Trauma

October 23, 2023

This article is designed to be a non extensive article about trauma and therefore will have great limitations. My aim is to give the reader some understanding about the gravity and the importance of addressing ones own trauma. Having a glimpse of ones own value is necessary to start the healing process. This gives a bit of truth to stand on to begin the rescue of oneself out of confusion and heartbreak. It is never too late to start.

Hallmarks of trauma
There are many, many, many hallmarks of trauma. I will primarily address a more long standing trauma as opposed to an acute, recent, and limited trauma. If you have experienced a single event trauma, you may have one or two of these symptoms but it is unlikely that you will have more. The following is a non exhaustive list of what to look for. Examples are as follows:

No Resting Place
Most people can sit and rest within themselves when they try. Imagine being by yourself, around a campfire, at peace with yourself. This is a resting space that is usually available to people when it is sought after. Trauma can create enough inner turmoil that this inner resting place is inaccessible. This is experienced as an inability to escape inner agitation, inner fear, and inner hurt. Since inner hurt is often experienced, the person avoids anything that may poke at the hurt. This eventually leads to avoidance of encountering quieter moments for fear of encountering inner agitation, fear, hurt.

Intolerable Feelings
Intolerable feelings are feelings that need your assistance. Those feelings are trying to get your attention. It may be coming from a very young and terrified part of you, therefore you can count on intense feelings to be illogical and immature. Intolerable feelings are a natural response to what has happened to you during the traumatizing event. Belittling them or avoiding them will only increase agitation.

Imagination About the Future Reflects Experience
We all have past experience. Our mind’s job is to make sense of the events of our lives. But there is no productive narrative that comes from trauma. Trauma is not going to make sense in a way that will propel you toward a healthy outlook about the future. Knowing this is useful since it informs you to not trust your thoughts that tell you about an awful future. Your brain contains your past experience. Your brain can only put together pieces of life in a way that makes sense, something that will fit with past experience. Your brain will use past experience to create an imagined future. The brain is an unbelievably complex tool but it is not useful for imagining a future if you have a history of trauma. The brain, in this capacity, is not to be trustedLack of a Healthy Relationship With Yourself
Part of a healthy relationship with yourself is to learn what to trust inside your brain and what not to trust. This is true of all human beings but with trauma it will be more of a challenge. We all have experienced shame and regret because we have all made mistakes big and small. With trauma, shame and/or may be avoided because no one has been a role model as to how to work with these complex emotions. Shame and regret are only two examples of complex emotion that may show up. There may be others. You do not want to avoid these complex emotions. You want to be able to show up for them, be curious about them, and work toward understanding them.

Hating Yourself
This is usually unconscious but one way to spot self hatred is to watch how you treat yourself during a crisis. There may be an explosion of cruelty toward yourself during a crisis. Another way to look for self hatred is to look at your actions. Notice how often you force yourself to do something against your will. When a large part of you does not want to do a thing, and you do it anyway, it hurts. Forcing yourself to do things you don’t feel good about is one way self hatred can show up in your life.

Hating parts of yourself is self abuse. If you hate any part of yourself, you are at risk for attracting someone who will mirror this back to you. You may find yourself in chronically confused relationships.

Obsession
Obsession is all consuming. Often (not always) obsession focuses on a relationship. Obsession is experienced as an unrelenting, exhausting, hyper-focus, and is nestled inside of a cascade of panic. This is often due to an earlier attachment disruption. When an attachment disruption is perceived it can prompt a visceral flashback. A visceral flashback is basically what it sounds like. An intense deep negative feeling that starts in the body, and then that message is conveyed to the brain. The entire nervous system gets recruited to laser focus on a single person or event. Usually the focus is on some sort of relationship. The obsession is panic that stems from deep sorrow. The obsession is often aimed at reestablishing connection.

Dissociation
We don’t dissociate bad things, we dissociate what our minds can’t believe or comprehend. This means if something overwhelmingly positive happens or if something overwhelmingly negative happens, the mind may shift the memory to a barely conscious space or to an unconscious space in the mind. Either creates a reality that is distorted and encourages a person to play out unhealthy roles that were assigned long ago.

Learned Helplessness
There are two prominent types of learned helplessness. One type of learned helplessness gets activated when you try and fail, repeatedly, to connect with someone you care about. What commonly follows is deep despondency or anger or both. After this pattern is played out for years, the pattern has been deeply learned. Unfortunately, when there is a new experience with a person who has the capacity to maintain a constant and solid connection, it is not what is familiar. The positive solid connection pushes against what has been experienced and it may feel uncomfortable. A very positive experience may bring up deep discomfort and the brain will make a go of making sense of it. What a traumatized brain knits together is often wrong.

Learned helplessness may show up as taking on a role that reflects a lack of competency. Competency can create turmoil within a fragile social dynamic or within a fragile single person. Competency can feel threatening to someone who has a combination of low self esteem and fear. Competency may be viewed as arrogance through the lens of low self esteem. In this dynamic, competency needs to be shut down to gain a safe equilibrium. Developing confidence in a skill set may exacerbate fear in a fragile family system. This message of competency being dangerous is broadcasted through the family. It effects children especially since children are masters of surviving their environment. Children will do what is necessary to maintain a connection with their caregiver, however limited that connection is. But when the pattern is engrained in the child’s nervous system, when the child becomes an adult, that tendency is still there. The child, now adult, will often repeat patterns that seemed useful during childhood. There is an internal message, a confused kind of knowing, that competency is somehow dangerous and not valued. This needs to be considered as a possibility so it can be addressed on a conscious level.

Numbness
When intolerable feelings are experienced consciously, an emotional storm may break through. Prior to that emotional storm, a numbness had been surrounding the trauma cascade of intolerable feelings. When there is a foundation of safety, some of the numbness wears away and intolerable feelings may surface. The human brain is likely to read this incorrectly and assume there is a problem. This may even prompt some to place themselves in dangerous situations which will promptly reinstate the numbness. But the hurt, pain, and confusion are still there. A healthy life comes by way of carefully navigating through the intolerable feelings, and by allowing the deep pain to come into conscious awareness. Deep pain is the natural response to the harm that has been inflicted upon you, harm that you have inflicted on another, or both.

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The brains job is to make sense of things and create a kind of equilibrium. In this regard our brains are not very sophisticated. The brain’s equilibrium can be seated in an unhealthy dynamic. It takes real effort and real interest and real care to start to understand what your brain is telling you. Part of this is about feeling through the confused feelings, coming to a deep understanding of the harm that has been done, and to gently see and correct what lies your brain is telling you. The above list of patterned thoughts and behaviors can give you a jumping off point to observe what influences your behavior. Being curious and patient with yourself is vital and cannot be overstated.

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Now we will shift gears and talk about what will and will not be useful.

Burrowing
Burrowing is a healthy coping strategy. Burrowing is often used when someone has been in a prolonged abusive situation. Burrowing includes going into a quiet, private room with very little stimulus, ample comfort, to do nothing. The person may lay on the floor and stare at a wall for a few hours. This is an act of self love as the body and mind seek to find protection and deep rest.

Logic
After experiencing trauma, an emotional storm may be living quietly in your nervous system. Logic will not hold up against this storm once it breaks through. This emotional storm is the storm that was avoided at the time of trauma. Depending on your support system and how stable you are, it may be wise to allow yourself to go into that storm for a limited amount of time. Assess your situation and determine if you need to go outside, read a book, take a bath, entertain yourself, or take medication. While you don’t want to avoid the emotional storm all together, this does not mean you don’t take a break, and come in out of the storm by way of doing something else. This is especially important if the storm feels dangerous. Some people can go all the way into the emotional storm with no resistance safely, and some are not prepared to do so. Being careful with yourself is a way that you can build trust with yourself. Being careful with yourself is part of how you will navigate the storms effectively.

Willingness
There needs to be a willingness to reach out for help when you need it. This may mean finding a therapist but a good friend can be helpful too. What is most important here is two things: that the person is honest with you, and that you, in return, find the capacity to be honest with them.

Blame
Blame can be a useful phase of healing. When used beyond a particular phase of healing, it becomes toxic to your nervous system. Keep an eye on where it is moving inside of you—is it moving toward healing or toward whipping up a toxic storm of hate?

Clean Up Your Thinking
When you have abusive thoughts of “I deserve this,” or “I’m a piece of shit,” notice them. Write them down. Look at what evidence you have to support these very broad and unspecific statements. See if you can make the statements more specific and more reflective of something in reality. You may find that there has been a regrettable action. This can be useful to you as you look to see what lead to problematic decisions and/or actions.

Remember, imagination about the future reflects past experience. As you move forward with life, keep this in your awareness. Instead of imagining what your future may hold, make efforts to do the next obvious thing as it relates to your wellbeing. When your brain goes back to creating a problematic future, bring your focus back to doing the next obvious thing that supports your well being.

If you allow problematic thoughts to continue, neglect to give them attention, your brain, by shear repetition, is prone to believing those problematic thoughts. Our strangest actions are usually based in keeping us safe and they start with imagination. Get repetitive thought patterns down on paper. Stabilize them by noticing them and start working with them.

Medication
Medication can be useful in a number of ways and here are a few examples:

If you have obsessive thoughts, medication can help with the intensity of those thoughts. Obsession often stems from an attachment rupture and that will need to be sorted through and understood. Medication can mute the obsessive thoughts which can help you focus on something that will support your well being.

Medication can be useful when your emotions are taking you too close to emotional chaos and destruction. Medication can make it more likely you don’t get so close to the emotional chaos and destruction in the first place.

Medication can make it more likely that you don’t get swallowed up when you move toward a visceral flashback or other form of decompensation. It can help contain your experience within a safe window of tolerance.

Relationships
Relationships can be extraordinarily healing, however, you are the only person who is going to be able to give you long term stability. Go toward relationships that have a deep sense of enjoyment. Traumatized people tend to believe that the relationships that make them light up inside are not available to them long term. What is longed for has never been given as a child, and this is the message that resonates in the nervous system. This creates problems because it is a lie. Love and belonging is possible for you. However, love and belonging may churn up intense and unstable emotion. The churned up emotion can be worked through as you move toward a healthy relationship. Lost and confused feelings can be navigated, understood, and brought home to rest. An unwise option is to find an unhealthy relationship that feels dangerous and that will shut down feeling.

A trauma history can make you feel and believe that you are unloveable. It puts you at risk of choosing an unhealthy relationship which reflects that pain back to you. “The compulsion to repeat” plays out. Reach for people who you genuinely love and work with the confusion that arises. Relationships based in love are different from what has been experienced. Relationships based in love are from a world different than the one you have experienced. That different world will be a different world to navigate, to learn about, and well worth the journey. Otherwise, agreeable relationships based in lack will be found and they may turn darker than you could have imagined. Be extremely careful in your relationship choices. This is an act of self care.

Kindness
Kindness and compassion are natural expressions in our shared human condition. There is very little that will take root and heal trauma without authentic care and compassion. The first step is to imagine what that would look like. There are superficial expressions of care and compassion and then there is a deeper kind of showing up for yourself. As you can imagine, deeply showing up for yourself, and being present with your experience, is going to heal much more than a cognitive understanding of trauma. Ten years of research seeking to understand trauma will not make as much of a difference as investigating what it would look like to be kind to those parts of you that need expression and support. Your job is to go back and rescue little you from a dark mixed up world and bring him/her/they into the bright light of day.

Growth and Development
I will end on a brief note about growth and development. Growth of any kind is a stretching out of a current capacity. We can apply this to book learning or learning a skill. This can also apply this to growing physically. It can be applied to growing emotionally toward becoming a mature adult. All kinds of growing create tension, repeated failure, effort, and pain. This is important to know if you have a history of trauma. When there is trauma the natural pain of growth gets mixed up with shame and/or learned helplessness. This is important to know so when there is resistance to learning something about yourself, or resistance to being wrong, you know to step back, refuse to be hateful toward yourself or others, and find a different way forward. Don’t let learned helplessness stop you from learning. Don’t let shame or regret get in your way of learning. If there is a lack of emotional learning, you will risk getting stuck in a type of emotional infancy.

 

We are all growing emotionally and there will never be an end to deeper understanding. We are all on this journey of experiencing pain, feeling shame, feeling regret, making mistakes, being wrong, and failing. This can be done willingly and this leads to growth. The outcome of each growth spurt is love. If this does not make sense to you, it will the more you commit yourself to growth in the name of sanity. Change is always possible.