Some trauma theory
Aug. 13th, 2009 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gaudiorThree notes:
1) This is what I think right now (based on a fair bit of research and experience, but still). It is neither absolute truth nor what all theorists think, nor necessarily what I will think in twenty years.
2) While I've tried to make this sufficiently non-specific that it shouldn't be too triggery, I'm putting it behind a cut-tag anyway.
3) If anyone can tell me how I'm incorrect, I'd welcome additions and revisions.
How Trauma Works, and How You Recover
Something happens to you, and you are so hurt or violated or terrified that it's overwhelming. Some part of your mind says, "I can't bear this-- I will go mad if I have to live through this." And so your experience splits. Maybe you black out, maybe you feel like you've left your body and are watching this happening to someone else, maybe you just disconnect from your feelings. The point is that you have separated the unbearable feelings of that experience from the rest of your consciousness.
What happens next depends on a lot of things. Most people who experience any traumatic event-- rape, natural disaster, bombing, car accident-- spends the next few weeks to few months having the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, like nightmares, flashbacks, being easily startled, etc. Those are the symptoms of your mind trying to reintegrate something unbearable, trying to take the horrific and make it part of your worldview. Most people start out life with an illusion that we are special, immortal, protected from harm. A trauma disrupts that confidence, and if you're lucky, you spend the next several weeks after it figuring out how you can be safe-- seeing that you survived the experience, coming up with something you can do to prevent it from happening again. Studies have shown that the more action a person is able to take during a traumatic incident (e.g., coming up with a plan to keep the terrorists from harming you or your fellow hostages), the less PTSD s/he experiences. Also, the more support you have-- the more people listen to your feelings and offer you comfort and understanding-- the better you'll be able to integrate it. And you may end up just fine.
But often (about a third of the time, according to one study I can't now remember to cite), integrating the unbearable isn't so easy. Sometimes the event is too horrific to make sense of it. And, particularly devastatingly, sometimes the people around you deny that it's happened. One of the worst things for children who are abused, particularly children who are sexually abused, is that the abuser will tell you that you do not feel what you feel-- that you enjoy being hurt and violated, that you wanted this. Far from helping you to understand what you feel, your abuser divides the reality you experience from the reality everyone else asserts. Sexual abuse of young children can lead to survivors being delusional simply because they have no reason to trust consensual reality, because of a horrible confusion between the pain they feel and what everyone else tells them they should feel.
In those cases, the unbearable feelings are locked away from the rest of your experience. You have no way of coping with those emotions and going on with your life-- so you don't. Instead, you build strong walls against those feelings, to keep them out of your awareness.
Building the walls is hard work. You might need to put the whole memory of the event on the other side of the wall, lest remembering lets the feelings creep out and overwhelm you. You might keep the factual memory, but shut down all your other feelings as well, to keep the overwhelming ones out of your experience. You might need to split into entirely different personalities, so that the you who holds these memories is a different person from the person who lives the rest of your life.
There are side effects, of course. The emotions are locked away, not gone, and it takes energy to keep the walls in place. If you shut down all your feelings, you become numb, and you might starve yourself, binge, cut yourself, take drugs, drink, have desperate sex-- all just so you can feel something, feel alive. The walls may leak, so that your old fear, anger or sadness come out at random, leading to reactions out of proportion to the current provocation. You may keep just enough of the fear to remember that you must never trust anyone, that you must avoid getting close to someone who might hurt you-- while still keeping just enough of the loneliness and confusion that you desperately seek love from someone, anyone, who will hold you close and make it all make sense. Flashbacks and nightmares may throw you completely over the wall, trapping you for the moment on the other side, in the feelings of the original trauma, with no way of getting out. And because you don't realize that the initial trauma caused all of this, none of it makes sense, and you can only conclude that you're irredeemably fucked up and crazy.
You're not, though. You've done a marvelous feat of mental engineering to build the walls that let you survive and function through the initial trauma. And now you have a new engineering project: taking the walls down.
Once you take the walls down, once you have access to those old emotions, you can look at them with your adult, rational mind. Those experiences become part of your worldview. You can integrate them with your later, stronger, better-loved self. Once the walls are down, those dispossessed emotions and experiences again become part of your self and your life, and you're able to feel them without them overwhelming and destroying you. And then you have access to all your feelings, good and bad.
One thing that this theory means, then, is that the key to recovery is not necessarily reliving every memory of the trauma, but rather, recovering the feelings that came with them. A perfect memory isn't necessary for mental health-- we all forget all kinds of things, all the time, and it's usually not too problematic. But it's the loss of emotion-- and those emotions' clamoring against your internal walls-- that leads to all the problems I've described.
So one thing I've found in working with trauma survivors is that yes, we certainly can explore and re-experience the initial trauma in therapy, and that's (painful as hell, but) workable and (eventually) effective. But it can be just as effective, and much less destabilizing, to work on finding and integrating those emotions in your current life. You can find the terror of being raped in being yelled at by your boss, or trying to leave the house -- it resonates with the feelings behind the walls. You can find the rage of being violated in an argument with your lover, or a politician's smugness. The grief of the loss of a parent you thought loved and would protect you returns in the death of a pet, in a friend's canceling a plan.
All of which is a double-edged sword, because it can make your life far more fraught and chaotic than you'd like. But it also means that you can take down the walls-- slowly, carefully, with support. You can get back access to those parts of you that were taken. Over time, you can come to understand where your feelings come from, and what they mean. Gradually, usually through a relationship with someone who empathizes and proves him/herself trustworthy again and again and again, you learn the difference between what's going on now and what went on when you were being traumatized. Slowly, step by step, you come to understand your feelings, and to have feelings about matters you could only understand intellectually. You never become exactly as you were before the trauma-- but I believe that you can get to the point where you've learned tremendous self-understanding, where you know your inner landscape and architecture, and you don't bang your head into your internal walls any more.
1) This is what I think right now (based on a fair bit of research and experience, but still). It is neither absolute truth nor what all theorists think, nor necessarily what I will think in twenty years.
2) While I've tried to make this sufficiently non-specific that it shouldn't be too triggery, I'm putting it behind a cut-tag anyway.
3) If anyone can tell me how I'm incorrect, I'd welcome additions and revisions.
How Trauma Works, and How You Recover
Something happens to you, and you are so hurt or violated or terrified that it's overwhelming. Some part of your mind says, "I can't bear this-- I will go mad if I have to live through this." And so your experience splits. Maybe you black out, maybe you feel like you've left your body and are watching this happening to someone else, maybe you just disconnect from your feelings. The point is that you have separated the unbearable feelings of that experience from the rest of your consciousness.
What happens next depends on a lot of things. Most people who experience any traumatic event-- rape, natural disaster, bombing, car accident-- spends the next few weeks to few months having the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, like nightmares, flashbacks, being easily startled, etc. Those are the symptoms of your mind trying to reintegrate something unbearable, trying to take the horrific and make it part of your worldview. Most people start out life with an illusion that we are special, immortal, protected from harm. A trauma disrupts that confidence, and if you're lucky, you spend the next several weeks after it figuring out how you can be safe-- seeing that you survived the experience, coming up with something you can do to prevent it from happening again. Studies have shown that the more action a person is able to take during a traumatic incident (e.g., coming up with a plan to keep the terrorists from harming you or your fellow hostages), the less PTSD s/he experiences. Also, the more support you have-- the more people listen to your feelings and offer you comfort and understanding-- the better you'll be able to integrate it. And you may end up just fine.
But often (about a third of the time, according to one study I can't now remember to cite), integrating the unbearable isn't so easy. Sometimes the event is too horrific to make sense of it. And, particularly devastatingly, sometimes the people around you deny that it's happened. One of the worst things for children who are abused, particularly children who are sexually abused, is that the abuser will tell you that you do not feel what you feel-- that you enjoy being hurt and violated, that you wanted this. Far from helping you to understand what you feel, your abuser divides the reality you experience from the reality everyone else asserts. Sexual abuse of young children can lead to survivors being delusional simply because they have no reason to trust consensual reality, because of a horrible confusion between the pain they feel and what everyone else tells them they should feel.
In those cases, the unbearable feelings are locked away from the rest of your experience. You have no way of coping with those emotions and going on with your life-- so you don't. Instead, you build strong walls against those feelings, to keep them out of your awareness.
Building the walls is hard work. You might need to put the whole memory of the event on the other side of the wall, lest remembering lets the feelings creep out and overwhelm you. You might keep the factual memory, but shut down all your other feelings as well, to keep the overwhelming ones out of your experience. You might need to split into entirely different personalities, so that the you who holds these memories is a different person from the person who lives the rest of your life.
There are side effects, of course. The emotions are locked away, not gone, and it takes energy to keep the walls in place. If you shut down all your feelings, you become numb, and you might starve yourself, binge, cut yourself, take drugs, drink, have desperate sex-- all just so you can feel something, feel alive. The walls may leak, so that your old fear, anger or sadness come out at random, leading to reactions out of proportion to the current provocation. You may keep just enough of the fear to remember that you must never trust anyone, that you must avoid getting close to someone who might hurt you-- while still keeping just enough of the loneliness and confusion that you desperately seek love from someone, anyone, who will hold you close and make it all make sense. Flashbacks and nightmares may throw you completely over the wall, trapping you for the moment on the other side, in the feelings of the original trauma, with no way of getting out. And because you don't realize that the initial trauma caused all of this, none of it makes sense, and you can only conclude that you're irredeemably fucked up and crazy.
You're not, though. You've done a marvelous feat of mental engineering to build the walls that let you survive and function through the initial trauma. And now you have a new engineering project: taking the walls down.
Once you take the walls down, once you have access to those old emotions, you can look at them with your adult, rational mind. Those experiences become part of your worldview. You can integrate them with your later, stronger, better-loved self. Once the walls are down, those dispossessed emotions and experiences again become part of your self and your life, and you're able to feel them without them overwhelming and destroying you. And then you have access to all your feelings, good and bad.
One thing that this theory means, then, is that the key to recovery is not necessarily reliving every memory of the trauma, but rather, recovering the feelings that came with them. A perfect memory isn't necessary for mental health-- we all forget all kinds of things, all the time, and it's usually not too problematic. But it's the loss of emotion-- and those emotions' clamoring against your internal walls-- that leads to all the problems I've described.
So one thing I've found in working with trauma survivors is that yes, we certainly can explore and re-experience the initial trauma in therapy, and that's (painful as hell, but) workable and (eventually) effective. But it can be just as effective, and much less destabilizing, to work on finding and integrating those emotions in your current life. You can find the terror of being raped in being yelled at by your boss, or trying to leave the house -- it resonates with the feelings behind the walls. You can find the rage of being violated in an argument with your lover, or a politician's smugness. The grief of the loss of a parent you thought loved and would protect you returns in the death of a pet, in a friend's canceling a plan.
All of which is a double-edged sword, because it can make your life far more fraught and chaotic than you'd like. But it also means that you can take down the walls-- slowly, carefully, with support. You can get back access to those parts of you that were taken. Over time, you can come to understand where your feelings come from, and what they mean. Gradually, usually through a relationship with someone who empathizes and proves him/herself trustworthy again and again and again, you learn the difference between what's going on now and what went on when you were being traumatized. Slowly, step by step, you come to understand your feelings, and to have feelings about matters you could only understand intellectually. You never become exactly as you were before the trauma-- but I believe that you can get to the point where you've learned tremendous self-understanding, where you know your inner landscape and architecture, and you don't bang your head into your internal walls any more.
