Do you struggle to feel joy, peace and love? Did you know that the unresolved, lingering residue of past overwhelming experiences can get in the way of your ability to feel anything at all?
Many people think there is something wrong with them because they don’t feel the same joy, peace and love they see others feel. I have lost track of the number of people who wonder if they are narcissistic because they can’t feel love for others, even those closest to them.
Many people when honest will admit to not feeling much of anything. There may be transient occasional glimmers of joy and love but it is only ever fleeting.
The reality for these people is that their experience is a natural aftermath of trauma.
Trauma Leads To Numbing
Numbing yourself from emotions is a normal biological reaction to serious trauma. According to trauma researcher and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, trauma is any painful experience that the individual cannot escape and which overwhelms the individual’s capacity to cope.
For children exposed to trauma that capacity has had little if any development so it doesn’t take much to overwhelm them. For adults the extent of their ability to cope will depend on what opportunities were present in childhood to development the capacity to cope.
Why The Brain Numbs and the Impacts
Survival when experiencing overwhelming stress depends on the ability to shut down the areas of the brain that are involved in transmitting the terrifying feelings and emotions experienced in trauma.
The trouble with this shut down is that both negative and positive feelings and emotions are shut down. Many trauma survivors will report feeling like their feelings are frozen and they are separated from those they love by a wall of thick glass.
This is described as emotional detachment, desensitisation, depersonalisation, alexithymia and dissociation.
If you would like to learn more see my blog: Alexithymia. What is it and do I have it? – PLC Blog
The Problem With Numbing
Imagine not fully experiencing the joy of an amazing piece of music, of a loved one’s touch or an amazing sunset. Imagine instead that you experience only a fraction of the joy such things normally evoke. What you can experience is subdued.
The problem extends to losing the ability to recognise what you are feeling. Reacting to things is often numbed or at best delayed. Making sense of what is going on is really difficult. Being able to look internally and be aware of what you are thinking and feeling and understanding what is actually happening for you doesn’t happen, or may happen much later when it is safe to think.
Why “Quick Fix” Therapies Don’t Work
It is very popular at the moment for people to seek “quick fix” therapies that promise to immediately switch off these problem areas. But these quick fixes don’t work in the long term. Learning to switch on the blocked brain areas takes time. Trauma pathways need to be downgraded and new neuronal networks need to grow to connect the brain to those shut down areas. This takes time. Even in children a new neural pathway takes time to grow and children have faster developing brains than adults.
Much as we would all like our problems to be overcome quickly it is just not possible.
If you have experienced trauma, especially in childhood, you will often find it is hard to describe what you are feeling because you don’t know what your physical sensations in your body mean. This is because you learned to disconnect from your physical sensations in order to manage the overwhelming fear and pain. Your brain then severs the connections between it and the rest of your sensory system in your body.
Losing Your Sense of Who Am I?
This blocking also impacts on your sense of self. You can’t know who you are unless you are able to feel and interpret your physical sensations.
The result of not being able to feel your physical sensations is that you feel muddled and often very hazy inside. You can miss a sense of how overwhelming events in the past were and therefore not be able to comprehend the significance of past events.
Numbing The Past So That It Seems Like Nothing Bad Happened
It is common for traumatised adults to not be able to comprehend how much the past has impacted on them.
One part of trauma therapy involves being able to understand that “blindness” of the past and learn to understand the enormity of what has happened.
An Example.
An example of this is an incident I was in many years ago. I was beaten up by another woman, not because of anything I did wrong, but because that was the space she was in. My immediate response was to feel shame and to feel I did something wrong to cause it to happen. This was something I was primed to believe as a child. I was only beaten because I was bad and it was my fault. It was only later when I told a friend and she reacted with horror that I realised what was done to me was wrong and it was not my fault. I was not used to other people thinking such treatment of me was wrong. This is a common experience for a traumatised child.
The Impact On The Way You Relate To Others
The way you relate to other people, especially those in authority, is impacted by your childhood experience of relationships with the adults in your life. If you had a parent who was angry and judgemental, you may look at authority figures expecting them to be angry and judgemental.
You may also not recognise when you are in an abusive relationship. In my earlier example of being beaten up and feeling it was my fault and feeling shame, I demonstrated a common issue that impacts on adult relationships. For many people caught up in abusive adult relationships it is that early learning that being abused is your fault that leads you to think that behaviour is your fault, not that it is wrong.
How To Recognise Past Trauma
A really effective way to recognise the trauma you have experienced in the past and to help identify it is to be able to create distance between you and the trauma. Some of treating trauma involves teaching you to be able to create some space between you and the thoughts, behaviours and emotions that have been generated as a response to the trauma and triggers of the trauma.
Alongside this is teaching you mindfulness. To be able to feel and observe what is in your body in a safe way.
Distance And Mindfulness Are Companions In Early Trauma Identification And Treatment.
Another aspect of healing is learning to identify the things that trigger the overwhelming memories of your trauma. This allows you to be aware of triggers and take steps to learn not to be overwhelmed by the memories.
Rita, who had a childhood involving severe and terrifying abuse learned to tolerate the physical sensations that sprang up with triggers. These sensations were overwhelming and difficult to cope with. As therapy progressed and she learned mindfulness, to be able to put the scary memories at a distance where she could observe them safely. She learned that avoiding those uncomfortable feelings makes them worse, not better. She learned to see the sensations as sensations that were in the present. But she was safe now and the trauma was no longer happening. With that understanding she was able to learn to calmly notice the sensations and not judge them. Over time she learned that the memories that popped up were of the past and did not constitute threats in her present life.
Severe Anxiety Is Often A Result Of Childhood Trauma
Bruce came to me for help with his severe anxiety.
In therapy he was able to identify that he had grown up in an abusive home environment as the oldest child. He had spent much of his childhood protecting his younger siblings from his father and trying to protect his mother. Like many children in this type of situation, he became parentified. He tried to become the parent as he saw himself as the one who was able to protect his mother and siblings from his father.
In adulthood he worried obsessively about everyone else. He was always concerned about things happening in his siblings’ lives. He worried about his mother. He worried about his wife. He worried about his children. He was constantly hypervigilant and looking for problems he needed to solve. He became overinvolved in his children’s lives and obsessed about things that could go wrong. It became so intrusive in his children’s lives that they cut off contact with him.
In counselling he was able to understand where his hypervigilance and anxiety came from and started learning to feel the sensations in his body and distance himself from the past fears. He practiced mindfulness daily and this allowed him to be use mindfulness when he began to get anxious. In time he learned to let go of his stranglehold on his family and allow them to experience their own difficulties on their own.
At his last session he demonstrated how calm he now felt, how he was able to put anxious thoughts about his family at arms length and process them as not his responsibility and separate them from his past trauma.
Past trauma memories were now memories, sad and scary, but in the past.
He was able to set healthy boundaries around himself and reestablished contact with his children who no longer felt overwhelmed at the intensity of his vigilance over them.
Triggers Are Not Always Bad Things
When working with your trauma it is important to remember that triggers are not always bad things. Nor is being triggered bad. Instead of running away from the feelings and triggers it is important to learn to sit still with those painful feelings.
The Boy In The Forest
There was a boy who wanted to walk through the forest to visit his grandmother. Every time he set out on the path he heard a strange wailing and saw a shadowy figure in this trees up ahead. In terror, he fled back to the safety of the meadow next to the forest.
Several times he tried to walk through the forest and every time he fled in terror at this shadowy figure that wailed strangely.
One day his father decided to come with him. When they heard the scary noise the father kept going. The boy was terrified but kept walking beside his father. They heard the strange wailing and the father didn’t even react. He just kept walking along the path.
Around the corner he could see the shadowy figure writing around his in the trees. His father reached up with his walking stick and caught the figure on the end of the stick, then pulled it towards him. To the boy’s surprise it was an old cloak stuck up in the trees. The wailing sound turned out to be the wind in the trees.
The boy had been avoiding the path because he was too scared to approach the object and see it for what it was. When you are unable to approach your memories you are like that boy. With a counsellor by your side it is possible to face the memories and see them for the past events that they are.
The Risks of Avoiding Your Memories
The risks of avoiding your memories are great. So many people use other things to bring relief. But they find it is only temporary. Numbing can be overeating, restricting food, working too much, excessively exercising, compulsive shopping, pornography, gambling, obsessing about other people, drugs or alcohol and many more. If it numbs you then you will probably try it.
These activities don’t heal the pain and they don’t remove it. They just mask it and the activity has to be done again and again, and you become used to the activity, so it has to be escalated in order to work.
This is why healing work through counselling is so important. In counselling you work to remove the need for numbing and avoiding activities. You can learn to sit with the memories and put them in the past where they belong and not see them as still being in your present.
Allow yourself time to heal, practise mindfulness daily so that you can use it in those triggered moments. Learn to feel into your body and to not be afraid. Learn to feel those emotions and body sensations without fear. Learn to set boundaries between what is now and what was then.
Can I Help?
If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your traumatic memories, please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au
If you would like to learn more, I write a regular newsletter with helpful information, tips, information on courses, and the occasional freebie. At the moment I have a free mindfulness meditation for anyone who signs up to my newsletter. This meditation offers a way to safely explore your feelings and learn to be okay with them. If you would like to subscribe please click on the link here: http://eepurl.com/g8Jpiz
*please note that whenever I mention someone in my blogs I never use real names and change the circumstances to de-identify the person who has generously given permission for me to use their story in my blog.
