Dealing with Trauma

The cost of SILENCE  dealing with trauma:

We have a human need to confess and to share our feelings.  

By Maria Pau of Coaching With Substance.

There are examples throughout cultures of the various types of confession - ranging from dream sharing in African tribes to confession rituals in North and South American tribal cultures, as well as confession in the church and a preponderance of support groups in our culture.

According to James Pennebaker, author of 'Opening Up' and researcher on the physical effects of withholding versus expression of emotion, inhibition has three serious effects on us physically. 

Inhibition is physical work: 

when people actively inhibit their thoughts, feelings and behaviour, they have to exert significant effort to restrain and hold back feeling. In the case of emotional inhibition, the work is constant. Inhibition affects short-term biological changes and long-term health. 

Inhibition is a cumulative stressor:

In the short term, inhibiting feelings results in immediate physical changes such as increased

perspiration, which can be measured through methods such as lie detector tests. "Over time, the work of inhibition serves as a cumulative stressed on the body, increasing the probability of illness and other stress related physical and psychological problems. Active inhibition can be viewed as one of many general stressors that affect the mind and body. Obviously, the harder one must work at inhibiting, the greater the stress on the body"

(Pennebaker).

Inhibition Influences Thinking Abilities

When we inhibit parts of our thinking and feeling, we are not able to think through significant events in our lives. Hence, we are prevented from understanding and then integrating that understanding into the larger context of our life pattern. "By not talking about an inhibited event,

for example, we usually do not translate the event into language. This prevents us from understanding and assimilating the event.  Consequently, significant experiences that are inhibited are likely to surface in the forms of

ruminations, dreams and associated thought disturbances" 

(Pennebaker).

The Role of Confrontation

Pennebaker has also found that, "Confrontation reduces the effects of

inhibition," reversing the detrimental physiological problems that result

from inhibition. When we make a lifestyle of openly confronting painful

feelings and we "resolve the trauma, there will be a lowering of the

overall stress on the body." 

Confrontation "forces a rethinking of events.  Confronting a trauma helps 

people understand and, ultimately, assimilate the

event. By talking or writing about previously inhibited experiences, people

translate the event into language. Once it is language-based, they can better

understand the experience and ultimately put it behind them" (Pennebaker).

This is a crucial part of developing the emotional literacy necessary for

recovery.

The Long-Term Effect of Childhood Trauma

Pennebaker's research was done with a research team which examined the progress of people who lost spouses by suicide or suddenly through accidental death—that is, recent traumas—as well as childhood trauma such as sexual abuse that occurred early in life. 

He found that childhood traumas affect overall health more than traumas that occurred within the last three

years, due to the cumulative stress on the body through long-term inhibition of feelings. When traumas are not resolved, they are not converted into

language, thought about and integrated into our overall pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving.

The obvious result of this, as I have observed over years of clinical experience, is that clients arrive at therapy, say in their mid-thirties, feeling as if their lives are puzzles with significant pieces missing. They may have trouble settling on a life's direction. They may be experiencing problems in

intimate relationships, or the thought of a long-term committed relationship overwhelms them.

Intimate relationships trigger unresolved pain from the past. Early childhood traumas such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, divorce - or seemingly lesser traumas such as being ignored or misunderstood by those whom we most wish to understand us and are dependent upon for our sense of healthy

connectedness - lie dormant within us if our coping style has been inhibition rather than confrontation and disclosure. Then the pain gets triggered without the understanding and self-awareness that we would have, had we gradually and over time resolved our feelings related to the trauma. 

The result of this is often a projection of early pain into the current relationship. That is, we see the trigger event or our current intimacy as the problem in and of itself. All too often it follows that our idea of the solution or way out of the pain is to dump or exit the relationship.

The deep excavating work of therapy is to make conscious these early wounds and convert them into words so that they can be felt and understood - to use the skills of emotional literacy. Only then can we place them in their proper perspective, giving them a context (where, when and how), so we can integrate them back into ourselves with understanding as to what happened and what meaning we made out of them, that we currently live by.

In Australia childhood trauma such as sexual and physical abuse and especially emotional abandonment in early development is rampant and for most part untreated. Hence our extremely high rates of Addiction, Codependency, Depression, Suicide, ADHD and ADD, as well as high rates of

relationship and family breakdown. Our true stats are a disgrace. Its time for some serious action. 

If you or someone you love relates to this information call us at  COACHING WITH SUBSTANCE (CWS) INTERVENTIONS  PHONE 07 5606 6315 FOR IMMEDIATE HELP (7days). 

Email: info@coachingwithsubstance.org.au

TRAUMA AND ADDICTION

TRAUMA AND ADDICTION

By Maria Pau

Trauma, by its very nature, renders a person emotionally illiterate. What happens feels out of the norm, hard to pin down, elusive and strange, so we don't integrate it into our context of normal living. The brain, like any good computer, categorises information by type. For example, traumas

such as the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, or a devastating hurricane or being raped are not part of our daily routines, so we don't have well-developed mental categories for organising our impressions of them.

They seem unreal, out of the ordinary, and they need to be talked through to make them feel real. Talking about trauma, going over what happened, contextualises it so we can integrate it. 

Complications due to Trauma

If we do not process trauma, the result can be serious and ongoing life complications such as

depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, anger, feelings of betrayal, and trouble trusting and connecting in relationships. Such are the symptoms that, when unresolved, lead people to seek pleasure or self-medicate with alcohol, drugs, food, sex, spending and other addictions.

Because of the unpredictable, uncontrollable and traumatic nature of substance abuse and addiction, people who are chemically dependent, or those in an addict's family system such as spouses, children and siblings, usually experience some form of psychological damage. Family members as well as many addicts present disorders that extend across a range of clinical syndromes, such as anxiety disorders, reactive and endogenous depression, psychosomatic symptoms, psychotic episodes, eating disorders and substance abuse, as well as developmental deficits, distortions in self-image, confused inner world with disorganised internal dynamics, and co-dependence.

Chronic tension, confusion and unpredictable behaviour, as well as physical and sexual abuse, are typical of addictive environments and create trauma symptoms. Individuals in addictive systems behave in ways consistent with the behaviours of victims of other psychological traumas. For example, trauma victims often develop "learned helplessness' - a condition in which they lose the capacity to appreciate the connection between their actions and their ability to influence their lives (Seligman 1975) as do individuals inaddictive systems.

"Persons are traumatised when they face uncontrollable life events and are helpless to affect the outcome of those events." (Lindemann 1944).  Many people suffer deep emotional and psychological pain and are systematically traumatised from living with addicts. After repeated failures and disappointments while trying to gain some semblance of control, feelings of fear, frustration, shame, inadequacy, guilt, resentment, self-pity and anger mount, as do rigid defines systems. 

Dysfuntional Defensive Strategies

A person who is abused or traumatised may develop dysfunctional defensive strategies or

behaviours designed to ward off emotional and psychological pain.   These might include self-medicating with chemicals (drugs or alcohol) as well as behavioural addictions that affect their brain chemistry by bingeing, purging or withholding food, or engaging in activities such as excessive work or high-risk behaviours such as risky sex or gambling. 

These behaviours affect the pleasure centers of the brain, enhancing "feel-good" chemicals and

minimizing pain. This means of handling trauma leads to the disease of

addiction.

Cellullar Memory

Scientific research, mainly in neurobiology, has produced significant studies of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The findings through brain imaging demonstrate that trauma can affect the body and brain much more than had previously been understood (Van der Kolk 1996). Traumatic memories are stored not only in the mind but throughout the body as what scientists call cellular memory. 

Psychodrama, because it is a role-playing method that includes the use of normal movement, provides a natural and immediate access to those memories. Long before the scientific research had yielded these conclusions, J. L. Moreno was developing his psychodramatic method, one of the earliest methods of body psychotherapy. Moreno taught that the body remembers what the mind forgets (J. Moreno 1964).

Based on observations of role-play, Moreno saw the importance of involving the body in remembering. He hypothesized two types of memory: content (mind) and action (Goody). 

Content memory is stored as thoughts, recollections, feelings and facts. Action memory is stored in the brain but also in the musculature as tension, holding, tingling, warmth, incipient movement, and the like. The best route to recapturing action memory, according to Zerka Moreno, his wife and co-developer of the field of psychodrama, is through expressive methods that use the whole person

(mind and body) in action. When we act out rather than talk out situations from our lives, the recollection of memories occurs more completely. The action itself stimulates memory, much in the same way an old song or a familiar smell is followed by a flood of associations.

"People have been aware of a close association between trauma and somatisation since the dawn of contemporary psychiatry" (Van der Kollt 1996). The link between mind and body (psyche and soma) is again supported by the current research of neuroscientist Candace Pert: "intelligence is located not only in the brain, but in cells that are distributed throughout the body… The memory of the trauma is stored by changes at the level of the neuropeptide receptor… This is taking place bodyside."  (Pert, 1998).

If you relate to this information call Coaching with Substance for help…. 07 5606 6315.

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We are Australia's leading award winning addiction treatment and rehab consultants for gambling, drugs, alcohol, sex, eating and internet addiction, along with eating behavioural disorders and co-dependency for Australasia and New Zealand.

Maria Pau is a 4x No. 1 best-selling author on the subjects of addiction and co-dependency and spiritual wellness. She is the Program Director of Coaching with Substance, the first of its kind in Australia as registered public benevolent institution, charity and not-for profit association that focuses on wellness using coaching principles of peak performance. We run a cutting edge holistic addiction treatment program and outpatient rehabilitation consultancy firm that ensures you are released from the shackles of addiction once and for all.

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