Trauma - a crises of meaning- making
According to the Mirriam Webster dictionary, Trauma is the Greek word for "wound". Although the Greeks used the term only for physical injuries, nowadays trauma is just as likely to refer to emotional wounds. In an emotional arena, it refers to a “psychological wound that causes an extraordinary amount of stress in the psyche”.
But is it only extra stress? I remember when my mother passed on at age 8, it wasn’t just stress - it was traumatic. The difference was that losing my mom had fully disrupted my life and changed me forever. It means how I saw life, my family, my idea of safety was forever gone, Thus, we get traumatised when we can no longer make sense of what is happening to us (or vicariously to others).
Trauma can be understood as a rupture in "meaning-making", says David Trickey, a psychologist and representative of the UK Trauma Council. When "the way you see yourself, the way you see the world, and the way you see other people" are shocked and overturned by an event – and a gap arises between your "orienting systems" and that event – simple stress cascades into trauma, often-mediated through sustained and severe feelings of helplessness.(3)
So, what might be the range of situations we might consider traumatic?
Traumatic events can be wide ranging from the generic ones like death, divorce, illness, accidents and bereavement to extreme experiences of war, torture, and genocide. Also, natural calamities like floods, earthquakes and the current pandemic .In the family arena, it could mean loss of a parent, absence of an attachement figure, being unloved, not experiencing attachment even though both parents are present.
Traumatic experiences are stored in our mind, emotions and body but we are not aware of them consciously. We may be leading trauma influenced lives and remain unaware of the extent of the influence. Disassociating is a survival mechanism or a coping mechanism that we quickly deploy to distance ourselves from the distressing event.
People can experience this consciously on different levels – we may live in depression and anxiety. We can dissociate from it by suppressing it. We become fearful and find the world hostile. We may feel like we can trust no one and hence only rely on ourselves. We can silence our trauma and self medicate via drugs and alcohol, food, money, need for insatiable success, never ending achievement drive, status shopping – in fact anything that will numb our pain. If unresolved, we may carry the trauma and pass it down to the next generation.
Bessel Van Der Kolk in his book “ The body keeps the score” suggests that there are real changes in our physiology when we are traumatised. We become ready to deal with the trauma by the arousal of the limbic system - a part of the brain related to survival. We react with the fight or flight response. And we may not know how to come back to “normal” Our baseline changes as we emotionally spike disproportionately when new (bad) events occur. (1) In the wild, animals have a natural mechanism to return to normal balance post say a “chase” or a close call from another animal. But what happens to humans - how come we cannot regain our emotional balance? Why does our body hold on to trauma?
Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist.(2)reminds us that every experience, thought, feeling, and physical sensation triggers thousands of neurons, which form a neural network. When you repeat an experience over and over, the brain learns to trigger the same neurons each time. “Neurons that fire together wire together”:and this creates a pattern of reactions and old trauma habits get wired into us. Emotions like fear and abandonment or self loathing get fired up continually and habitually when things go wrong. Hence, the self regulation and peaceful return to normalcy is lost. But it can be regained. In almost all cases, a witness and a compassionate therapist is necessary.
We can rarely over come this by ourselves. (although possible),
Inner Child therapy helps us to heal those wounds – we cannot change the trauma but we can connect with it differently- we can release the rigidity of initial response and eventually make meaning of the trauma. It is hard to list the methods as Inner child therapy uses a variety of techniques to unfreeze the old responses of dissociation and the faulty coping mechanisms. The therapy is experiential and works in the moment. It is a tough and painful journey.
Integration of the whole self via release of painful feelings like fear, anger, shame leads to healthy pathways of coping. And a brighter future. This is Emotional Resilience.
References:
(1)“The Body keeps the score” by Bessel Van der kolk. Penguinrandomhouse.com 2015
(2)Donald Hebb (Psychologist) https://can-acn.org/donald-olding-hebb/
(3) https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210203-after-the-covid-19-pandemic-how-will-we-heal