The Long-Lasting Impact of Trauma Pt. 3

I hope by now you are beginning to see the impact of trauma on our lives from childhood forward.  The reality is that so many of us have been dealt this wound in childhood and it takes such a long time for it to come up and be exposed.  The good news is that once it is discovered, no matter how long it may have festered nor how deep the wound, it is treatable and there is hope.  However, the treatment requires effort and patience and persistence.  We will struggle to change our ways and to adapt to this new version of life where the burden of our past is not so heavy and where we are able to effectively manage the pain and the expectations we have beset upon ourselves because of the messaging we received for often decades before it came to a head.  The expectation we have placed upon ourselves come from a variety of sources, but we have allowed them to become our very own.  We have lax (putting it mildly) boundaries and allow ourselves to take on other’s responsibilities.  We do whatever we can to deal with something that takes us back to our small helpless place.  Previously we talked about fawning (people-pleasing) and freezing (dissociating or living in a fantasy world).  Both of those are ways that impact how we deal with the outside world.  With people-pleasing we amend our way of interacting with people to try and get them to just want to stay around us and not walk away and we see that in any relationship imaginable, even professional ones.  With dissociating we are perfectly willing to sacrifice relationships in order to feel some sense of safety.  Both of these can be normalized, with fawning looking like someone who is just a giver and a “ride or die” and someone who freezes simply being disinterested or not looking for a relationship or simply just a “loner”.

Another normalized response is becoming a workaholic.  Sure, some careers require us to put in a great number of hours in order to achieve at high levels.  For some professions it is a part of the process that we work and work and work and the end goal is to have downtime after we meet our career goals.  Lawyers and doctors are two of the most recognizing careers where it seems almost a given that an individual will have to resort to working 70+ hours a week in order to make it, almost like an initiation into the profession.  Certainly, there could be some amount of storytelling by Hollywood that contributes to that and I suspect that not every doctor or lawyer has had to work such an intensive or worse schedule in their career.  But it is normalized.  People are called driven if they put everything they have into work.  Someone who sacrifices their personal life for the sake of achieving career goals is a “go-getter” or someone climbing the corporate ladder, perhaps even “A straight-shooter with upper management written all over him” (if you got the last reference, I applaud your movie knowledge).  However, there is a sense of escapism present in being a workaholic.  Rather than dealing with the issues you are facing; you are instead putting off dealing with your issues to instead “do”. 

In some regards, workaholics are an amalgamation of the freeze and fawn people.  They are seeking an escape, but are grounded in reality, and they are only seeking an escape because they fear that feeling of abandonment or hurt that motivates people-pleasing behavior.   It becomes easy to say we are “just focusing on my career” right now to explain the ending of a relationship rather than saying “I chose work over this person because I didn’t want them to leave me first”.  Subsequently, like the people pleaser, there are some level of rewards from diving in and excelling in some regard.  Often this individual will be able to move up in their career because they seem to be highly motivated (to avoid conflict) in their career path and will work tirelessly to meet any looming deadline and be seen as an asset to the company.  As long as they are working, they don’t have to worry about feeling.  So even when the workday is over, or there is no project deadline forcing them to work long hours, they may find other things to busy themselves with.  By busying themselves constantly, they are free to live a life where they don’t have to be stopped in their tracks and made to realize how painful emotions might be.  So if that means learning a third language “for fun” then so be it or if they have a newfound love for exercising that allows them to workout for hours at a time, then all the better!

These individuals are responding to trauma in a “flight” capacity.  This is like the “fight or flight” you hear about so often.  Much like animals, we are not always afraid to run away from things that can hurt us.  However, we may start running and be unable to stop.  Society may encourage us to keep running because we seem to excel at it.  Ultimately, we won’t be able to have productive or fulfilling relationships because we are simply too busy and we will lose friendships in addition because we simply never make the time to invest in people for fear that we may have to feel some amount of pain.  Things remain at a surface level and we just keep “hustling and grinding” until we have nobody in our lives of consequence.  Rather than open ourselves to the pain of relating to someone, we would prefer to be alone, but with a purpose rather than in a fantasy land.  Being able to slow down, allowing ourselves to confront that pain, and being able to cope with our past trauma provides the key to us moving forward and no longer staying in this busy life.