How to overcome trauma
What do you understand by the word trauma? Soldiers coming back from Afghanistan, refugees from Syria, 9/11 or the London tube bombings? You might think of survivors of rape, of major childhood sexual abuse. The ‘Big T’ traumas of war, terror, and threats to an individual’s life.
What you probably won’t think of is that time when you were six and your teacher punished you for not finding your homework sheet quickly enough.
Or when, at four, you heard your parents arguing in the kitchen, and you came out of your bedroom to stand at the top of the stairs terrified that they were going to leave.
I’ve been dealing with other people’s trauma all my professional life, as a BBC and Reuters correspondent in the former communist world (another story, for another time), and now as a psychotherapist.
But what I’ve only recently come to appreciate is how not just the big trauma but also more common adverse experiences in childhood can leave our nervous systems stuck in the evolutionary survival mode of fight/flight/freeze/submission, in ways which can hugely compromise our lives.
Most of us, most of the time, deal pretty well with trauma. Indeed, the most likely outcome from exposure to what are technically called Potentially Traumatic Experiences (PTEs) is recovery, and even what’s now known as Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG), especially when you’ve got good social support.
Sometimes, though, for all kinds of reasons (your history, genes) trauma doesn’t resolve, and can develop into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), with its characteristic flashbacks and nightmares, emotional shutdown, behavioural avoidance and/or hyperarousal (a state of increased psychological tension marked by such effects as reduced pain tolerance).
Until recently, a diagnosis of PTSD required you to experience loss of life or its threat, and a feeling at the time of intense fear, helplessness or horror. The ‘Big Ts’ in other words: being in a car crash, being mugged, or surviving a bomb attack. That’s now changing, and official manuals are being revised to embrace also what might be termed ‘smaller t’ traumas which can existentially undermine the core sense that we all need of being safe in the world.
While it’s important not to pathologise the ordinary ups and downs of life, today’s improved knowledge of how our brains and nervous systems work does give us permission to explore – and heal – emotional wounding.
JUST LIKE A MOVIE
So how does it work? Recently, I was approached by a woman in her early 60s (let’s call her Mary) desperate to stop her temper tantrums from ruining her marriage. Mary knew that her furious, hyper-critical response to her husband’s purchase of an airgun was way out of proportion.
So we used what in my form of therapy (attachment-focused EMDR, or Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is called Bridging, to see if she may be re-enacting a childhood drama.
I got her to visualise, like a scene from a film, the most distressing moment of her tantrum with her husband, and to notice the feelings, bodily sensations and self-critical thoughts that went with that.
She recognised that her underlying thought was ‘I’m invisible’, and there was an aching sensation in her heart. And so I asked her to drop back in time, as far as she could go, without censoring what came up.
Within the blink of an eye, we’d travelled more than half a century to the days after her little brother was born, with her two-year-old self screaming inconsolably under a chair. Her stressed parents had failed to see how, with the change in the family system, the bottom had dropped out of their little girl’s safe world.
And here we were, in 2016, with Mary’s core childhood distress triggered by her husband’s purchase as if it were happening right here and right now, all over again.
TRAPPED IN THE BODY
So what happens in EMDR therapy that’s so different from ordinary counselling?
Once we’ve together identified where the roots probably are and connected you with the old story, we unpack the thoughts, feelings and physical sensations that still go w