Traumatic Experiences of Normal Development

An Intersubjective, Object Relations Listening Perspective on Self, Attachment, Trauma, and Reality

Carl H. Shubs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000035612
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Traditionally, trauma has been defined as negatively impacting external events, with resulting damage. This book puts forth an entirely different thesis: trauma is universal, occurring under even the best of circumstances and unavoidably sculpting the very building blocks of character structure.

In Traumatic Experiences of Normal Development, Dr. Carl Shubs depathologizes the experience of trauma by presenting a listening perspective which helps recognize the presence and effects of traumatic experiences of normal development (TEND) by using a reconstruction of object relations theory. This outlook redefines trauma as the breach in intrapsychic organization of Self, Affect, and Other (SAO), the three components of object relations units, which combine to form intricate and changeable constellations that are no less than the total experience of living in any given moment. Bridging the gap between the trauma and analytic communities, as well as integrating intrapsychic and relational frameworks, the SAO/ TEND perspective provides a trauma-based band of attunement for attending to all relational encounters including those occurring in therapy.

Though targeted to mental health professionals, this book will help enable therapists and sophisticated lay readers alike to recognize the impact of relational encounters, providing new tools to understand the traumas we have experienced and to minimize the hold they have on us.

Part I

Character structure

1

Listening perspectives and object relations foundations

The premise

Trauma is so deeply interwoven into the intrapsychic structure of mind and in character development that talking about one inevitably leads to talking about the other. In essence this is a tautology, because it is trauma that creates character structure, which is the result of organizations of selfhood that derive and evolve from impingements on the self’s unrestricted functioning. The two are so integrally enmeshed that I found it impossible to talk about one and not the other, and so I present the interrelationships between the two as a sort of interweaving throughout this book, which I hope further illuminates that relationship rather than obscuring it. In a Platonic sense, if there were no trauma in a person’s life, there would be no character structure. A braided rope is not the same thing as a single strand of fiber, no matter how strong that strand is, and I believe that is evidenced here as I present my ideas about the braid of Self,¹ Affect, Other (S-A-O)² within traumatic experiences of normal development (TEND).

In one of the first workshops I attended as I was learning about trauma and its effects on victims of violent crime, Robert Pynoos presented one of the most powerful and enduring lessons I learned about the importance of the idiosyncratic meanings a child makes concerning his experience of violence, particularly in the context of his larger life. Pynoos told of a girl, we’ll call her Becky, who was part of a group of children who were under fire from a gunman in their schoolyard. The greatest fear for the child, Pynoos related, was not “I’m going to be killed” but “Mommy’s going to be so mad at me.” What this highlighted for me was the preeminence of the internal world and its processing power of external events.

It is this processing, the internally assigned meanings and interpretation of events (both internal and external) that determine whether the event is traumatic. Pynoos was teaching this fact back then, even though—as Sarnat (1997) attests over ten years later—the trauma community and the analytic community were typically still at odds with each other. Sadly, this disagreement continues even today.

One of the major focuses of the SAO/TEND listening stance (which for the sake of convenience will be referred to simply as “SAO/TEND”)³ is that it strives to bridge this gap. Each alternative perspective has valuable things to offer, and yet alone each misses important things regarding understanding and subsequent treatment. Sarnat (1997) affirms this position of the necessity for an integrated listening stance:

To neglect psychoanalytic listening risks foreclosing the space for analytic work. To neglect trauma-oriented listening risks minimizing the actuality of trauma and oppression, rupturing the empathic tie to the survivor, and foreclosing the full intensity of traumatic memory from the therapeutic situation.

p. 79

I believe that the perceived difference between the two communities is essentially flawed and reflects the integration problem itself. In my view, there should be no difference in their respective points of view. From the perspective of the mind of the affected child, in his best interpretive efforts to express his experience of events, his representations do accurately reflect his experience if we are willing to listen and able to understand the mostly non-verbal and non-linear language with which he is able to express himself.

I want to underscore Sarnat’s (1997) contention that “a therapist’s exclusive attachment to either listening stance may interfere with optimal responsiveness to the adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse”—or any traumatic experience, for that matter—“and that flexibility in listening approach is necessary if the therapist is to be fully responsive to the therapeutic needs of the survivor” (p. 80). I maintain that this is especially true when we are trying to attune ourselves to the survivor of any internal or external event regardless of the person’s current age. This has even greater significance regarding those events of normal experience in childhood, particularly to the Infant⁴ and the organizing Self of that person,⁵ since the younger a person is, the greater impact each event has.

This book reflects the massive change in some parts of the psychoanalytic community concerning how we understand what happens in people’s minds. More specifically, it addresses how traumatic experiences play central roles in the organization and functioning of those minds. Toward that end, it provides a reassessment of dissociation as a process and/or disorder. It also re-examines the place of dissociation in psychoanalytic conceptualizations.

My focus is in accord with the position that such processes are general phenomena and basic to mental functioning (Bromberg, 1996; Farber, 2006). This dissociation is an elemental operation in the development and establishment of a person’s internal world as well as in subsequent manifestations of those constructions throughout a person’s life (Bromberg, 1995). For these reasons, it is important that we be able to recognize and address its presence in our therapeutic work with patients.

SAO/TEND offers the therapist just such a method with which to attune to the existence and presence of a person’s various self states, his connections and disconnections, and to do so systematically and consciously. It recognizes dissociation as an invaluable tool of intrapsychic survival that simultaneously enables attachment as well as detachment, particularly in the face of traumatic interactions with a person’s global world as a whole, his caretakers within it, and those caretakers as projected upon that external world.

The approach I am offering in my TEND listening stance provides an intersubjective, object relations framework for attending to the operations and organization of the mind for recognizing the ways in which everyday living may create traumatic experiences for the developing infant. It also offers a vehicle for understanding and appreciating how those occurrences can and do lay a foundation for future development of selfhood and relationship with others. Significant to my view is that neglect or abuse is determined by the subjective experience of the Infant and is therefore an inherent part of normal development. Accordingly, dissociation is to be viewed as a normal function in intrapsychic organization and not one that is exclusively relegated to concepts of pathology and disorders. It refers to the process of the creation of various Not-Me states of mind and self states that each of us has and which we typically think of when we are talking about “me.”⁶

This perspective is overtly and bald-facedly inclusive of all parents as subjectively experienced perpetrators upon the mind of the Infant, even when those parents are the most attentive, best intended, and most loving. There is no such thing as perfect attunement. Misattunements are inevitable. There is no such thing as flawless responsiveness, and there will always be instances in which the Infant feels overwhelmed and traumatized. There is also no such thing as true omnipotence, and therefore the subjective omnipotence of the infant will inevitably and repeatedly fail. In addition, the parent can never completely fulfill that dependency-based need of the Infant. These are some of the hard truths of normal development. While we all deserve a perfect developmental world as a birthright, none of us gets it, as even the realistically perceived best of all possible worlds is imperfect. These statements may also be seen as axioms of life, and they are central to this book’s listening stance.

Infants, traumatic meanings, and an integrated listening stance

My point of view is based in the recognition that the infant is a very active experiencer of his life, activities, environment, and the interactions between them. It is crucial, therefore, that we are able to understand the subjectivities within those experiences and to appreciate their impacts on the child’s intrapsychic structure and organization, because these form the foundation of the internalized rules of existence and of reality that Bowlby (1969) refers to as internal “working models” (p. 80).

The trauma that is always central to my attention is the intrapsychic trauma that occurs in the relational experience of the infant in interaction with his parent or primary parent figure, particularly as that interaction is experienced from his subjectivity. I call this developmental trauma, by which I mean the breach of intrapsychic structure that results from interpersonal and relational interaction, as occurs in normal development.

This is distinct from what I call incident trauma of childhood, which refers to the reactions to stereotypically recognized events that people typically experience as traumatic. In childhood, such occurrences include physical child abuse, molestation, and other forms of child sexual abuse; major and overt emotional abuse; blatant child abandonment; obvious neglect; and accidents or illnesses that have major and easily recognizable impact and negative consequences. Incident traumas of adulthood include reactions to such events as rape, attempted murder, significant assault, the death of a loved one (especially a young child), and significant accidents or illnesses that have physically significant consequences and long-term ramifications (like loss of a limb, broken neck, paralysis, or blindness). Non-physical incidents of adulthood that have significant emotional or psychological features (such as marital infidelity, divorce, loss of a job, or financial disaster) may also be traumatic, but these are not necessarily so. Developmental trauma is always present in incident traumas of childhood, though the reverse is not necessarily the case.

It is important that we are able to distinguish between incident and developmental trauma, because incident trauma always overlays existing and pertinent developmental trauma, manifesting only when developmental trauma meets a precipitating event. In the absence of developmental trauma, there is merely an event, an incident, but no incident trauma. This is similar to how a virus can lie dormant until the right set of circumstances allows it to multiply. Without this understanding of the relationship between the two, incident traumas can be highly resistant to treatment. Developmental traumas may easily become invisible and be a “ghost in the machine” if there is no recognition that they underlie incident trauma. The crucial question concerning any incident trauma is, “What is there about your experience of this event that made it traumatic for you?”

Considering an event like Pynoos’s schoolyard shooting scenario, how can we approach the process of the child’s meaning-making, especially within the understanding that it is a relational process concerning the intentions and the subjective goals of each participant in the typically dyadic interaction? That situation becomes even more complex and layered as we think about all the other people—the girl’s internal and intrapsychic Others⁷—who are likely to also be present in her mind at that time. Among these Others are (intrapsychic representations of) her teachers, fellow students, and the gunman, each of whom plays a different part in her processing of the experience, as does her relationship with her mother and other members of her family.

I believe this view applies substantially more strongly to experiences of normal development and relational interaction—both intrapsychic and overtly observable—than it does to experiences conventionally ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Character structure
• Part II Trauma re-examined and redefined
• Part III Self and attachment
• Part IV Denial and not knowing revisited
• Index