The Trouble With Trauma: Resolve the impact of abandonment and fear of rejection, and understand the importance of connection in recovery

Preface

In preparation for this book I completed a little exercise for myself where I asked myself a few questions about why I wanted to write this book, why it was so important, why it needed to be me, and why now!? In essence, my brain’s response was, ‘why not!’

Some of you may have seen Simon Sinek’s work around finding your ‘why’. Understanding that having a good sense of your purpose, your ‘why’, really helps to clarify a number of things in our lives.

In his book Start With Why, Simon refers to the fact that all inspiring leaders, regardless of their area of expertise, all think, act and communicate in the same way – which is the complete opposite of everyone else! In this book and in his subsequent books, he seeks to inspire readers to build a world in which trust and loyalty are the norm, rather than the exception.

In essence, when I go back to my ‘why’, I seek to inspire people to move from illness to wellness and even further onto awesomeness. I am a pioneer of radical recovery.

When I think about my ‘why’ – I recognise that what we are actually talking about is the need to have a clear sense of purpose for our lives. Having a clear sense of purpose is what helps people recover from the impact of trauma. We can overcome anything if we feel there is some purpose in our life.

My life’s purpose is to help everyone to understand that what society thinks of as trauma isn’t the reality of traumatic experience. As a clinician, I’m a trauma therapist and a proponent of the trauma model of psychopathology. This model conceptualises people as having understandable reactions to traumatic events, rather than suffering from mental illness.

Trauma models emphasise that traumatic experiences are more common, and more significant, in consideration of causation of mental health issues, than has often been accepted in modern approaches to psychological problems.

I have experienced trauma in my life; I even had PTSD at one point after being hit by a bus as a pedestrian. I could consider myself lucky to have survived, but rather I see that I made a choice to recover. I was able to recover with the help of a number of professionals, but also because of my own perspective about how our life experiences happen for a purpose; I just needed to understand what that purpose was.

The impact from any traumatic experience is directly related to our sense of responsibility in the experience, our lack of control or power in the face of the experience, and our ability to attribute meaning to why we had the experience. The key to recovery rests in our ability to feel a sense a purpose after the experience.

Trauma is normal – life is challenging – but truly empowered people seek truth, respect, integrity and purpose. Validation promotes action.

Sorry is NOT the acceptance of liability, it is the acknowledgement of another person’s pain.

Resilience cannot be inherited; it is adaptive and imparted through a supportive environment where failure is applauded as providing another step in the cha-cha of life!

Human beings experience trauma because life throws us curve balls – we just need to learn to duck and weave. Dexterity is what helps us to learn. Without pressure, there can be no diamonds.

Show me someone who is truly inspirational and I’ll show you someone who has experienced difficulty and learned from their experience.

Mental health awareness is at the highest level in humanity’s history – but we are only now starting to understand how our mental health impacts all areas of our society. Are our mental health issues truly worse? Or are we just more courageous in our willingness to be open about our experiences?

Show me any ‘problem’ in society and I can link it to traumatic experience. Trauma isn’t just ‘mental’ – it’s physical. The sooner we call out Descartes on his ‘detour’ of the human experience, the sooner we may be able to turn humanity around to be able to make a revolutionary recovery.

Without storms and sun – there can be no life. Only sun – dry desert. Only storms – sludge and mud. No green – no growth. It is the combination that is powerful.

We can adapt to our environment; we can cope. But to be lush, we need a combination of both: sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain… Luscious! Without sun we have no hope; without rain we parch. We must have both and value both.

Revel in the storm, because when the rainbow appears the universe reminds us that there is hope. It’s not surprising that the rainbow is the universal sign of diversity and hope. The pure joy of all of the colours in life, presented together, none more important than the other.

Our environment teaches us about nourishment. If unbalanced, we cannot provide ourselves the nourishment we need, and we won’t grow even if we can survive.

Survival is Miraculous – Recovery is a Choice.

Don’t be a passive survivor in your life, become a persistent recoverer. A revolutionary pioneer of your most luscious life.

We Need Connection To Survive

Our ultimate need as human beings is for connection.

Why do I say it’s our ‘ultimate’ need, a need that surpasses every other? Because without connections to other living beings, we would die. We are neurologically ‘hard wired’ for connection.

But what is connection? Connection is a relationship in which a person or being is linked to another living being.

Connection and vulnerability

In Brené Brown’s ground-breaking TED Talk on vulnerability (one of the top five TED Talks ever), which has been viewed over 35 million times on YouTube and led her to present a Netflix program titled ‘Call to Courage’, she talks about how shame affects our ability to form effective relationships – it impacts our ability to connect.

Brené calls herself a shame researcher and storyteller. Her research is based on years and years of qualitative research, interviews and observations that help people understand why the experience of shame leads us to feel that we want to isolate ourselves and protect our hearts from being hurt again. I deeply admire what she has done to raise awareness around how shame impacts us as human beings to the collective consciousness. (And I will always be grateful for the movement of TED for providing an innovative ‘non-mainstream’ platform that allowed Brené’s ideas – and those of many other inspirational people – to be spread to hundreds of millions of people around the world.)

Brené’s explanation of vulnerability, and how those who ‘bounce back’ from a sense of rejection manage to do it, has provided the world with a beacon of hope, support for being courageous, and an explanation of what it really means to be brave. She has inspired a new generation of people to develop resilience, and has done it by being willing to be vulnerable herself – despite the personal hardship this may bring her.

Brené talks about the challenges that we all face, and in this way, she really is able to normalise it – which is why it has been so power­ful. However, Brené’s research is only part of the story. It provides us with an explanation for what is happening and how some human beings appear to be able to harness their vulnerability, demonstrate bravery and act courageously. It helps us to know what behaviours lead to overcoming our human challenges, but it doesn’t provide a clear plan for how to change our thoughts and feelings to enable us to act courageously.

We need more…

The need for connection is normal

Connection is an emotional need that affords us a range of physiological outcomes. We need to not only understand that it’s normal and it has significant psychological impacts, but it also has physiological impacts.

As you read this book, you will understand how our need for connection is the absolute core requirement of our ability to develop as human beings, why we struggle without it, and what we need to do to change it. As human beings our whole lives are about connecting with others. From the time we are born, we are dependent upon being connected. It is the basis of our ability to sustain life. In our primal old brain, our amygdala senses that our ability to be connected is literally about life and death.

The difficulty with having our most basic emotional need being ‘connection’ is that our main problems as human beings then come from any form of disconnection, or a perceived threat of disconnection.

And this is the trouble with trauma: traumatic experience creates a disconnect.

If We Understood The Impact Of Trauma

And Taught How To Resolve It,

We Could Eliminate Mental Health Issues

In A Few Generations

As human beings we are neurologically driven to form connections, as being reliably connected to others is absolutely essential to our survival. As a result, anything that impedes our ability to connect is going to be problematic. The trouble with trauma is that it creates a disconnection. As human beings, we perceive events as traumatic because the event creates a disconnect.

What is ‘trauma’ and why is trauma such a big problem for us?

Trauma is at the base of what psychologists refer to as psychopathology – the negative psychological problems we experience that cause us difficulties in life, the feelings and experiences we refer to as ‘mental illness’.

It’s important to be clear about what I mean by ‘trauma’, because many people, especially in western cultures, believe that traumatic events are only things that are life threatening. They think of events that are hugely impactful: accidents, rape, natural disasters. It is true, these events are absolutely traumatic… but so are the things that threaten our ability to connect, because to our brain they are viewed as the same.

The word ‘trauma’ comes from Greek – it literally means ‘wound’. A deeply distressing or disturbing experience. Over time, it has grown to mean more, especially in psychological circles. However, I really want to come back to the ‘original’ meaning because I believe the way modern psychology has viewed trauma isn’t helpful for understanding what it really is and how it impacts our development. My perspective is based on the original Greek meaning – it is an event that creates a wound, an emotional wound that develops from a distressing or disturbing experience. To our brain, a disconnection is a distressing experience.

It’s important to ensure clarity on this point because when we consider the modern psychological interpretation of trauma, we have taken it to imply that an inability to cope with a traumatic experience is a failing on the part of the human who experiences it. Yet, the way our brain approaches traumatic experience is entirely normal – and arguably it is also completely developmentally appropriate!

We all experience trauma. Yet we are told as a society that we shouldn’t focus on it. Our inability to ‘not’ focus on it, or to repress the impact of the trauma, is considered by the fathers of modern psychology as some sort of neurosis.

It isn’t.

It is actually the failure to recognise the ‘normality’ of traumatic experience that has put us where we are now as a society – overworked, overmedicated, avoidant, judgemental human beings.

We need to change this approach if we want to improve our lives, and the lives of generations to come.

It is the failure to recognise trauma as a normal experience that requires review and processing, and that is responsible for the majority of our mental health issues today.

I firmly believe that if we understood trauma and its impact and we were taught the processes to resolve it, we could eliminate the most common mental health issues from our society in a few generations.

How trauma results in mental health problems

My primary explanation for why trauma is so important to understand is that our very first experience of a trauma – the first that we actually recall and we can make an attribution and blame ourselves for – is usually from when we are about four years old. Our first experience of trauma is realistically earlier in our life, but the first abandonment we experience and take responsibility for is definitely before we start primary school.

Why do I say that this happens when we’re four? Well, as human beings we have a really interesting developmental experience from the time we are born.

Needs

When we are born, our emotional needs are met by our primary caregivers, so our mother or other adults who looked after us as a baby. Our needs are usually always met; we are fed, clothed and have a roof over our head. In this way we can feel reasonably secure and can grow and feel nurtured.

Around 18 months old, things change and we find we start to learn language and express ourselves – we start to say ‘no!’ We are exploring language and what gets a reaction, and we see this as important, and we notice the reaction we get when we say ‘no!’, we will often repeat something to see the response we get. However, we do not have a direct or clear understanding at this point about what it all means – our little brain is trying to learn how the world works and we test certain behaviours to see the reaction. Do we get what we want or not? This will determine whether or not we should repeat a behaviour.

Desires

We grow a little more, and around the age of two we develop ‘desire’ – which is very different to ‘need’. So, what’s the big deal about desire?

As two year olds, we change our focus from what is given to us to meet our needs, and suddenly now have a desire for something different. However, we often don’t have effective language skills to communicate our new desires. This is why two year olds throw tantrums, because instead of having a basic physiological need met, we want something different, but we can’t communicate that desire to my parents or caregivers, or if we can they may not give us what we want.

The problem as children is that we don’t understand why, because up until now they have given us what we needed, but they don’t appear to do the same with what we want. We don’t understand why there is a difference, because it’s all in our heads and they seemed to understand us before. So, we think that our primary caregivers know exactly what we’re thinking because for everything up until that point the caregiver intuitively ‘knew’ what we needed – we are egocentric.

But when ‘need’ changes to ‘desire’, we look to our parent to give us what we want and we don’t necessarily get it!

Now, there are a range of reasons why we don’t get it, but why do we throw tantrums? It’s because we don’t have the language to communicate our desires, and we’re usually not getting what it is that we want, so in frustration we will throw a tantrum. Despite the fact that many psychologists believe our childhood traumatic experiences cause psychopathology, the responses we have at this age are actually developmentally appropriate. It isn’t ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ – it’s normal for us to have this response at this age. If we didn’t have this response, we would not be able to ensure we maintain the connection that is so vital to our survival as a human being.

From this point we develop more language, we become more aware, but we still believe that our parent can understand what’s going on in our head. In fact, we believe that all the adults around us can read our minds.

Individuation

Then there is that moment when we know that children develop true and full individuation. Young children – toddlers – will