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
