate about their encoded traumas, diverse identities, and the conflicts among them. Conclusions and implications During psychotherapy, aftereffects of traumatizing infective messages might be detoxified by deconstructing, desensitizing, and processing messages' precise words and emotional envelopes in relation to contexts in which they were delivered, and the individual's inner dispositions at moments of impact. Carefully crafted, timely interpretations can be therapeutically infective, generating enduring positive impacts. Future studies using an assortment of approaches can test these perspectives.