I have some things to say about trauma. (I have much more to say than this, but this is plenty for now.)
Most of us can identify acute trauma (following an accident or an assault, etc), but complex trauma can result from something seemingly benign or invisible, like being parented by a person who is chronically (even mildly) anxious or dissociated. The fewer caretakers we have, the steeper their job is in teaching us how to regulate.
I’ve been recovering from complex trauma. It’s tricky. I had a loving, supported childhood, with attentive, conscious parents. No major mishaps and no major heart breaks. Mostly what I want to say is that I had no idea what complex trauma was or that I was living with it. My attachment wounding (which I also didn’t realize I carried) is synonymous with this trauma.
I have been astonished the last few years with all of the healing my nervous system has needed. For months I would say to my therapist, “I had NO idea I was so fucked up”. Though, when I sat down to write this, I suddenly recalled telling a couple of therapists beginning in my late 20s (roughly ten years in to talk therapy) that I was “ready to do the deeper work”. I remember being met with bafflement and questions about whether I had ever suffered any acute trauma, neglect, or abuse. I said no and was told that there really wasn’t anything else to be done. I think one of them said, “I don’t know what you mean.” They really seemed puzzled by my proclamation. And I didn’t have anything more than this vague feeling, so I dropped it.
A decade later, between existential pain and chronic illness it became clear I needed to do something different. I began work with an attachment-focused somatic practitioner who explained to me what I was experiencing.
It’s wild to look back as I piece this all together. I knew so much more about myself than I was given credit for, but I just wasn’t in touch with anybody who understood what I was holding. There were ways, though, in which I had no idea anything was wrong. I lived my whole life thinking that feelings, beliefs, behaviors, and habits of mine were organic to me, when in fact they were protective strategies. (Even my introversion is suspect.) Some were also symptoms of backlash from those protective strategies.
I felt moved to write because I encountered my 16-year-old self while driving home today. I love her. A piece of music came into my head and with it the memory of who I was when, at 16, I heard it for the first time.
I’m fortunate that despite carrying this trauma, I’ve always loved myself deeply, and for the most part I’ve also liked myself. Though the way I've treated myself has not always been congruent with this love. It’s a really complicated thing, maybe even impossible to understand when you’re on the inside of it, (or if you’ve never experienced it?) because in a way, it is you. It isn’t. It’s patterns to unlearn, but it’s often patterns you learn before your prefrontal cortex is cataloging your memories with time and date stamps, so there is no explicit memory (which is the way most of us conceive of memory) of your learning.
Whenever people use the phrase “self-sabotage” I bristle, because this is likely what is at play: a (now unhelpful) protective strategy that you aren’t consciously aware of, or you’re aware, but the strategy can’t be changed or discarded using the intellect.
WE ARE NOT BORN TO INTENTIONALLY CAUSE OURSELVES HARM.
But I hear “self-sabotage” or “get out of your own way” as putting the onus on the person suffering to “fix” themselves cognitively, to think their way out of a problem which can only be solved in intentional, loving, compassionate relationship.
I consider myself to have been mostly healed for the past year and I’m still sorting pieces and getting context for the bigger picture that is me, my life. It’s an ongoing, nonlinear process.
For a lot of years before I started doing this trauma work (or even knew that one could do this trauma work) I started having visions of younger versions of myself. I understood immediately I was going back in time to offer protection to past selves who were feeling fear. I think now that there’s more to it. In various healing movements, people talk about soul retrieval work. There are many ways to view this, but this is what I’ve been doing. Hakomi practitioners refer to the symptom as fragmentation: some way we show up in the world is deemed unacceptable and we have to adopt a coping strategy to be different in order to increase our chances of survival; this causes internal injury and some piece of our being gets splintered off, stashed away in a secret, untraversed place.
So, often these memories for me are a moment of healing. I get to go back in time metaphorically speaking and collect a version of myself who has been in hiding due to a need for self-protection and reintegrate her. I’m really grateful for this process. It’s a beautiful thing to come back into relationship with me at 11, or 16, or 23. And today I’m mostly feeling gratitude. But there’s been a lot of grief in this process too. Because I have to come to terms with the fact that I didn’t get to show up as my full self at 11, or 16, or 23. I was afraid of so much. I hurt people I loved because I wasn’t fully embodied. I missed out on opportunities because I was busy protecting myself. I missed out on joy and beauty and love and connection in the present moment because I was in a constant state of hyper-vigilance because I (often unknowingly) didn’t feel safe. (For my counseling people out there, my therapist hypothesized some time ago that perhaps I was operating in what’s called a “faux window”, a concept outlined in the book, Nurturing Resilience. In other words, my coping strategies were so sophisticated I had no idea I was ALWAYS outside my window of tolerance.)
So, this grief…it hurts to be 40 and feel like I’ve just come alive. And I’ve never been so happy, I’ve never been so at ease. I just wanted to acknowledge today this grief and the reality that despite all of my hard work and best intentions I didn’t get to arrive here at 26. I feel like I’ve missed out on a lot. And I have a suspicion that complex trauma resembling mine is a widespread phenomenon in our capitalist, patriarchal, White supremacist, individualistic culture. I know how fortunate I am that I had the time and space and resources to do this work.
Lupine for healthy relationship to community
Note: in the weeks since writing this I have been hyper focused on the realization that I knew I needed this healing 15 years before anyone helped me. I have been cycling through frustration and grief and anger and regret and all the other emotions synonymous with these. I KNEW. I KNEW and was told I was wrong, and I put my knowing away. This happens. It is part of being in human relationship. The practitioners who “failed” me didn’t do it out of spite or negligence. People we trust offer us wisdom and if we have no context for our own knowing, we sometimes take that wisdom, even if it is lacking or it contradicts what we feel. And it sucks. If I had known one person who was familiar with complex trauma, my life might have taken a whole different shape.
As a result, the principle at the heart of my practice is: we each know what we need better than anyone else. In America we exist in a culture that does everything it can to disconnect us from our knowing and from each other. Resolving complex trauma and attachment wounding using a lens critical of systemic oppression is my primary interest as a practitioner.