Early Trauma

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Author: Irina Mlodik

Childhood psychological trauma is a person's reaction to events that are significant for him, which cause long-term emotional experiences and have the same long-term psychological impact. Family conflicts, serious illnesses, death, death of family members, divorce of parents, overprotection on the part of elders, coldness of intra-family relations and alienation, material and domestic disorder can give rise to injuries.

Often people turn to a psychologist without linking their current state with psychological trauma, especially childhood. In most cases, the traumatic effect is implicit, hidden nature. As a rule, we are talking about the inability of the immediate environment, especially the mother, to provide the child with an atmosphere of trust and emotional security. A traumatic situation can be hidden behind an outwardly quite prosperous home environment, in particular, behind a situation of overprotection and hyperprotection, when no one even suspects that very important sensory and behavioral components are lacking in the relationship between parents and children.

Early psychological traumatization has its own laws:

1. She is always unexpected. You cannot prepare for it. She is taken by surprise. She, as a rule, plunges the child into a feeling of helplessness, inability to defend himself. Very often, at the moment of trauma, he falls into an emotional stupor, not experiencing strong feelings, unable to get angry or fight back. He freezes and does not even know how to relate to this. Only later does emotionality turn on, and the child can experience pain, horror, shame, fear, etc. A strong trauma that cannot be digested by the psyche can be repressed and not remembered for years. But its post-action continues to work and determine the behavior of a person in his already adult life.

2. It happened in a situation where the child had little to control. At the moment of trauma, the child suddenly loses control over the situation, because all the power and control at this moment, as a rule, belongs to an adult who, in one way or another, is related to the trauma. The child is completely defenseless in the face of the changes that trauma brings to his life. And since then, he practically does not tolerate possible unpredictability, tries to organize his world, carefully considering possible steps and consequences, almost always refuses the slightest risk and reacts painfully to any changes. Anxiety becomes his eternal companion, the desire to control the world around him is an urgent need.

3. Childhood trauma is changing the world. Before the injury, a child believes that the world is arranged in a certain way: he is loved, he will always be protected, he is good, his body is clean and beautiful, people are happy with him, etc. Trauma can make its own harsh adjustments: the world becomes hostile, a loved one can betray or humiliate oneself, one must be ashamed of one's body, he is stupid, ugly, unworthy of love …

For example, before the injury, the child was convinced that his dad loved him and would never hurt him, but after a drunk father raises his hand on his daughter, the world becomes different: in him a man who loves can offend you at any moment, and you it will be scary and you won't be able to do anything. Or another case: a little girl spins merrily, from which her skirt whirls around her little legs in beautiful waves, and she feels so light, flying, magically beautiful. Mom's shout: “Stop swinging your skirt! I would be ashamed to shine with cowards before the whole world! - changes everything irreversibly. Now it will always be impossible for her to behave in any way sexy and attractive, because now in her world female attractiveness is under the strictest prohibition in order to avoid unbearable shame, which she does not even remember where it came from.

4. In the subsequent life of such a person, there is a constant retraumatization. That is, a child, even growing up, unconsciously "organizes" and reproduces events that repeat the emotional component of the trauma. If in childhood he was rejected by his peers, then in his subsequent life in each team he will so influence the field around him that he will certainly cause the rejection of those around him, and he himself will suffer from this again. A girl beaten by a drunken father, with a high degree of probability, can "arrange" for herself a drinking or beating husband or partner. And he will again … complain about fate.

I call this "substituting a torn side." An unconscious desire, completely unwilling to expose the world to its unhealing trauma, which the unsuspecting world will certainly hit with a fist, or knock out a crust that is hardly growing with a finger. It's amazing how much traumatized former children suffer from this, and with what tenacity they organize their lives in such a way that everything is also painful.

5. Traumatized children growing up cannot afford to be happy. Because happiness, stability, joy, success is what happened to them before the trauma happened. They were happy and happy how suddenly their world changes, and it changes in a catastrophic way for their childish consciousness. Since then, happiness and peace for them is a sense of an impending disaster. They may not like the holidays, frown at someone's compliments and assurances of love, not trust those who are interested in them with the best intentions, destroy the family idyll, leading everything to a scandal … As soon as the sun begins to shine on the horizon of their life, they will certainly all make a grand dramatic storm break out. Moreover, very often a storm, arranged not even by their hands: the husband unexpectedly gets drunk before the long-awaited trip, all the children fall ill, their loved ones leave, there are redundancies at work, etc. Everything happens, as it were, without their direct participation, but with a depressing pattern. The whole world rushes to the rescue: they need to reproduce the trauma at all costs, only at the same time they subconsciously take control of everything, now they will no longer allow everything to happen suddenly, as once upon a time, when it was the first time. Now they are convinced that when everything is good, something terrible always happens. And it certainly happens, because the world is always going to meet them …

6. Trauma is not always one key event. It can be constant psychological pressure on the child, an attempt to remake him, criticism in which he lives day after day, his feeling of being unnecessary to his parents, a constant feeling of guilt for what he is and everything he does. Often a child grows up with some kind of sometimes poorly understood message: “I have to please”, “everything around is more valuable than me”, “nobody cares about me”, “I disturb everyone, smoke the sky in vain” and any others that cripple him psyche and creating a retraumatizing reality. It is not easy to work with messages that are firmly embedded in the mental framework in adulthood. Also because there is not even a memory of how to live without these messages, there is no life experience before the trauma.

7. The earlier the injury, the more difficult the healing process. Early traumas are poorly remembered, they are early built into the child's psychological constructs, changing them and setting new conditions on which this psyche then functions. This early "disability" leads to the fact that the world seems exactly the way the child perceived it from the earliest childhood. And it is impossible to simply find and pull out a curve or a traumatic construct from the psyche without risking the collapse of the entire psychic structure. It is good that clients have psychological defenses that largely protect the psyche from such operations. Therefore, dealing with early trauma is more like an archaeological dig than a surgical operation.

Dealing with early trauma

Not every trauma stays in the psyche for a long time and then changes psychological constructs. Only the one that was not properly lived. From practice, I noticed that this happened in those cases when:

- the child was unprotected, he was not provided with support, he experienced an acute feeling of insecurity and powerlessness;

- the situation was clearly conflicting (for example, the one who should protect and love humiliates or causes harm) and the child has an emotional and cognitive dissonance that no one helped him to resolve;

- the child could not defend himself, could not show, and sometimes even allow himself to feel aggressive feelings towards the traumatic object;

- repression worked because of a strong danger to the child's psyche, or he can remember the situation, but "skip" some emotions and feelings that were too hard to live at that moment;

- the child, not being able to discuss the trauma situation, “made conclusions” about how the world works, and unconsciously built defenses against this world, making it globally traumatic.

If we are working with an adult who was injured in childhood, it is important for us to keep in mind:

1. The trauma is safely “buried” and contained, and often you will not be able to get “direct access” to it, even if you are convinced that it was and even understand what it was and what violations it brought to your client. The client can deny the presence of at least some significant traumatic event in his past life for a long time. The client has long been accustomed to considering his "torn sides" the norm in which he lives. And he is often unaware of the connection between his current problems and the trauma you suspect is present.

2. The mental structure of an adult client is quite stable. And despite the fact that it has long been bringing a lot of grief, suffering and difficulties into the client's life, he will not rush to refuse it. Because for many years she served him "faithfully", and besides, she once protected him from a difficult and difficult situation.

3. The client is afraid to even approach those feelings that were experienced (and, most likely, not even fully experienced) by him once, and therefore the resistance as he approaches the traumatic past situation will grow sharply. Often, it is by its presence and strength that one can assume that we are somewhere close.

4. Therefore, work with early childhood trauma in an adult client cannot be short-term, since it is required to go through several stages that each client (depending on the nature of the trauma, the degree of violations, the characteristics of the defenses built after it) will take their unpredictable time.

Stages of dealing with early childhood trauma in an adult client:

1. Building a strong working alliance, trust, security, acceptance. At this stage, the client, as a rule, talks about his problems in life, preferring not to go deep, but subconsciously he checks the psychotherapist for non-value and acceptance. It is impossible even to feel difficult experiences in yourself next to a person whom you do not trust and who has not been thoroughly tested by you, especially if you were previously traumatized.

2. Gradual training of the client in awareness and the habit of looking at their problems not only from the point of view of "what the world is doing wrong to me", but also from the point of view of "what I am doing with the world, that it is so with me." The development in him of the ability to see his authorship in the formation of the models by which he now lives.

3. Together with him, explore when and how these patterns were formed. What was the life of our client, that he had these very views of the world, attitudes, ways to contact the world, build and destroy relationships.

4. To see and accept your "disability", for example, the inability to grow up in love, to have those parents who would understand and support, the inability to believe in yourself as people who have never had these traumas and problems do, the inability to trust, to love ourselves or to treat the world the way “healthy” people do.

5. Over and over again to experience strong feelings about the traumatic situation discovered and its consequences: sadness, bitterness, anger, shame, guilt, etc. It is important for the therapist to notice what feelings the client is difficult to allow themselves to experience. Very often clients find it difficult to feel anger towards the "rapists" who were at the same time close people, parents, brothers, sisters.

6. Free yourself of guilt (or part of it) by sharing (or transferring it entirely) responsibility with those who were a participant or source of childhood trauma. Having understood and shared the suffering of that child who was then subjected to a kind of violence and was completely helpless and "unarmed." The abused and traumatized inner child continues to live inside adults and continues to suffer. And the task of our clients is to accept, protect and comfort him. Very often, adults treat their inner traumatized child not with understanding, but with condemnation, criticism, and shame, which only enhances the destructive effect of the trauma.

7. Trauma has largely shaped psychological "disability" due to the fact that the child was not protected by those who were called to protect. Our task is to teach an adult client to protect his inner child and be always on his side. This will allow him to avoid injury in the future and save him from subsequent re-traumatization.

8. Gradually, together with the client, rebuild the familiar frame from his psychological constructs and attitudes, showing him how those constructs that he had in childhood helped him and worked, and how they do not work, are not adaptive or destructive now, in his adult life especially when this is the only way to react to what is happening. Together with the client, find his own resources and capabilities in order to endure unpredictability and build his life without anxious expectations and endless reproduction of trauma. For this, it is also important for the client to feel his own power over his life, which was once traumatically taken away by those who were called to care and teach how to use it.

Thus, an adult client who has worked through his early childhood trauma is given a wide range of opportunities to shape his life. He always retains the same, taken from childhood, ability to react (to close in himself, or try to charm everyone, or be very obedient, or attack for defensive purposes). But to the previous method, others are added, many of which can be much more successful in approaching a particular situation.

An adult client stops unconsciously "fiddling" with old wounds. They are carefully processed, bandaged, and gradually scarred, leaving behind scars that no longer hurt so much. The client understands where and how he is injured, and treats his troubles with respect, attention and does not allow others to hurt him again. And he finally allows himself to live successfully and happily, ceasing to control the whole world around him in an alarming creation of a personal catastrophe.