Learner therapist (43)…… chronic childhood trauma recovery - a note for patients

Torrey Orton

July 13, 2014

The purpose of this paper is to provide a generic framework for thinking about the experience of chronic trauma and the typical processes involved in recovery. It will not replace doing work on your trauma, but it may soften the trip by making likely pathways visible and therefore easier to travel. While every individual’s injury is different, their nature is shared and recovery pathways are, too.

What is chronic childhood trauma?

Damaging behaviour (physical, psychological, social, financial, historical…) imposed repeatedly on people (children) unable to defend themselves against it. The traumatised child is therefore a victim in the normal meaning of that word. It is believed that in Australia 20 % of adults have some childhood abuse in their backgrounds. Under-reporting is the norm.

They are victims of violences of a number of kinds ranging from physical to spiritual, passing by way of social and economic on the path. What distinguishes violences as such is their being sources of personal pain, usually experienced in the gut first and later in symptoms like constricted breath, movement, and consequently in self-restraint by self-doubt, and so on. The original sources may be lost in personal memories blocked by self-numbing and addictives of various sorts. Physical assault and social/emotional deprivations are equally damaging forms of violence, with different hardened defence symptoms.

What do we know about chronic trauma?

It is caused by adults who themselves have often been victims of abuse, often multi-generationally, with clear histories of violence, alcohol and drug habits, defective intimate relationships, marital breakdown…Just the histories which you reading this may have come to therapy to deal with!

The victims blame themselves

Most childhood abuse is familial, but recent national investigations make clear its prevalence in schools and other institutions charged with care of and for children. Victims almost always feel guilty about their abuse! They feel ashamed of their abuse. They think they are (partly) responsible for their abuse. They feel dirty. They still love their abuser(s), which goes around and around in circles sustaining a partial denial of the abuse, loss of memory of the abuse, or even largely taking over responsibility for it from the perpetrators. And finally they live often in a climate of re-abuse in the social system(s) of its origin – family, school, office, church, barracks…!!

What is abused? The person or the self is abused, is injured in their heart and soul. Some therapists call it “soul murder”. The basic distortions of the self are in the Fight, Flight or Freeze response which is triggered repeatedly by the trauma and provides the basic form of patterned defence. So, you can expect to have over-developed patterns of violent (fight), avoidant (flight) or numbing (freeze) behaviours which occur automatically under stress, even if the stressors are not exact replicas of your original abuse. 

You may also have a tendency to relate with / be attracted to people who help you replay the original trauma(s) because they are familiar and within your emotional and behavioural competences. You may reject positive behaviour from people because you feel unworthy of it or confused because you do not know what it is and/or mistake it for a manipulative tool of your abuser(s)…

Recovery?

If you are expecting the original injuries, and their present expressions, will be completely expunged, they won’t. Think of a major physical trauma like losing a limb or a critical organ failure. These are facts with which one has to deal forever after. They modify capability. The various kinds of childhood abuse all distort body functions…ranging from inhibited breathing patterns to hyper-vigilance, jitteriness, defensive postures and carriage…etc.  This means our bodies carry visible messages of our abuse and that abuse can be reached through the body. Abuse also distorts social functions – our basic relationships and ways of relating. We learn to relate in ways which compromise our potentials.

That messaging can be radically reduced, but the history is the same. You were abused. Feeling you have to keep it a secret is part of the abuse, and is often made an explicit demand on you by your abuser(s).

You may have to manage multiple vulnerabilities – drugs / alcohol, eating, weight, disordered sleep, relationship instabilities (infidelities, recurrent breakdowns, social isolation, etc.). On the way to recovery there may have to be various little recoveries made. Some of these are very trying. Alcohol and other drug dependencies come to mind. While a whole suite of disordered behaviours may feel overwhelming, the work on any one of them should produce results across all of them. For example, if you are learning to manage anxieties, the process will include serious self-awareness development. That development – mindfulness – will be transferable to other parts of your life. Mindfulness is an all systems, all situations capability.

Getting your power back

Any of these pathways will involve getting your power back. Some pathways may be explicitly designed to do this, as are reconciliation processes and assertion techniques. Others may help you gain greater self-control over your responses, clarity in your understanding of your history and present, and confidence in your own intentions and needs. Along the way there are a few key challenges:

·         Disclosure - How much of your story to tell, and to who?

·         How to create your story – Write it? Draw it? Tell your story..???

·         Reframe behaviours – your currently dysfunctional behaviours (your ‘symptoms’) were adaptive when acquired as responses to abuse in childhood.

·         Practice new behaviours (which may be presently useful versions of presently unuseful ones, especially on the assertion/aggression border) – e.g. capturing anxiety early in its trajectory so that abuse can be pre-empted; expressing anger when it is still containable for you and those near you – when it is irritation or unease that piles up into rage if not acknowledged.

·         Finding and developing natural drives which enhance your sense of self – vocations which are intrinsically rewarding, and often partly developed already, even to a high degree.

 

See Adult Surviving Child Abuse at http://www.asca.org.au/about/resources/child-abuse-prevalence.aspx