Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma

Conversations with pioneering clinicians and researchers

Daniela Sieff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317600718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
• Index: Psychology

Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma is an interdisciplinary book which explores our current understanding of the forces involved in both the creation and healing of emotional trauma. Through engaging conversations with pioneering clinicians and researchers, Daniela F. Sieff offers accessible yet substantial answers to questions such as: What is emotional trauma? What are the causes? What are its consequences? What does it mean to heal emotional trauma? and How can healing be achieved?

These questions are addressed through three interrelated perspectives: psychotherapy, neurobiology and evolution. Psychotherapeutic perspectives take us inside the world of the unconscious mind and body to illuminate how emotional trauma distorts our relationships with ourselves and with other people ( Donald Kalsched, Bruce Lloyd, Tina Stromsted, Marion Woodman ). Neurobiological perspectives explore how trauma impacts the systems that mediate our emotional lives and well-being ( Ellert Nijenhuis, Allan Schore, Daniel Siegel ). And e volutionary perspectives contextualise emotional trauma in terms of the legacy we have inherited from our distant ancestors ( James Chisholm, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Randolph Nesse).

Transforming lives affected by emotional trauma is possible, but it can be a difficult process. The insights shared in these lively and informative conversations can support and facilitate that process.This book will therefore be a valuable resource for psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors and other mental health professionals in practice and training, and also for members of the general public who are endeavouring to find ways through their own emotional trauma. In addition, because emotional trauma often has its roots in childhood, this book will also be of interest and value to parents, teachers and anyone concerned with the care of children.

Part I Psychodynamic perspectives

1 Uncovering the secrets of the traumatised psyche The life-saving inner protector who is also a persecutor¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315747231-1

Donald E. Kalsched and Daniela F. Sieff

1 Earlier versions of this chapter, entitled ‘Unlocking the Secrets of the Wounded Psyche,’ appeared in Caduceus (2006) 69:10–14 and 70:16–20, and in Psychological Perspectives (2008) 51 (2): 190–199. We are grateful to both publishers for their permission to use some of that material in this book.

Summary

The psychological system created when a child is traumatised is life-saving, but has a terrible down-side. The normal reaction to unbearable pain is to withdraw from the cause of that pain; however, when we are children, and it is our caregivers who are causing pain, we cannot physically withdraw, so withdrawal happens at a psychological level instead. We dissociate. Our relational and creative potential, which in happier circumstances would animate and vitalise our life, goes into hiding in the unconscious. At the same time, another part of the psyche moves to the forefront to become its protector.

This protective system vehemently avoids anything that appears to carry a risk of retraumatisation, but tragically it sees danger in the very opportunities that would bring us healing, fulfilment and meaning. Thus it sabotages these opportunities, perhaps by creating an insidious belief in the hopelessness of our life, or by fostering a vicious, scare-mongering inner critic. It may also sabotage these opportunities by spiriting us into a world of fantasy or addiction.

Rather than providing genuine protection, this psychological system is ultimately life-denying and self-traumatising. The inner protector becomes an unwitting inner persecutor. Healing requires that we move beyond the protector/persecutor, enter into our brokenness and reconnect to our buried potential, as well as to the original pain. It is a difficult and challenging process. The fairy story of ‘The Handless Maiden’ brings the archetypal dimensions of this system to life, and describes how we can move beyond it.

Daniela Sieff: Your work focuses on the psychological defence system that is created when we undergo some kind of childhood trauma. What is the essence of the system?

Don Kalsched: If, as children, our social and emotional environment is good enough, we will develop as an integrated whole. Our creativity, confidence and sense of self will unfold organically, and as we grow we will learn how to protect our emotional self in a healthy way. However, healthy development is compromised when our sense of self is repeatedly threatened. That can happen if we are abused or neglected, if our needs are invalidated or if we are made to feel inadequate and missing in some essential value. In particular, if our sense of self is threatened and there is nobody who can help us to metabolise our pain, we will enter the realm of psychological trauma.

At this point a psychological survival system kicks in – I call it the archetypal ‘self-care system’. The problem is that when we are children this survival system has only a very limited number of options available to it. After all, a normal reaction to unbearable pain is to withdraw from the scene of injury, but because we depend on our caregivers we cannot leave, and so a part of the self withdraws instead. Our essence – the creative, relational, authentic spark of life which lies at our very core – goes into hiding deep in the unconscious. At the same time, another part of our psyche grows up prematurely. It becomes the inner caretaker and protector of our hidden essence, while complying with outer requirements as best it can.

The initial split in our psyche is miraculous because it averts psychological annihilation and saves our psychological essence in a protected and encapsulated state. However, it is also tragic in that it leaves us dissociated from what is most vital and creative in us, as well as from the experiences that make up our daily lives. The emotionally painful experiences continue, but they are not happening to ‘me’, because the essential ‘me’ is hidden away.

Dissociation is an unconscious process that goes on outside awareness. It seems to be a hard-wired capacity in the human psyche, like the circuit breaker installed in the electrical panel of a house. If too much current comes in (trauma), then the circuit-breaker trips. That said, we now know that the painful experiences do not disappear but are encoded in the body and unconscious brain.

Daniela: Can you talk about the belief system that children constellate around psychological trauma?

Don: If, as children, our life is sufficiently painful to require a lot of dissociation, and if our painful experiences are not made understandable by our parents, or other caregivers, then we develop a distorted interpretation of our experiences. Striving to understand why we are being neglected or abused, we are likely to believe there is something faulty with who we are: ‘I would not be suffering this if I was an adequate person…. There must be something wrong with me…. Mummy and Daddy are right, I am not loveable….’ These beliefs constitute shame – a core conviction of our own defectiveness. As children, we come to these distorted beliefs for several reasons. First, this is typically the explanation given to us by parents – either explicitly or implicitly – and we do not have the knowledge which could help us refute it. Second, our psyche's self-care system can wrestle an (illusionary) feeling of control out of this belief, and create a hope that something can be done to change the situation: ‘If only I can become “good enough” then maybe my pain will stop.’ Third, self-blaming beliefs are protective in that they prevent us from becoming angry with our parents and blaming them, and because we depend on our parents for survival we cannot afford to do that. In short, this self-blaming, shameful belief system is the best that our psychological self-care system can do.

However, when we turn our childhood anger away from our abusers, we have little choice but to turn it inwards onto ourselves, whereupon the psyche is split yet again, this time between a critical inner protector and a supposedly inadequate inner child. This splitting of the psyche is a violent process, just like the splitting of the atom, and the fallout is equally destructive and toxic. The split is cemented into the fabric of our being and a (false) shame-based identity becomes the filter through which we see our life. Simone Weil wrote that ‘the false god turns suffering into violence; the true god turns violence into suffering’.² The self-care system of the traumatised child becomes the ‘false god’ that turns suffering into violence.

2 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, translated by Friedhelm Kemp, Munich 1952, p. 104.

A client that I worked with remembered that when she was four years old her family moved to its first real home. She had been promised a room of her own and a backyard in which to play. On arriving at the new home, she spontaneously picked a bunch of flowers to give to her mother to show her excitement and joy. However, when her mother realised that these flowers had come from the neighbour's yard she went mad. She asked her bewildered daughter: ‘What is the matter with you? How could you do that? You must go and apologise to the neighbour now!’ The love, excitement and spontaneous joy that the young girl was trying to express got cruelly quashed. Episodes like this, which happen in every child's life, do not matter too much if they are occasional occurrences or if the mother's empathy intervenes, but this client was frequently shamed when expressing her emotions, and in time she learnt to dissociate them. To achieve that, she buried the vibrant, spontaneous and feeling child, while at the same time another part of her grew up prematurely, developing a self-sufficient armour and becoming identified with her very good mind. However, at the hands of her inner protector, my client began to hate both her body with its emotional feelings, and the expressive, vibrant little girl who lived in that body and seemed to cause all her trouble. By the time she was in her thirties she was a very successful journalist; however, her hatred of her body was expressed through a secret eating disorder. By this point she was living in a world that was severely compromised by her psychological self-care system, even though that system had been created to help her survive her childhood.

Daniela: You talk about the traumatised psyche becoming self-traumatising – can you elaborate on this?

Don: Once the inner protector has been constellated by the self-care system, it will do all it can to prevent any possible retraumatisation. In doing so, it becomes an unwitting, tyrannical and violent inner persecutor, inflicting more pain, trauma and abuse upon us than the original trauma, and external world, ever did. I like to use the analogy of auto-immune disease. In such disease – AIDS, for example – the killer T-cells ‘think’ they are attacking destructive intruders but they have been tricked and are really attacking healthy tissue. In the same way, the inner protector thinks the excitement or hope presented by a new life opportunity is dangerous, so does all that it can to sabotage such opportunities. Thus it becomes a pathological anti-life force within the psyche.

In short, the inner protector turns against the very person it is supposed to be protecting to become an inner persecutor. This makes the pain carried by the trauma survivor much worse.

Daniela: How does the inner protector sabotage new opportunities, and keep our essence locked away from the supposed dangers of life?

Don: The primary method used by the inner protector is a self-persecutory inner voice. This voice will say whatever is needed to prevent our essential self from leaving its hiding place in the unconscious and venturing out into a world where it could be retraumatised. For example, if we were abandoned as a child, it might say something like ‘You are not lovable, and never will be’ in its determination to prevent our adult self from opening to love, and thus risk being abandoned once again. Or, if during our childhood we were repeatedly told we were stupid, it might convince us that we have nothing interesting or original to say so that we turn down an invitation to lecture, and thus avoid the risk of exposing our supposed stupidity. However, rather than providing us with protection, these negative, demoralising inner attacks often result in deep and overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and despair – a sense that life is for others and not for us.

This negative inner voice is not the only method of ‘self-defence’ used by the inner self-care system, and although other strategies are less immediately obvious, they are equally powerful, life-denying, self-destructive and self-traumatising.

One key strategy is to create additional layers of psychological splitting and dissociation. Not only do we split into a hidden inner child and a protector/persecutor, but our actual traumatic experiences are dismembered so that our experience is not felt. When a jigsaw puzzle is lying in 500 pieces we cannot see the big picture. In addition, we learn how to move out of our bodies so that we do not feel the full emotional and physical impact of what is happening to us. Once we are able to do that, we feel as though we are not actually there during our ordeals. Rather, we have become a disembodied observer – one step removed from what is happening to us. However, there are costs: dissociated from our experiences, our bodies, our feelings and our lives, we become like zombies – numbed and entranced. In one of her poems, Emily Dickinson described this powerfully:³

3 Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

There is a pain – so utter –

It swallows substance up –

Then covers the Abyss with Trance –

So Memory can step

Around – across – upon it –

As one within a Swoon –

Goes safely – where an open eye –

Would drop Him – Bone by Bone.

The inner self-care system is the ‘trance’ covering the unbearable abyss of unmediated traumatic experiences. It descends whenever earlier trauma is retriggered.

Another method commonly used by the protector/persecutor is to encapsulate us in fantasy. Living a real life leaves us at risk of being retraumatised, so the psychological self-care system recruits the inner imaginal world which can provide a vibrant private space, where the sprit can live safe from the onslaughts of reality. In the fairy story of Rapunzel, the tower in which Rapunzel is imprisoned represents the fantasy world, and the witch personifies the archetypal protector/persecutor who is determined to keep Rapunzel (safely) out of real life. She is known as a sorceress, that is, a spell-caster – an expert in trance states. Peter Pan's Neverland may have been created to serve a similar purpose by author James Barrie. When Barrie was seven years old, his older brother, who was his mother's favourite child, died. Barrie's mother became depressed. In the fictionalised version of Barrie's life, portrayed in the film Finding Neverland, Barrie is describing this episode when he poignantly says: ‘… that was the end of the boy James. I used to say to myself that he had gone to Neverland.’ In other words, the film portrays Neverland and Peter Pan as the fantastical creation of the young James Barrie, who needed a safe, magical world into which he could retreat, following overwhelming trauma. Stories about fairies stealing children are another way that this archetypal dynamic has come to light, and ‘away with the fairies’ means literally that for a traumatised child! The child has taken refuge in the world of fantasy, imagination and dreams. The refrain of Yeats’ poem, tellingly entitled ‘The Stolen Child’, beautifully expresses this:

For he comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

From a world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

There is something wonderful in our psyche's capacity to invent fantastical worlds which give our threatened spirit a meaningful place in life and therefore some hope – but a high price has to be paid in terms of our adaptation to reality. When a temporary world of fantasy becomes a permanent inner state of being, it takes over. At this point fantasy has become a hypnotic spell that creates a ‘comfortable’ prison. We are encapsulates in limbo-land; neither dead, nor alive.

Finally, the self-care system may take us into the substitute world of addiction. Instead of real-life nourishment, the system says ‘Have another drink’ or ‘One more chocolate brownie.’ I often use the image of a hydroponic garden I once saw that was growing the most incredible strawberries. Those plants had their roots in circulating water that was highly mineralised – it was like the ambrosia of the gods – analogous to the mythic world of pure fantasy. The only problem was that these plants were slowly losing their capacity to root in real soil … in real life. Addiction is similar: we are fed on the mind-altering substitutes of pure ‘spirit’ and so we have the most magnificent experiences, or so we think. But meanwhile we become weaker and weaker. And the more we are fed by our addiction, the less able we become to take root in the world.

Daniela: For me, a verse of ‘The Rose’⁴ encapsulates the self-care system in a very poignant way:

4 ‘The Rose’ words and music by Amanda McBroom © 1977 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI) and Third Story Music, Inc. (ASCAP). All rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. Reprinted with permissi...