UNRESOLVED TRAUMA SPLITS THE SOUL

Children always blame themselves for environmental failures, for failing to complete secure attachment with their primary carers, even when it is completely irrational. “I deserve this” becomes the default position for children, and this stays with them at an unconscious level into adulthood. When a very young child starts off feeling profoundly defective, self-hatred ensues. This fuels all sorts of symptoms and makes these children and adults more vulnerable to being negatively affected by their environment (loss of agency), and more prone to attract violence from others.

With most physical injuries, we expect the wound to heal back into the original physical state, however, psychological injuries do not heal without conscious efforts, and leave us continually feeling the overwhelming responses even after the traumatic circumstances are completely removed. 

Trauma responses vary in intensity and width, but essentially they all imply a split of the psyche that is  aimed at counteracting the existential threat that we continually feel we cannot escape. This existential threat and the impossibility of escaping it are the 'magic' ingredients of trauma-splits and the post-traumatic-symptoms that follow. A new Self is formed that either takes over completely, or is activated involuntarily without the first original organisation having any control over its duration and time of activation. Think of a persona or mask you put on in this or other circumstance, and enlarge that to your whole self.

Unaware since the traumatic event, you live the life of a self that is not your original self, but the self that is adapted to the trauma conditions. An example of this is given by trauma leading-expert Gabor Matte. He shows how two fundamental survival needs we all have, attachment and authenticity, can become split: 

Say a child gets angry in a parental context where anger is absolutely not tolerated, because one of the parents comes from an alcoholic abusive mother, and the other from a father who often displayed rage and violence. In what might seem a legitimate well-meaning way the parents tell the child "Good little kids don't get angry!" and then proceed by giving him a cold shoulder. From the developmental point of view of the child, the message is going to be "Angry little kids don't get love", and right there guess which of the two needs the child is going to give up? The authenticity one each time, and through that the loss of contact with their bodies

So what happens when the need for authenticity conflicts with the need of attachment? Suffices to listen to "Anyway you want me" by Elvis Presley to see that the decision to renounce to one's authentic self in order to maintain attachment is a decision that can endure well into adulthood as well as form the basis of all our intimate relationships. 

Children cannot see themselves as good in a bad situation and always blame themselves for failing to complete secure attachment with their primary carers. They cannot separate themselves from the environment, so they have no way but to introject the source of environmental disregulation (aggression, sexual abuses, violence) and carry with them the dysfunction wherever they go. This fuels all sorts of symptoms and makes these children and adults more vulnerable to being negatively affected by their environment (loss of agency), and more prone to attract violence from others. “I deserve this” becomes their default position, an ingrained automatic justification for being the subject of abuse. 

The sharing of Scott Kiloby, founder of The Living Inquiries Community and Certified Addiction Treatment counselor, reinforces this understanding:

I grew up as this really happy kid, this very sensitive gay, I did not know I was gay but I was this really sensitive kid. I was also very athletic though, so I felt really different. But when my mates found out, they felt there was this thing they had to snuff out of me. I was bullied, publically ridiculed, and physically attacked at school and I became terrified with the world. The initial traumatizing event left me to be absent at school for two months, but no one took real notice of it and life progressed as if nothing had happened. Slowly I slipped into drugs and alcohol to numb my paralyzing terror

In this way we build a tendency to disown certain particular emotions that relate to our trauma, like anger, sadness or fear, allowing trauma driven processes to become insidious and more and more hidden from our conscious awareness. We are left vulnerable to perpetuate behaviour that is self-serving in the short term, but damaging in the long run. To take refuge in the mind, developing a personality that rests precariously on the intellect is one such, very common, self-serving behaviour.

The positive admiration our cultures carry for the intellect, allows such dissociation to often pass as normal, to be even praised in fact, but the undercurrent of such psychology remains that of a system that is in deep pain and stress.

Scott Kiloby brings us another valuable example from his counseling work, illustrating for us the way in which this dissociation between the intellect and the heart occurs, as well as how it can be tackled:

I met a man one day and he went into a very very elaborate conversation about the nature of reality, about the stages of evolution of consciousness, about male and female energies. He was literally mapping out the entire universe in front of me. Have you ever been in one of those conversations that is not a conversation? Where someone is speaking to you so much it is almost like a monologue? And you know what came up for me was "What is going on?". Because the conversation was interesting but we were not getting to the point. So after 15-20 minutes of him speaking endlessly about the nature of the whole universe, I said, "but what do you think is wrong with you?", and then there was a long silence, and then he just cried, and I swear he cried for ten minutes until finally he said "I hate myself and I want to die". I said "Ok, well, can we focus on that? Can we focus on that instead of the elaborate conceptual framework?"... And come to find out he had been molested as a child, and had used his mind to compensate and protect himself from the pain

Kiloby's client is one among several other examples showing that we can become very successful in certain activity domains without realising that they are really just coping mechanisms for dealing with painful truths we are not only deeply afraid and ashamed to confess, but also fear they might reveal a degree of anger and aggression we can either not tolerate or fear losing control of. Feeling ourselves back to the pain is fundamental.

 Scott further adds:

I have never seen anybody learn all there is to learn about the brain and trauma and simply heal because they learned that stuff. I have never seen it happen. In fact, I know scientists who can tell you absolutely everything about the brain and how it functions in trauma, and they themselves have trauma and are experiencing PTSD. So education and knowledge is important, but knowledge is not freedom, so we have to move beyond the knowledge of statistics, brain studies and all that stuff and get to the business of feeling. 

Traumatic events that stay with us, therefore, always imply a split from the self, and healing, is about repairing that split. Read this brief article about why talk-therapy offers a unique opportunity for healing that nothing else seems to match.