The Long-Lasting Impact of Trauma Pt. 2

As we discussed previously, trauma is something that may have been fairly imperceptible in our lives.  We may not fully grasp the ways that we were traumatized nor are we likely able to put a finger on a specific event that had an impact on us for a lifetime.  Yet here we are together in the therapy room talking about our trauma.  We touched on fawning behaviors in part 1, focusing on how the messaging we receive in our childhood makes us feel less than and keeps us from being able to adequately express ourselves, our needs, wants, and feelings to others for fear of costing us that relationship.  To expound on that idea, our parents or similar caregivers are the first relationship we will ever have.  This means we pick up so much from them.  We derive value from the way they treat us, speak to us, and tend to us when we have needs.  We see how they relate to others and may learn to emulate that.  So when they ignore us or tell us to be quiet because the tv show they are watching is more important, we recognize how little value we have.  Beyond that, if there is conflict in the home, we often will emulate one parent’s response or adapt our own response that works to counteract that of the other parent.  Inevitably, we wind up exactly like one of our parents in the same situation or acting in such a way as to soothe the other parent.  Learning to anticipate other's reactions and working to appease them before they hit a melting point becomes almost like a survival skill for us. 

Another “survival skill” we may learn and master in our childhood is akin to dissociating.  We become overwhelmed with everything we are facing and cannot handle any additional negativity, so we disconnect.  This looks different based on the person and the severity of the trauma they have been exposed to.  For some, this is just hiding in a room and playing video games, losing ourselves in this other world and a story that allows us to escape the pain that we have been living with.  Since video games are normal, nobody sees this as us deviating from what a normal person does, but they fail to miss the fact that we are playing an exorbitant amount and that we seldom interact with anyone else. 

For others, they respond to trauma by simply not acknowledging the “shit” around them.  Maybe we see our parents fight and instead of thinking “wow, they are really going at it” we think they are just talking loudly or behaving normally in some way.  Because for us, this thing that was big and scary at one point is now our normal.  We live with these fights and loud angry voices on an ongoing basis.  There’s nothing to see here, this is just how married people are.  This unfolds into the rest of our lives where we essentially turn a blind eye to anything that may be upsetting to us.  We may have a partner who is an alcoholic but rather than recognizing that and trying to intervene or allowing ourselves the ability to leave we normalize the behavior.  “They have been working so hard and are so stressed out, it’s normal to have a glass of that in the evening to unwind and relax” while somehow ignoring the fact that gallons of liquor are being consumed on a weekly basis, and the alcohol bill may be catching up to the food bill.

We work tremendously hard to avoid conflict because that is the lesson we learned.  This means that if someone is angry with us, we may just shut down completely.  Their loud angry voice takes us back to that place when we were small and defenseless and felt helpless as one parent was yelling at the other.  In the moments we are unable to escape into one of our fantasies either through escapism or through selective ignorance, we simply shut down, not responding to nor engaging in this onslaught of anger coming our way because we have no other survival tool at our disposal in the moment.  Unfortunately, because we follow patterns we learned early in life, this likely means that this person spewing white-hot anger our way is only going to become further incensed at our failure to engage with them.  They will view us as having checked out and only push harder on our boundaries in an effort to get some response, literally any response out of us.  In the meantime, we are standing there essentially pulling the blanket over our heads in an effort to have this stop, hanging on for dear life and praying that your silence will yield some safety soon.

These responses, and ones similar to them are all called “freeze” responses.We are in essence doing that thing that the old stories would say about when you encounter a bear in the wild, simply play dead and they will leave you be.We are trying to be very still emotionally so that we don’t have to suffer any further pain.We seek out ways to escape, not physically but emotionally.We can still be present in body, but we will not be attached with any consequence to reality.Instead we maintain a relatively loose attachment which means that we are unable to actually have a real and deep relationship.The moment conflict arises we are checked out and unable to resolve it because it takes us back to that place where we have to hide in our own reality, rather than risk the pain of walking out into the barrage of actual reality.We seize on an idea of what perfection and acceptable behavior is, and if something deviates from that, we simply allow it to go away because the fear of being alone is far less painful than the fear of continuing to suffer.