When you don't heal. Trauma Tiger 3.

"Putting yourself back together again." KanrieAnn

"What the crap?" we may ask ourselves when our emotional struggles persist. We go to meetings and therapy, we mediate and practice yoga, we eat only raw, vegan muesli, and consume libraries of self-help texts. But still, we're edgy and anxious, we snap at our mates and friends, we weep loudly over small hurts, and our addictions itch. Despite trying every wise and even sketchy recovery technique, we still don't feel better.

We may even be told we can't expect to feel better. All we can have is management of constant pain. In despair, we think, "Is recovery worth this? My drug really was my only comfort." Then we cruise up to our favorite bar, drive-through or pharmacy, and just look. Yearning.

But healing and freedom, they exist. The trick is knowing where to find them. (They're not in those bags, bottles and cans.) Often, they lurk behind our unresolved trauma.

I know some of you may think, with your eyes all asquint, "Trauma? I've never been traumatized. Other people are beaten, raped, have survived war or car accidents. I'm just a normal addict," or, "I've just got your run-of-the-mill dysfunction." Well, maybe.

But traumatic events are not merely happenings like, for instance, an asteroid crashing into your back patio as Bruce Willis shoots off your pinky toes while fighting radioactive snake monsters from space. Trauma really isn't an "event" at all. It's a condition. A state of being, potentially caused by any deep hurt.

In Waking the Tiger (see this and this for background), trauma psychologist Peter Levine explains it:

"The official definition [of ] trauma is that it is caused by a stressful occurrence 'that is outside the range of usual human experience, and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone.' . . . This description is somewhat useful as a starting point, but it is also vague and misleading. Who can say what is 'outside the range of usual human experience', or 'markedly distressing to almost anyone'?" 

Some of us have been raped, shot, overdosed. We can look back to an event and say, "This is what happened. This is why I hurt." But others of us just don't know what's with us. We've never seen ourselves as "traumatized," but for a while we've felt off. Some mysterious cloud of hurt chases us. And we have tried hard to get over it. We worked our Steps, shared it in therapy, wrote letters we then burned or sent flying skyward on balloons. But still, the hurt stays. We still feel scared, angry, sad. Stuck.

These are signs of trauma. According to Levine, traumatized people can have widely various experiences that cause their injury. Surgeries, falls, the sudden loss of a parent, child or spouse, the disastrous injury of a dear friend. Anything that triggers your primal trauma response will do. The unifying thing is the symptoms:

"traumatized people. . .  are unable to overcome the anxiety of their experience. They remain overwhelmed by the event, defeated and terrified. . . . Unresolved trauma can keep us excessively cautious and inhibited, or lead us around in ever-tightening circles of dangerous reenactment, victimization, and unwise exposure to danger. We become the perpetual victims or therapy clients. Trauma can destroy the quality of our relationships and distort sexual experiences. . . . The effects of trauma can be pervasive and global or they can be subtle and elusive." 

And that's the big giveaway. Subtly or globally, we feel overwhelmed, unable to overcome. Traumatized.

Healing starts when you can accept that, if you are traumatized, your feelings are "physiological as well as psychological." Your pain, fear, sadness and anger, they aren't shortcomings. They're wounds, even if you don't know what caused them, like the inexplicable bruises and scrapes that appear on your shins somehow. And you heal them, partly, in the same way. Hear Levine:

"we all have the innate capacity to heal our traumas. . . . trauma represents animal instincts gone awry. When harnessed, these instincts can be used by the conscious mind to transform traumatic symptoms into a state of well-being."

You wouldn't pick at those seemingly spontaneous bruises and cuts, slapping them around as signs of your malignant self-pity. You'd bandage them, allowing your body to heal. Similarly the best way not to heal trauma is to try to disgorge it, blaming yourself for a "pity party" and refusing to "wallow." (If this old timer's experience is worth one nugget of truth, it's that that ain't going to work.)

What works is admitting your trauma, aiding it with as much TLC as you can muster, and helping your mind relearn health. You may need some new forms of professional assistance. But you wouldn't decline the ER in favor of an everyday band-aid if you sawed off a finger, so it's probably unwise to deprive a metaphorically bleeding brain, right?

And then, one day, if you feel better, and along the way you recalled something like, "Oh yeah, I guess that one time my grandfather did punch me in the face," or, "I guess Mom did drive away and never come back," you'll know you were never a weepy masochistic. Your hurt was never your fault. And instead of punishing it with more pain, you helped.

Slipping: There's no such thing as fairy dust.

We all know that place. Where we teeter on the edge of the decision. To cut ourselves. Call that dealer. Drink that beer. Go back to that website. Eat that cake. It would be like sliding off a cliff. All you'd do is drift one foot leftward, and you're falling all the way down.

And at the edge you believe you're weightless. You feel no gravity, see no horizon, no earth far below. No consequences. The choice seems so easy. Restraint is so hard.

When you're trying to stay clean it can feel like you have two warring selves. One you floats at this cliff in a bliss-bubble. The other you stands outside the bubble screaming and pounding on its crystal surface like you're Dustin Hoffman trying to stop the apocalypse. You want to scramble after whatever cord powers your suspension of sanity and yank it hard with a zeeoowww that would send your other self hurtling, informed, onto the safe high ground.

But you can't. You stay stuck outside, watching helplessly as the floating you drags you both over the edge, with a blissed-out smile on its face.

Weirdly this is a learned skill.

Pain rolled over us once. To survive, we may have whipped out a mental pop-up tent into which no pain or fear could enter. We hid inside. Left reality. Dissociated.

In Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation, psychotherapists Suzette Boon, Kathy Steele and Onno van der Hart describe some physical aspects of this strange dissociation:

"There may be times when you feel spacey, foggy, or fuzzy. You may lose a firm connection with the present without being aware of it, and only realize afterwards that you were not very present. . . . You may have times when you are aware of your actions, as though you are watching yourself, but do not feel you have control over them."

They also describe dissociation's result from trauma:

"If we consider a continuum of trauma-related disorders, with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) being the most basic, and developing in the aftermath of a traumatizing incident at any age, then complex dissociative disorders are a more pervasive developmental accommodation to trauma...."

Trauma hits. You're shocked and scared. You hide. You fly around like Peter Pan in Wendy's sheet-bunker for hours. You try to come out, but when you do you're hit with overwhelming fear, shame and anger. So you hide more. You fly around for months, maybe years. And every time you try to emerge, "smack!" Overwhelming pain. So you never come out. And in time your hideout expands like a glowy ethereal Blob, no longer shielding only trauma but blocking every unwanted feeling or thought.

Meanwhile all that fear, shame and anger sits alone on the outside, waiting for you to come back. But you never do. And while you expand your hideout, the earth between you cracks. And the crack spreads into a cliff-edged canyon, with your two selves stuck on opposite sides, miles apart.

And then one day you find yourself all grown up (or trying to be), with that fearful, shameful, angry self boasting a 12 Step program (or two or three), and fighting hard to stay clean. But frickin Peter Pan on the other side of the canyon won't stop leaning over the edge.

So what do you do? What Peter did. Sew your fearful, shameful, angry shadow back on. And refuse to fly away.

We'll check in with Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation again to talk about how.

Trauma Tiger: Part Two. The bully with the breastplate on.

Shame is like armor. And not that invincible spider-thread Kevlar kind of armor that could take an infrared missile to the chest and keep going. We're talking medieval armor, made out of lead, that's hot, hard-edged and heavy. It weighs you down. You try to trot around on your horse fending off invading enemies, but you just jangle crazily like your bangle-wearing grandmother driving a tank through a construction site. And your horse looks up at you with that "Dear Mother of Mercy why?" look only horses can have. 

Shame tells you it's protective. It's realism. It's clear-eyed acceptance of the sad, inevitable truth. Acceptance that will keep you ready for doom, so you're prepared. But shame is really fear. Fear pretending it's not, like that biggish kid at school who cries when his father yells at him so beats up everyone else at lunch. He's afraid to admit he's afraid, but he can't just poof! his fears away the way he wants, so instead he protests that all his fears aren't fear at all, but truth. And then he smacks you around with this "honesty": You are not afraid that you're bad. You are bad. You are not afraid of why you've been hurt. You deserve it. You are not afraid of why you've failed. You're a looser. You are not afraid of why your parents treat you the way they do. You are worthless.

Shame is fear of fear, and it cements your fears into your worldview. This kind of fear that mutates into these twisted craggy Slip-'n-Slides of self-disgust often stems from trauma, from entrenched addictions that frazzle our neural receptors, or from mental illnesses that can warp our perspectives like some cosmic string theory event. 

In Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (see Trauma Tiger: Part One for kicks), Peter Levine offers a good metaphor:

"When confronted with a life-threatening situation, our rational brains may become confused and override our instinctive impulses.... [It's] similar to what occurs in your car if you floor the accelerator and stomp on the brake simultaneously. The difference between the inner racing of the nervous system (engine) and the outer immobility (brake) of the body creates a forceful turbulence inside the body similar to a tornado."

So basically the "Oh my sweet carrot sticks! I'm going to die!" trauma energy gets stuck inside us and spins into a neutron bomb of terror that can't easily be "faced and conquered" without a hearty dose of Clozapine.

Addiction and mental illness are pretty much the same. Years of active addiction can reprogram the brain into thinking it's essentially gone without water for a week and a half when the abused substance is withdrawn. Addiction can also tangle emotional responses into hyper-sensitive feedback loops that spout upward into traumatically tumultuous torrents of anger or ecstasy before crashing into deep waves of depression or apathy. Likewise mental illnesses can trick sufferers into thinking they're on the brink of death every day.

The sad part is we're actually supposed to feel this way, kinda. Hear me out. Hypothetically we should be allowing ourselves to break down into these sobby panic-stricken states of universe-ending terror, so the energy creating them can flow out of our systems. This is the "not stomping on the brake" part of the process.  But we have a really hard time doing this in a way that releases control. Queue Levine:

"Many war veterans and victims of rape know this scenario only too well. They may spend months or even years talking about their experiences, reliving them, expressing their anger, fear, and sorrow, but without passing through the primitive 'immobility responses' and releasing the traumatic residual energy, they will often remain stuck in the traumatic maze and continue to experience distress."

Basically, even if we want to work through it, we want to do it with our talking, reasoning, big-kid helmets on. And if perchance we let ourselves slip over the edge into the quaking vulnerability quivering under our shielding, we get self-judgy. Al la Levine, we "tend to judge this instinctive surrender in the face of overwhelming threat as a weakness tantamount to cowardice."

And there's your shame. Fear of fear. The armor that keeps you pinned to the floor under a hot iron plate of histrionic self-loathing. And underneath it all is an adorably biggish kid who just needs to collapse.

Trauma Tiger: Part One

One of the most evil phrases ever spoken is, "Just let it go."

This erudite (and helpful!) instruction is often issued pushily by those who've never actually been gripped by the said "it" the letting go of which they propose. These pushers aren't trying to be evil (usually). They just sincerely think their experience of, say, not getting their dream first car, translates easily into your experience of being raped when you were five, or of being barfed on by your black-out drunk mom, or of being beaten with a dictionary for your whorish interest in Party of Five.

"You just have to get over these things," they might say from across the table, while you secretly shred the napkin in your lap into tiny, dismembered threads. And weep inside.

And they don't know that their (however-unintentional) suggestion that you are at least partly at fault for your pain (such suggestions are embedded at the slimy cores of all "let it go" nuggets) spirals you into compulsive fantasies of how you might feasibly get away with hitting this helpful friend in the head with a baseball bat without any baristas noticing, or hours of  scream-crying just to avoid actually acting on the violent urge.

They think their gripe equates your trauma. But it doesn't. And neither does "normie" healing equate trauma recovery.

A normie coping strategy can often be easy peasy, accomplished by saying something like, "Oh well, I guess I should focus on happier things," and followed up with a bit of retail therapy (I love Home Depot as much as the next hipster).

Trauma healing, on the other hand, is typically a scosche more complex, often featuring desperate, strung out struggles to just not geyser out random spasms of unspecified rage at the grocery store, or not shrivel up into black, cavernous hair-cloaks of self-loathing at work.

One of the best books (IMO) ever written on the unique nature of trauma healing is Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma.

In his prologue, he underscores what differentiates trauma from ordinary pains:

"...the body reacts profoundly in trauma. It tenses in readiness, braces in fear, and freezes and collapses in helpless terror. When the mind's protective reaction to overwhelm returns to normal, the body's response is also meant to normalize after the event. When this restorative process is thwarted, the effects of trauma become fixated and the person becomes traumatized."

Notice, he says here twice the body. Not the brain. Not the character. Basically, he's saying trauma is a not a head game. Healing trauma is not a mental decision. Failing to recover or recovering slowly is not a moral failing, or a sign of obstinacy. Trauma can not be disgorged at will.

Even if you've never had a bruise or a scar (though many of us have), trauma is a physical injury, something like a blown circuit breaker, or fried surge protector, or over-heated hard-drive that won't shut down squirreled away in the nooks of your hypothalamus. Healing trauma is thus also a physical process.

So let us return for kicks to the untoward table of "just let it go" despair, and flip things: Your friend feels bad because he or she can't lose weight. Well, what does any sound-minded individual say, but, "Just let it go." 

"What?" your friend asks, looking all askance at your scategorical response.

"What?" you say in reply. "Have more will power. Just let it go."

Yeah. Because will power incinerates fat internally. Just ask Susan Powter.

Assuming that fat can be evaporated at will from the lovely love-handles we all accumulate (because vegan peanut butter brownies are that nom), is as logical and kind as assuming trauma can be processed the same way. If ever anyone suggests to you that you are somehow at fault for not "letting go" hard enough ("squeeze it dammit!" they may scream), know it's not your fault. Know it's a process. A process that, ironically, just has to be let go.