Learner Therapist (52) … Fear of losing the edge

Torrey Orton

January 22, 2015

 

For the second time in a week I ran into a patient from a traumatised background fearing that if he recovered from his defences against the trauma he might lose his life energy, drive and motivation…that his strength would be diminished or undermined, that he would lose his edge. I remember a very similar feeling myself five decades ago when I was interrupted in my life’s progress by depressive episodes. At the time I argued (to myself of course) against finding some help with the notion that I would lose my quite clear edge in my chosen activities, while in tandem advancing the view that my worries were nothing compared to person X or Y, whose troubles were so obviously more deserving of help than mine. At the time I thought my appreciation of the needs of others was a unique moral insight. I’ve since found an enormous company of helpers and fixers espousing my mantra all on their own. Another edge dulled by normality.

 

This second aspect – unworthiness of help, or much of anything for that matter – is what our hyper-vigilant defences keep from our view. The edge of our defences, their energy, focus and sharpness, is sustained by a largely unconscious apprehension that it is being dulled by the engine of unworthiness.  So, if we deconstruct our defences we will slide back into the sludge of unworthiness and its helpers - hopelessness and helplessness. The actual experience of trying new thoughtfeelingbehaviour is one of re-entering the traumatising world and self – a world of danger which a lifetime’s defences have been designed to prevent. The twister here is the often recognised fact of the abused re-exposing themselves to old and new abusers over the life cycle. Why? Because the defence is more comfortable than the promise of freedom from it, which can only be obtained by daring to behave in new ways!!

 

I think this kind of experience is especially prevalent for the “high performing” among my patients. It might be difficult for them to tell the difference between their injured self and their competent one – all the more so if their high performing self is clearly and unarguably publically acclaimed. It may appear to the therapist as ‘resistance’ to therapy in various forms. An ally of the preference for the edge is disclaiming victimhood, which is encouraged by the pop psych “move on”, “just get over it”, “changing your thinking will change your world” ideology.

 

The third side of the edge is an over-developed competence, which may create an unbalanced self but does not qualify for Medicare funding. A fourth cut of the edge is that it will never wholly disappear, that the wound which it expresses will always be with the wounded to some extent. It is, with respect, called character. The wearing away of our visible person into the wrinkled one of old age is one mark of our learning experiences of all kinds.

 

A sign of therapeutic success for trauma patients is the capacity to hear that they will never get over it in some important senses, one of which is having an edge. Another is seeing our scars as honours. That this is extremely difficult is modelled for us in daily life by the struggle of our defenders – soldiers, police, firies, paramedics… - to handle the traumas of their defence of us and the denial of their experience demonstrated by our social unpreparedness to care for them on return from our wars. Therein lies one of the most obvious sources of intergenerational violences, and around it goes again!

 

Those two patients I mentioned got over it. They were enough into the therapeutic work that they could acknowledge their temptation not to do the work for a tangible reason – that getting better might make them even less well, or so the loss of edge might feel to them. Their edge is among the most reliable of their feelings of being in the world, of existing, and reliable about keeping them in the world in the face of various pressures pushing or pulling them out of it!! But they are successful enough to know that their edge is now constraining their full development, usually in the relationship sides of their lives, either intimate or collegial, or both.

 

Learner Therapist (51) … Valuing your gift

Torrey Orton

November 15, 2014

Polymaths aside, most of us are gifted in some sense. That is, we have strong preferences for different life activities. These may range from a gift for being active, for taking action, to a gift for music or numbers, or…on it goes. Take a list of human needs and you can populate a map of potential gifts. These gifts are the source(s) of our vocational interests and preferences, or the matters of style which couch the interests in optimum performance settings. They seem to be congenital effects with a positive spin, if they can be expressed and developed. On good days we are thankful that others have the gifts we don’t so we don’t have to spend much time doing unattractive things like programming applications, taking care of the wayward, milking cows….what I call the natural division of labour.

A gift makes itself known to us by imposing itself on us, and, through our submission to its compulsion, on others who may be the first to notice it. What we do is what we do and therefore not necessarily a subject of reflective observation until its impinging on others draws their attention to our behaviour. Kids often have this experience of validation by others early in schooling or the reverse: its denial of validation by their parents or teachers. They may object that certain gifts are not socially or economically viable - “don‘t let anyone see you doing that; they’ll think you’re crazy” or “you’ll never make a living painting, lad!”

A gift of any sort has a number of characteristics. \

·         One, it is self-validating because it arises undoubtedly from within individuals. I hear a gift’s presence in patient remarks like: “Oh, I’ve always wanted to write. I was putting stories together before I learned to write.” Or, “I started drawing before I could write…I just doodled my way through primary school, and continue to this day.” (holding up a sketch of me on their notepad)

·         Two, it is self-sustaining because it is its own energy source, drawing on the total available to a person and siphoning it off into the focal length of the target domain.

·         Three, it is intrinsically motivating.

·         Fourth, the shaped energy of our gift feels to others sometimes like a command to make way for us, even though it may not be our intention at all. Gifted actions tend to have clarity of direction, form and content – that is, they focus on definite materials, in an observable manner towards some kind of objective or vision.

·         Fifth, gifted action tends to produce the all-embracing conscious experience called “flow” – a state at times like presence or mindfulness in action.

·         Sixth, gifted action feels creative in some sense and it may actually produce something; it tends to build or construct.

·         And, seventh, the activity of the gifted feels unique; it is what makes us unique in our eyes (and sometimes those of others!).

In therapy for complex trauma the presence of workable gifts is an essential, though not sufficient, condition for something better than mere survival. What a gift does is help a partially whole person, what’s called “high functioning” in our trade, to emerge from the dreck of abuses, ambling alongside the abuse in the self-affirming developmental steps intrinsic to the gift. Some of these may translate into socio-economic successes which fully obscure the injuries of trauma to others (who want us to be normal so they don’t have to put themselves out to engage our uniqueness).

But the agents of these successes often don’t consciously take them for what they are: confirmations of their worth. So, part of therapy is to help patients establish their objective realities, to point out the unintended evidence of their own performance self-reports occurring or implied naturally in therapy. This can take great therapeutic persistence because the defence against recognising their successes is a central dynamic of protection from further harm – the harm of disappointment again that they have not done well enough, not been perfect…!!!

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