1. TRAUMA - The silent killer
On the installment of complexes and how the body copes with overwhelming stress.
How about you?
Most people think of trauma as something that happens to unlucky people involved in a war, a heavy accident, an aggressive attack, sexual abuse, the loss of a child or another severe situation, causing them to get overwhelmed and not able to handle their lives anymore. While this is partially true, deep trauma is much more involved in almost everyone’s personal lives, way more than most people realize or want to admit for themselves. It is the reason why people tend to emphasize the negative, darker things in life: the things they lack, persistently worrying about one thing or another, being a control freak or getting addicted to smartphone, gaming, drugs, TV etc. It is the reason why many people suffer chronic stress, anxiety, depression and can’t seem to find a way out of it and not being able to focus on the much healthier positive side of things.
It is a misconception that people are unable to continue their conventional work and family lives when they are traumatized, but the real question is: are they able to live the life that brings fulfillment and gratification on their deepest soul level? How many people really live their lives passionately or happily, doing what they are best at, getting the right amount of encouragement and support and have the genuine will to share their joy unconditionally?
The deserted tiger
Emotional trauma installs itself in the subconscious brain the moment our bodies’ resistance can’t cope anymore with the culminated stress, caused by a sudden (or chronic) shock triggering an immense anxiety, while the person does not or cannot find a way to escape the threatening situation. It is an actual and very strong physical (!) response of suppression of a huge amount of unresolved, unprocessed emotions, far beyond the rational understanding and self-control of the person involved. It is one of the bodies strongest survival mechanisms, without which we would literally (!) die. To give you a vivid example of this: imagine a young tiger puppy that got abandoned by his mother in the Serengeti desert. This is really traumatic for this young tiger, since it needs to encounter all dangers and find food and safety on his own. He is way more vulnerable then, way more prone to external attacks by bigger, more experienced hunter animals. The only way for the small tiger to survive is to suppress his fears and move on. He will become more harsh, more stressed, more ‘searching’ for things instead of ‘trusting’ on things. Chances are he will become a bit less tolerant (maybe even aggressive), have trouble ‘attaching’ to other tigers and will never feel really at ease. His live is more dangerous, he consumes more energy day in, day out and chances are he will get worn out sooner than the other puppies that got raised in relative security with their caring mother.
Spiraling down
Coming back to the human life, you could say that every child experiences trauma during his upbringing, whenever it doesn’t get what it wants. There is a limitation being imposed on him or her, that’s causing temporary, emotional turmoil, until it finds a way to understand and finally accept it as an important step to becoming an independent grown-up. A majorly important factor is the explanation that the parent gives to the child to make it help understand why the limitation was imposed on him or her. The parent should also take care that the child’s emotion calms down and regain its comfort, making sure none of the traumatizing emotional residue gets stored in the child’s subconscious memory. The big problem with installed trauma is that the emotional support and the explanation weren’t available and the child was left with the unresolved riddle of a very painful event. This of course, gets worse and worse when these unresolved matters repeat themselves over and over again throughout the upbringing. The stress and suppressed emotions become so strong and the brain tries to suppress them more and more, that literally the child’s behavior starts to deter and fail. It can become unexplainably silent, frustrated, violent, senseless, hyperactive, extremely passive, depressed, isolated and what more.
The longer this unresolved stagnations persist, the more they start to affect the bodily and brain functions of the child and later adults. Traumatized people will start to feel ailments or get sick more easily than securely raised and comforted kids. Chronic stress is almost always an indicator of unresolved trauma and related stagnation. When you expand this to modern societies and lifestyle and start to wonder how many people actually experience a level of chronic stress, it makes you think how majorly under-recognized this problem is.
To get a good view on what happens in the brain when trauma is prevalent:
The moment your body can’t cope with the amount of pressure the shock and the accompanying, unresolved emotions cause, a suppression mechanism comes into action that pushes down alle these thoughts, anxieties, worries, anger into your subconscious memory. From then on, quite a bit of your continuous energy supply is needed and uncompromisingly used to keep these overwhelming, unprocessed emotions down. This is the reason why people with trauma experience chronic stress, are not able to relax, are usually overly worried, short-tempered, have difficulties with keeping their focus (easily distracted), have less stamina (fatigue) and a hard time directing their actions forwardly.
The most bizarre symptom however, is that the traumatized person doesn’t have access to these suppressed, unprocessed emotions and is often even unaware or ignorant of them. These are called blind spots, because the person cannot see, grab, get access to or even communicate consciously about them. I talk in the plural, since one can definitely have several suppressed traumas, which form into a complex, which makes it even more difficult to handle or maintain. What the traumatized person can and at some point will (hopefully) communicate about is vague physical ailments, reduced memory or focus capability, lack of energy/fatigue, unexplained pain, trouble maintaining healthy relationships or work, feelings of isolation, depression, fears, nightmares,… As said, the longer these traumas stay unrevealed, the bigger these problems become and without a doubt your body reserves get so drained that at some point your health gets so deteriorated that you end up in a negative spiral that is super hard to overcome. The despair that can emerge at these points can be very overwhelming, not only for yourself but also for other people related to you.
So these blind spots full of emotion exist in your subconscious brain and they push as to speak some regular brain connections into an abnormal state or some parts just don’t get enough ‘attention’, causing reduced functionality and erratic behavior, that get fixated the longer the trauma persists. This results in what is called ‘coping’ or ‘compensating’ behavior. As the names imply, your brain tries to maintain normal behavior, but it does get erratic and limited in its execution, because it is in ‘survival’ mode. So the most important activities are still possible to do, but refined action becomes increasingly difficult. Your brain and thus your behavior will try to compensate for it. You will start to ‘act’ that the problem is not there. You will try to ignore it, neglect, suppress or avoid it, making sure the outside world does not detect something is working as it should. This shows itself in behavior like obsessions, hyperactivity, narcissism, social anxiety, overacting, manipulation, dominance, bursts of unexpected anger, attachment issues, bipolarity, emotional dependency and instability, submission, craving, etc. which all have a severe detrimental impact on the relationships those people are involved in. It can last years until these hidden/suppressed psychological patterns emerge, but then often explode with so much power that the damage is hard to reverse. It can be a real shocker for people experiencing this. But at the same time you can argue that the ‘victim’ of someone else’s trauma was not able to recognize the bind spot within the other, and thus maybe had a blind spot him or herself?
Turning over
So referring back to our diagram, how can you go back to the healthy, balanced behavior and continue more happily with your life? Is it really possible to overcome deep trauma? It depends on a few things.
1.
Decisiveness & resilience
First of all, you have to be able to decide for yourself that you’ve had enough of it and that you’re willing to confront in full all the deep fears, angers and stresses your body experienced the moment you got traumatized. This is extremely intense, comparable to the fear of death. But you have to keep in mind that it’s an illusion, because up until today you’re still alive, aren’t you? Fear is always an illusion, made up by your mind to protect yourself. But it can also be a major delusion, when you start to live with fear as your guiding light in life. If you do that, you don’t have much quality in life. You’re unable to relax and experience true joy.
2.
Heal through the other
Secondly: you cannot do it on your own, you need specialist help by people that know inside out what trauma is, what it can do someone and who probably experienced it themselves and were able to crawl out of the ugly, dark valley. They can also mirror you or put you in a position that you become increasingly more aware of the difference between ‘compensation’ behavior and ‘healthy’ behavior. The better you can identify and separate these, the more they emerge at the surface and the closer you are to final, recognition, acceptance and resolution. These moments can be very emotional and hard, that’s why the emotional support that these trauma-specialists can provide is crucial too.
3.
Be braver than the storm
Thirdly, realize that your perspective and resulting behavior will change for the better, but it can seem as if the reverse is true. For example, throughout the process of healing, you gradually could start to distance yourself from an abusive relationship as the destructive patterns within it become more obvious to you. This can lead to very difficult break-ups and unexpected responses form the other party as they will get confronted with their own fallibilities, while they are not ready for it. Also financially or professionally this can make you choose a different life path as a whole, bearing in mind all the positive and negative responses you’ll get from your environment. Always keep in mind that you will get closer and closer to your authentic self and thus closer to fulfillment and gratification in life.
4.
Heal your body
Fourthly, you have to make sure that you heal your body functions in parallel to your mental recovery. You can imagine that years of suppressed trauma have put a tremendous burden on your body functions and your immune system as a whole. You could say that the longer the trauma persisted, the more your body suffered from it. Every unresolved emotion and physical deterioration that have been building up throughout the years of trauma needs to be ‘reenacted’ to reverse its detrimental effects. You basically reverse engineer your health to make it come back to its original state of balance and purity. The main area that are affected by chronic trauma are:
- the nervous system, mainly the switching between relaxation-tension and focus
- the digestive/detox system, including the gut, liver, kidneys, lymphs, pancreas, etc
What you eat is really important, what supplements you take at what time is really important, finding quality support and guidance is really important, being objective, truthful and persistent is essential too.
5.
Return to balance
It is true that even when you finally resolved (=learning to accept) an emotional trauma, your brain functionality can still be ‘off’ just because it became habituated to these compensating behaviors for so long. After the acceptance stage, you have to retrain your brain again to flatten out the erratic behavior. The way you do this depends on your own preference and awareness of these residues. It can go through behavioral therapy, neuromodulation, limbic retraining, etc. Consider it as retraining your habitual (brain or behavioral) patterns into more suitable and balanced ones. It is very much worth it, because these changes are permanent, since you had pulled the sting out of the wound during your acceptance moment some time before. That’s when you will really start to feel healed.
