Back From the Brink: A Family Guide to Overcoming Traumatic Stress, by Don R. Catherall, Ph.D.
Table of Contents | Introduction | Afterword
Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
back to EmotionalSafety.net
previous | next

 

11

 

RESOLVING DEEP‑SEATED

BLOCKS

Working Through, Reconnecting,

and Moving On

 

Some traumatized people have emotional blocks that pre­vent them from becoming involved with people on an inti­mate level, blocks that preceded the traumatization. And now those blocks are interfering with the recovery. If these blocks are a part of who you are, they can be among the toughest impediments to your recovery and you may need to see a therapist to deal with them.

 

Problems with Guilt

 

You may find that your survivor guilt is particularly diffi­cult to shed. Survivor guilt is often seen among people whose survival is, at most, only vaguely related to someone else's death. And even if your survival was clearly related to another person's death, your guilt feelings have likely been in­fluenced by other psychological issues besides the trauma.

 

People sometimes continue to have survivor guilt be­cause it gives an illusion of having control: you could have prevented the trauma if you'd only done a certain thing. This attitude allows you to avoid the feelings of extreme helpless­ness that are part of the trauma. For you, the alternative to feeling guilty may be high anxiety.

 

If we are already carrying guilt around with us, we're more likely to respond to situations by feeling guilty. And a propensity to feel unwarranted guilt can cause considerable pain in our relationships. Consequently, we either avoid rela­tionships or remain defensive within them. Feeling guilt for a brief time helps us make moral choices in life; feeling exces­sively guilty hampers us and interferes with closeness.

 

People carry extra guilt for a variety of reasons. Some people had parents or other significant adults who controlled them by inducing guilt all the time. On top of feeling guilty, these people are usually angry and likely to feel that others are playing upon their guilt feelings. Other people feel exces­sive guilt for the opposite reason—they got away with too much as children, felt they were taking advantage of their parents' good nature, and developed a harsh attitude as a way of controlling themselves. Children who are scared by the intensity of the terrible anger they feel at parents and siblings often learn to control themselves by feeling guilty. Traumatization can bring any of these old guilty tendencies to the surface. And the more guilt you feel, the less you'll be able to engage in a trust relationship.

 

Excessive guilt is often manifested in self‑blaming. As you've seen, it's natural for you to question your behavior and responsibility in the trauma. You go back over what hap­pened hundreds of times and think about what you might have done differently. But if you carried excessive guilt be­fore the trauma, the natural process of self‑examination can turn into a destructive process of self‑blaming. You must for­give yourself. If you think that what you've done is unforgiv­able, try talking with someone who cares about you. You might be surprised to find that someone else can understand and still accept you.

 

When Florence left her first husband to marry Barney, she lost custody of her three children—two boys and a girl—in the trial. There was a lot of animosity in the divorce, and the ex‑husband subsequently made it very difficult for Flor­ence to see her children. She was so upset by her loss that she went into a severe depression. The divorce took on a traumatic quality for Florence, and for years she was haunted by images of the judge announcing his decision to award custody to her ex‑husband.

 

For several years, Florence had inconsistent, erratic con­tacts with her children. When Barney got a career opportu­nity in another city, they moved away. A year later, her middle child (and only daughter) became ill and died a few weeks after being diagnosed. Florence had not seen her be­fore she died. After that, her ex‑husband relaxed his hold a bit and started allowing the two boys to spend summers with Florence. When each boy finished high school, he went to live with Florence.

 

In her divorce, Florence had expected to be hurt finan­cially, but she had never really considered the possibility that she could lose the custody battle. Despite her poor legal counsel, Florence got angry at no one but herself, and even­tually Barney. She did not qualify for a diagnosis of Post­traumatic Stress Disorder, but she did have several of the symptoms. She withdrew socially and, from that time on, thought of her life in terms of before and after the divorce.

 

Then her daughter died. Florence subsequently became extremely overprotective with the boys. She made herself their personal slave whenever they were with her, and she and Barney frequently fought over Barney's desire to disci­pline the boys. Florence even blamed Barney for taking her away from her children because of his job‑though she blamed herself even more. This theme underlay most of their fights.

 

Florence felt guilty about everything she'd done that re­sulted in her losing her children. She felt responsible for her daughter's death—even though she wouldn't have been able to change it had she been there. Her daughter's death stimu­lated trauma symptoms, such as emotional numbing, intru­sive thoughts, sleep problems, and depression. Over time most of these symptoms improved, but her guilt continued. She had felt guilty before the child died, and the death only made her guilt heavier.

 

Only when Florence was able to share her feelings of guilt with Barney did they stop fighting. He had always felt that she blamed him, but when she talked about her own feelings of guilt, he saw that this was not the case. Still, the end of their fighting didn't mean Florence stopped feeling guilty. That only changed over time as Barney's consistent acceptance helped her look at herself from a new perspec­tive.

 

Here are some things you can think about if you're suf­fering from excessive guilt:

 

·        Did either of your parents ever express guilt? About what?

 

·        Did you grow up in a judgmental atmosphere, where there was a rigid line between good and bad?

 

·        Did people in your family apologize? Were apolo­gies viewed as expressions of concern for others, or as a punishment for misbehavior?

 

·        How quickly and sincerely were family members forgiven if they violated the family rules?

 

·        Did you learn to forgive others? (If not, you may find it hard to forgive yourself.)

 

·        Did you ever feel that other family members were trying to make you feel guilty in order to get their way?

 

·        Did you grow up feeling that it was all right to be who you are or that what you are was not all right and that you must hide your innermost thoughts and feelings?

 

The answers to these questions can help you build a clearer picture of your background education and training in feeling guilty. Changing this picture means developing new rules. It can be very hard to change your family rules, but the first step is always identifying them. It's only then that you can decide what kind of rules make sense for the world you live in today. Here are some rules you might consider:

 

·        Accepting responsibility for your own shortcomings should be applauded. This is a positive step in dealing with those shortcomings. You should feel good that you're dealing with them—not bad because you have them—and you should not use them as an excuse.

 

·        The only person who can make you feel guilty is yourself. You must take other people's feelings into consideration, but ultimately you decide whether you're letting yourself down.

 

·        An apology is a way of repairing a hurt. You do it because you care about the other person—not because someone must take the blame in order to stop the conflict.

 

·        All feelings are acceptable. No one should be blamed or judged for having feelings.

 

Guilt is like the seasoning in a meal. A little bit makes everything better, but too much can ruin the food.

 

Difficulty with Loss

 

All trauma involves loss, whether it is an actual physical loss or an intangible loss such as the illusions of security. If you have a history of loss, then this can be a difficult issue for you. Many people who experience painful losses learn to pro­tect themselves from having it happen again by trying to not get too attached to anything.

 

If your trauma was a major loss or if you have a history of loss, you may now find it difficult to let yourself get fully attached. You may play the game of fault‑finding and main­tain a defensive attitude toward the person with whom you're tempted to get close. You pull away and find reasons not to care—but since you're human, you do care. So you end up ambivalent, often attributing your own unhappiness to a fault in the person with whom you're involved rather than to your own fear of experiencing loss and hurt again.

 

Overcoming your fear of loss first means owning up to it. Once you accept that you're dealing with feelings of loss, it may be a little easier to see your aloofness as a way of staying away from those feelings. Perhaps you did not sufficiently mourn those other losses, and your current situation exacer­bates feelings you already carried. But as you accept your need to mourn past losses and face your sadness, you will be able to invest in present relationships more easily.

 

Mourning loss is both a private and a shared experience. In the final analysis, you mourn alone, and part of what makes mourning so painful is the awareness of your basic aloneness. Yet paradoxically, you can begin to work through your loss by sharing the experience with others. Talking about a loss to a good listener can give words to your feelings and help you to understand them better yourself. Rituals en­able you to communicate further with yourself and others and to crystallize feelings that are difficult to put into words.

 

Sean and Kelly suffered a traumatic loss and tried to live as if it didn't mean as much as it did. Their baby boy lived only four weeks. The loss was terribly traumatic for them, and they mourned for several months. Then they tried to re­sume their old lives, but they found it wasn't so easy. They developed problems in their marriage and argued a lot, and Sean started drinking heavily. Over the next several years, they grew even farther apart, and they stopped discussing when to have another baby. Sean became increasingly withdrawn, while Kelly became absorbed in doing volunteer work at a children's home. Additionally, Kelly began to take in every abandoned cat and dog that she came across and became active in an organization that cared for unwanted pets.

 

When Sean and Kelly were encouraged by a therapist to talk about the loss of "little Sean," they grew closer. They had each lived with their grief alone, each harboring secret feelings of guilt and blaming. Kelly was trying to be a suc­cessful mother to all the animals in town as part of her way of dealing with her guilt and replacing her loss. Sean was drowning his in the bottle. Even after these issues became clear, they continued to need professional help to work out the problems. Sean's alcoholism had become an independent problem and had to be treated. In addition, they both needed to grieve their loss.

 

Here are some questions for you to consider:

 

·        What kind of losses do you have in your back­ground? Have you lost dreams and opportunities as well as people?

 

·        How was sadness treated in your family? Were all family members permitted to cry, or were there rules against some members showing sadness?

 

·        How could you tell when your mother was sad? How about your father? Do you see any similari­ties with the way you behave now?

 

·        What have you lost as the result of your trauma­tization?

 

And here are some things you can do:

 

·        First of all, talk with your loved ones about your losses.

 

·        Talk about the losses from earlier in your life as well as the current ones.

 

·        Look at the ways that you've denied your losses by pretending that you didn't feel sad.

 

·        Perform a ritual to help you acknowledge your loss. Get your loved ones involved in it.

 

·        View yourself as in mourning, and give yourself time to feel your grief. Accept that you may be depressed for a while, but that it is appropriate.

 

·        Say good‑bye to those and that which you have lost.

 

History of Abandonment

 

Abandonment is related to loss—in fact, sometimes they're the same thing. But not always: You can be aban­doned without actually losing the person. I'm talking about an emotional abandonment. If you have a heightened sensi­tivity to abandonment, it's likely you suffered either an im­portant loss or an emotional disconnection from some significant caretaker in your childhood. You consequently carry feelings of insecurity now, and they increase when you find yourself becoming attached to someone.

 

Traumatization frequently stirs up abandonment issues, most obviously when there is a loss in the course of the trauma. But the link can be less direct. The simple fact that a traumatization has occurred can revive insecurities and fears that were formerly put to rest. Being traumatized places you in a more dependent state, even though you may resist it. And the more you feel you need other people, the more you're likely to reexperience concerns you had in previous situations where you relied on others.

 

As a child of eight, Irene was sent away to live with rela­tives for reasons that were never entirely clear to her. She departed under the impression that she would be returning to her parents' home within a couple of weeks, but it was several months before she came back. During the extended stay, she kept hearing that she would be going home shortly, but various things kept delaying her return. Her younger brother was still home and she talked to him and to her par­ents on the phone, always begging to be brought home as soon as possible.

 

She eventually returned, and the extended nature of her visit was never treated as a big issue. But as an adult, Irene developed fears of traveling and was overly protective of her children. In effect, neither she nor her family had ever ac­knowledged the traumatic effect that her extended "trip" as a child had had on her. But it left her with fears of being abandoned that were intense enough to influence her choice of husband and her approach to raising her children. Only after she examined these fears with a therapist did Irene be­gin to separate her childhood fears from the realities of her adult life. She was able to stop being overprotective and clingy with her children, and she became more comfortable with traveling.

 

If abandonment is an issue for you, the primary task is for you and your loved ones to be aware of your sensitivity to feelings of emotional abandonment. You should talk about your past feelings of abandonment. The more aware of them you are, the more you can separate the past from the present. Your loved ones can learn to be sensitive to these feelings and make efforts not to cause you to feel abandoned unnecessar­ily. But this means that you will have to speak up and let them know if you're feeling abandoned.

 

Difficulties with Rage

 

As we saw in Chapter 10, rage is a common consequence of traumatization. It is always difficult to deal with, but sometimes it can be terribly persistent—particularly when the traumatization uncovers rage from the past and un­resolved issues from childhood.

 

Emmett was an upstanding citizen who was mistakenly accused of being involved in a major crime. He spent nearly four months in the county jail before the mistake was discovered and he was released. He was enraged, particularly at the police detective responsible for the case. Emmett had tried to explain to the detective that he couldn't have com­mitted the crime, and he felt that the detective had not lis­tened to him. After his incarceration, Emmett developed a number of symptoms of PTSD, including intrusive memories and dreams, social withdrawal, sleep problems, and angry outbursts. In the ensuing months, most of the symptoms im­proved, but Emmett had difficulty controlling his temper. He got into angry confrontations with the authority figures in his life, particularly his supervisors at work.

 

Emmett went to a therapist to get some help for his problems, particularly his angry outbursts. As he explored his feelings, he learned that the situation with the detective had revived feelings he had had about his father when he was a child. His father, a rigid disciplinarian, had beaten Emmett for minor infractions and had never listened to Em­mett's side of the story. Emmett always felt that his father was unfair, but he learned to keep his anger to himself be­cause it only led to more beatings. As an adult, Emmett avoided his old feelings of being treated unfairly by becom­ing a model citizen—until he was treated unfairly by the detective. Then Emmett lost trust in all men in positions of authority.

 

A clue to the childhood origins of Emmett's rage was what he said during confrontations with his supervisors: "You can't treat me this way, you're not my father." In ther­apy, however, he came to see the origins of this rage and developed the ability to separate that old anger from his cur­rent situation.

 

Damaged Sense of Self

 

Traumatization can cause you to revert to ways of deal­ing with life and coping mechanisms from earlier stages of your life. Psychologists call this phenomenon regression. If, as a child, you had difficulty maintaining an independent identity, you're at risk for developing similar problems fol­lowing a traumatization. You may have had an overly protec­tive parent who didn't allow you to make decisions or have independent feelings. Or perhaps your parent was too narcis­sistic and needed to be the center of attention, unable to allow you to have your own identity.

 

Parents aren't the only ones who contribute to such diffi­culties. Children can become excessively dependent upon an adult when they are lost in the shuffle of a large family or terribly outshined by a remarkable sibling, leading them to form a less independent identity. If you carry vestiges of such problems, traumatization can cause you to once more shy away from getting involved with others for fear of losing your independent sense of yourself.

 

Dale, who was traumatized by the abortion, is an exam­ple of someone whose old difficulties with her sense of self were uncovered by her traumatization. She had always lived her life for other people: She was the reliable friend to whom others turned, expecting her to take care of things. After her traumatic abortion, she developed a number of conflicts with her husband Ed. She felt taken for granted, and she argued with him that his needs always came first and that she was expected to be the one to do all the accommodating. When she explored this issue in psychotherapy, she found that she had always felt this way. Her family had placed much more importance on her brother than on her. They had encour­aged his education, attended his athletic activities, and basi­cally paid more attention to his needs. She had dealt with this situation by becoming the uncomplaining daughter and adoring sister, allowing her own interests to fade away.

 

Dale's traumatization brought these old issues to the sur­face. She felt that Ed had wanted the abortion for purely selfish reasons and that she'd gone along with it only to please him. This opened up a feeling in her that their entire relationship was structured to please him and facilitate his life. She just fit herself into the spaces he left her. As she uncovered her feelings about her family, her anger at Ed abated. She realized that she was most upset with herself for not taking more initiative in her life or pursuing her inter­ests. She decided that this had to change. She went back to college and got the education that she'd always wanted. And as she took the initiative to make things happen in her life, her feelings about herself changed, and she no longer re­sented others for denying her opportunities.

 

If you're finding it difficult to maintain a strong sense of who you are, or if you fear being swallowed up by the other person in a relationship, the sanctity of a therapeutic rela­tionship could help. I would recommend that you go into psychotherapy, especially if you don't have a good trust rela­tionship. A professional therapist will protect your confiden­tiality and do everything possible to preserve your identity and sense of self.

 

Control Issues

 

One of the primary feelings that surfaces as a result of traumatization is helplessness. It's natural for anyone to try to avoid feeling helpless. And even if you grew up with more than your share of helpless feelings, you may have learned to cope by exerting control. We all use control to some extent. But some people become more strongly oriented than others toward controlling other people.

 

Manipulating and controlling produce different feelings on the part of the person being manipulated or controlled. Both kinds of behavior can make the person angry, but there are differences underneath that anger. When we've been manipulated, we feel tricked, and we tend to view the manip­ulator as dishonest or insincere. When we're controlled by someone else, however, we feel helpless, and we tend to view the controlling person as cold and uncaring. The manipula­tive person is trying to get something for himself, while the controlling person just needs to be in control in order to feel in control himself.

 

If you have control problems, you probably grew up in an environment that was chaotic or that contained someone who tried to control you excessively. You learned to cope with your environment by taking control yourself. Ironically, an overly controlling caretaker perpetuates the phenomenon by turning the child into yet another controlling parent.

 

Andrew had frequent battles over control with his wife, Lindy. The content of the conflicts often seemed much less important than Andrew's need to continually assert his con­trol. He felt that Lindy couldn't be trusted to take care of things; he oversaw and double‑checked everything she did. He was intellectual and practical, while she was fairly emo­tional. When they would get into an argument, he would come on very strong and insist that his point of view was the correct one. Lindy learned to back off, though she continued to resent his behavior. Andrew could not tolerate Lindy's emotionalism and would criticize her. As a result, Lindy felt controlled, and she said their conflicts made her feel as if he had "rolled over her with a steamroller."

 

When Andrew explored the issue of control in therapy, several things turned up in his past that helped explain his style. He had served in the air force in Vietnam and had been exposed to several rocket attacks at his base. He had shared a shelter with a group of men, and one particularly scared in­dividual used to get the whole group spooked. Lindy's emo­tional arguments seemed threatening to him in the same way.

 

Further exploration revealed another emotional situa­tion in Andrew's childhood. His father had left the family when Andrew was less than a year old, and his mother had focused all her attention on Andrew. He and his mother were very close for years, but he eventually came to feel suffocated by her excessive involvement with him. She tried to make all his decisions and told him what he was feeling. In order to fend her off, Andrew became controlling and intellectual the same way he responded to the hysterical airman and his wife. He needed to control them because their emotional up­heavals were too unsettling for him and left him feeling out of control.

 

Issues of Safety

 

If the trauma involves a physical threat, physical safety becomes a concern. Even a trauma that doesn't involve a physical threat can stir up safety issues from the past. If a trauma experienced in adulthood is severe enough, it can bring back the insecurity and fearfulness that you experi­enced in childhood.

 

In most of the examples in this chapter, an adult's trau­matization has revived issues from earlier in life. But a trauma need not revive earlier issues to have a severe im­pact. Sometimes the nature of a particular traumatization is overpowering, and sometimes the recovery process is not al­lowed to take place. Penny was traumatized in her early twenties and, twenty years later, developed problems related to her inability to feel safe. There don't appear to have been any situations from her childhood that caused her to react this way. Rather, the trauma she experienced was so severe that her ability to feel safe at all was terribly mangled. More­over, she had no opportunity to discuss and process the trauma.

 

Penny, as an independent and strong‑willed girl, did well in school, was active in extracurricular activities, and was popular with her peers. She pursued activities—such as rock‑climbing and sky‑diving—that most people avoided. She learned to test her limits by trying new things and devel­oped an attitude of competence and confidence in her own ability to deal with difficult situations. But after a traumatic incident in her second year of living on her own, this changed.

 

Penny became involved with a young man named David. He was close to his family and quite serious about the rela­tionship with Penny. But some of David's traits bothered Penny, and she decided to break up with him. After the breakup, he called her repeatedly and pleaded with her to reconsider, and when she refused, he would often end the conversation with angry threats. One day, he convinced her to come by his place and pick up some things of hers that were still there. He told her he had accepted the breakup and was no longer angry. When she got there, he raped her, beat her up, and kept her in a room for approximately twenty hours. When his parents showed up unexpectedly, David was discovered, and they released Penny, treated her wounds and bruises, and pleaded with her not to tell anyone about the incident. They said that David was mentally disturbed and they were getting treatment for him and that he would be put away if the story were known.

 

Penny's traumatized condition made her particularly agreeable to doing as David's parents asked. After all, they had just saved her, treated her gently, and taken care of her. And she had always viewed herself as able to deal with very difficult situations without calling for help. So she agreed to protect David and keep the incident a secret. For many years she didn't talk about what had happened. But she was no longer the carefree, exuberant risk‑taker that she'd been. She lived a quieter life, withdrew from her positions of high visi­bility, and adopted a blander image. She changed how she dressed, the kind of glasses she wore, how she wore her hair, and what she did with her free time. And she tried to forget those twenty hours during which she had feared being killed every moment.

 

Twenty years later, Penny married Charles, a reliable, even‑tempered man who made her feel safe. Like Penny, Charles was familiar with all kinds of sports and adventur­ous activities, and they shared many interests. He had two grown children, a son and a daughter, who lived in another state. When Penny and Charles were around the son (whose name was also David), Penny felt that the young man was being disrespectful toward her. Some of his remarks even seemed hostile, and she asked Charles to speak to him. Charles felt she was overreacting and suggested she let it go. Over a period of several years, this pattern was repeated, and Penny's anxiety grew each time. She came to dread en­counters with the son and was angry at Charles for minimiz­ing her feelings and refusing to take her seriously.

 

Penny and Charles sought counseling for their marital problems. The most frequent dispute centered on Penny's an­ger that Charles would not reproach David.

 

As the intensity of Penny's feelings became clear to him, Charles began to realize that he had been unempathic to Penny. He accepted his responsibility to protect her and took a much firmer stance with his son. Only then was Penny able to unburden herself somewhat by talking about her trauma in therapy, and she processed it further by talking privately with Charles. Finally, they both discussed the situation with David, including Penny's traumatization. David apologized to Penny and became more sensitive in his dealings with her. Penny was still not the carefree risk-taker she'd once been, but she found it easier to face fearful situations in her current life.

 

This chapter has focused on several kinds of issues that can be stirred up by traumatization. Many of them relate to the individual's personality and his or her approach to cop­ing with life. These issues are representative of the kind of things that traumatized individuals often continue to work on after they've begun processing the primary trauma itself. There are certainly more issues than these, and every per­son's story is unique, but these are common ones.

 

Not only do these preexisting issues make recovery very difficult for trauma survivors, they also make life very diffi­cult for the loved ones of trauma survivors. As a loved one, you're limited in what you can do because, to some degree, these issues themselves interfere with your attempts to ex­plore them. If you try to talk with the trauma survivor about his guilt, you run the risk that he will experience you as blaming. Probing unresolved losses can provoke powerful re­actions. The person who is sensitive to abandonment may feel abandoned every time she pushes you away. Trying to talk to your loved one about his rage is always risky. And it's easy to come on too strong with someone whose sense of self has been damaged. Trying to approach the issue of control with a controlling person is easily experienced as an attack and can turn into a control battle. And the underlying terror in the person who can't feel safe makes her distrustful.

 

So what can you do? The essence of what you can do comes back to what I've been stressing throughout the book. Develop a trust relationship. Talk about the feelings between you so that the air remains clear. You will only be able to discuss these and other difficult issues if you trust each other.

 

These issues are often resolved in psychotherapy. If you are the trauma survivor, you must decide whether to pursue psychotherapy. Your decision will depend upon the severity of your problem, the degree of your motivation, and the ex­tent of your resources. But therapy can be tremendously helpful for the problems discussed in this chapter. The last chapter of this book will take you on a quick tour of the terrain of psychotherapy so that you may approach it with some degree of knowledge.