This has been extracted from the writings of a psychotherapy practitioner attached here for archival purposes and for continual reference:
Signs of suppressed trauma are mistaken for character traits. Every.single.time. So I'm going to include some very specific examples here!
In any one of the 2 points on the spectrum below, you'll need to experience enough symptoms for you to perceive it to impede your functioning. Physiological symptoms are not included.
1 Some common, specific examples of one extreme:
Craving alone-time/withdrawal. Not liking change. Not having much energy. Regularly canceling social engagements, not feeling 'up to it'. Hyper sensitive (you're actually in fight-flight mode). Lack of self-discipline. Catastrophising; being told you're exaggerating/overreacting. Daydreaming/fantasising. Importance of having wants & aversions respected, yet fragile boundaries. Unable to hang on to a job (no interest). Judging others. Rushing yet always being late. Impulsive. Automatic excuses/little white lies. You do what makes you feel better, not what interests you, ie no hobbies/passions. Inability to endure struggling/doing things half-heartedly/gives up quickly because feels inadequate. Takes shortcuts. Distrusting people/suspicious of their motives. Lying/manipulative. Disorganised. Difficulty prioritising. Indecisive. Feeling trapped. Disinterested/feeling slightly removed from the world. Not focused, easily distracted. Conflicted when doing something, feeling you should really be doing something else with your time. Low mood. Tired. Problems sleeping & concentrating. Feeling best when safely tucked up in bed/couch. Procrastination. Black & white thinking. Relationship problems, especially inability to truly, intimately connect to another person. Monitoring other people's moods. Worrying. Feeling guilty. Self-doubt. Suspecting something is wrong with you, that you're not mentally ok. Feeling shame. Self-sabotaging. Emotional build up & outbursts or emotional numbness. Alexithymia (difficulty recognising & being able to name different emotions besides a handful of frequently occurring ones.) Binge-watching, eating or other addictive behaviour (hoarding, feverish on line shopping etc) or obsessive behaviour to distract yourself from any unwanted emotions threatening to surface. Limited awareness due to the limiting consequences of self-protection & thus limited wisdom (which can easily be mistaken for lack of intelligence!). Chaotic administration. Judging your life as very boring. Limited emotional range (not depth!). Inner critic speaks in hopelessness/despair. Depression. Attitude of self pity, cowering from life, resisting life, ‘participating'’ with reluctance. Relying on/needing someone else to handle practical aspects of your life.
2 Some common, specific examples of the other extreme:
Strong-willed. Strong opinions. Having tense energy. Forceful. Authoritative. Nightly teeth grinding. Being strongly disciplined, not gently allowing room for exceptions. Often frustrated. Competitive with self and others/Wants to win. Know-it-all. Limited emotional range. Resistance to emotions in others. Intellectualising to help keep emotions at bay. Chronic anger: highly critical, criticising others/seeks conflict, quick to anger, quickly very irritated, also with other people, intolerant, hostile. Disapproving. Aims to win arguments rather than consider a solution. Spending a lot of time on interests & hobbies, which are approached with a tense focus, bordering on the obsessive. Very active. Ideally being around other people. Joyless. Judging. Blaming. Complaining/negative focus. Arrogance. Forgetfulness. Defensive (form: deflecting). Inability to truly relax. Drug addictions/obsessions or addictive behaviour such as unhealthy focus on diets/gym/looks/sex, gaming, obsessive career focus etc. Bored quickly. Changing partner frequently. Job hopping. Shrewdness. Difficulty letting things go. Stern. Unforgiving. Takes inner critic to be the self. Fragile, but seemingly very strong boundaries. Functional depression. Attitude of rebelliousness, at war with life. Need to feel superior.
For a short while here and there, people can switch from one extreme to the other when they've reached the end of their tolerance.
Also, the impact & expression of trauma is on a continuum.
Age of impact, duration, type of trauma and which resources people have been able to develop, influence spread of trauma in neural pathways & which symptoms are expressed.
Insidious trauma, which is the trauma I focus on in this answer, is the subtle, erosive, subtle continuous hurt & neglect caused by a well-meaning parent suffering with depression or other (repressed) issues overlaying their expression of love and lacking sufficient resources to compensate, causes the most underestimated, widespread damage I've come across. Widespread, because the inherited erroneous attitudes, beliefs and connected feelings spread across the entire structure of neural networks of the child, affecting all areas, from a very young age onwards, staying undetected, slowly habituating the child to accept an abnormal outlook as normal, acting in the world based on a flawed premise, attracting the world views of the similarly damaged, until the person simply falls apart after a lifetime of misdiagnosed suffering and struggling, often having kept it together on the surface.
The nature & subtlety of this type of trauma makes the recipient doubt themselves since they see no apparent cause in their upbringing for their issues, so they silently develop more beliefs & other mechanisms to cope, continuing into adulthood, instead of ringing the bell & getting help. Reading about genes and biological disorders, further hides the original cause of their troubles.
Ultimately, what you are trying to grapple with is not just the lifetime trauma of having to witness the negative consequences of your own interactions with life based on an inherited, unhealthy belief structure. You are also repressing the initial trauma of having to take on the emotions and feelings of hopelessness & fear as you were acquiring this belief structure, this 'truth', from your parents. Being only a child as you had to face this threatening reality, trying to protect yourself from it, and finally having to internalise this unhealthy blueprint for life as your own painful working model for a daunting future ahead of you. Which you did in the form of a variety of defenses.
A child that sees a parent, their example, silently suffer, becomes afraid. (We now know that babies copy the emotions of their caregivers as early as 6 months. Some research suggests this is even earlier.) The parent is not seen as a safe enough figure to attach to, and thus the healthy attachment process gets interrupted. This is a serious aversive development. On top, a child that is forced to copy an unhealthy narrative about life, feelings and humans from their parent, slowly becomes traumatised in the process as the unfolding narrative tips the balance into triggering the fight-flight response. The latter will slowly become activated more often and more easily over time. The ensuing physical discomfort needs to further be interpreted and incorporated into the existing, fear-based, narrative (assumptions, beliefs, explanations).
Early on, the child makes an understandable ‘decision’: to protect themselves from whatever they're not sure is going on. And this is key: the child's system sees and feels evidence of danger in the adults' guarded interactions, level of pretense, stress, their beliefs etc, but the source of their behaviour isn't specific enough to be known. Thus the safety mechanism of 'generalisation’ (fears tend to ‘generalise out' when left unchecked) protects the child from all unknown danger with one general sweep: lay low, don't make a move until you are sure about the threats that spring from being alive. You’re now under the protection of the fight-flight response.
The child may be alive, but their fear response prevents them from committing to life; Arrested Development is emotional & mental Survival 101.
Understanding life in order to avoid danger rather than living it becomes the priority.
This decision to not commit to life usually stays undetected until it gets referred to when the child starts meeting more and more serious responsibilities that come from living as an adult. Because responsibilities require the willingness to commit and the need to engage in actions you don't necessarily enjoy or have much interest in. And that's when this early survival decision starts to become more evident.
So, the lists above are the symptoms of a rejected life rooted in disturbed safe attachment between child and parent and/or internalising a mentally unhealthy belief structure. Life is either endured with suffering a lack of commitment (example 1, Freeze/Flight/Fawn) or it is fought off with anger (example 2, Fight).
In insidious trauma therapy, we unravel the symptoms, coping mechanisms and beliefs down to their source. It comes down to this decision, the most powerful decision a human being can make:
Do I commit to life, or do I not?
We arrive at the point where we consciously decide whether we are going to actually live life or not. A quote by Portugese novelist Paolo Coelho comes to mind: 'A ship is safest when it is in port, but that is not what ships are built for.’
In short, the fight-flight-freeze-fawn response triggered in the child starts to develop into 'character traits' as the increasing responsibilities of growing up force ways to cope with life and with other people, and the child starts interpreting the effects of the survival response (anxiety, fearful thoughts, worry etc) and the coping mechanisms as character flaws, becoming increasingly self critical.
Stripped down to a few core symptoms that people tend to share across the board:
1. Relationship problems.
2. Strong inner critic.
3. Unable to make longlasting changes in habits.
4. Unnuanced (all or nothing) thinking.
5. Lack of intrinsic motivation/lack of interest in & enthusiasm for life.
6. Calculating.
7. Passive-aggressive behaviour (due to deeply buried shame & low self esteem which is expressed in either arrogance, judging and blaming, or giving in and feeling victimised/self pity).
8. Tension/anxiety (as the easy activation of the sympathetic nervous system, ie anxiety or panic, is a continuous threat).
9. Forgetful.
10. Being very strong-willed.*
11. Perfectionism.
12. Negative thoughts about other people.
13. Low frustration tolerance
14. Seeking distractions from unwanted emotions & feelings rather than calmly accepting & processing them.
15. Trouble sleeping.
16. Feeling generally joyless, depression.
17. Limited range (not depth!) & awareness of emotions.
18. Lack of Object Constancy (resulting in intense emotional spikes).
19. Need for Control
20. Few friends, spends time mostly at home.
At the end of each point you can add: “and judging yourself for it.”
These are all coping mechanisms or the results of them.
People with repressed trauma tend to not like themselves very much, having blamed themselves for a long time for 'their’ shortcomings. Without realising, people have been slowly shrinking back more and more fearfully in anticipation of their own unwanted thoughts, their moods; all potential triggers for the activation of the dreaded fight-flight-response.
And having a sibling who is functioning well, only confirms that the problem lies with the person repressing trauma. Little do they know that, naturally, parents unconsciously project the rejection of themselves onto the child that is more sensitive, more vulnerable; more reminiscent of the pain the parent experienced when they themselves were small.
Without exception, beneath layers of inherited beliefs and coping mechanisms, hides a lovely -just neglected- human being they never knew existed, just waiting to be discovered.
And let me tell you: even if you are sure you aren't a particularly nice person, or as good as others.. you still have got every right to be here! Every breath you take and every step you take, belong to you: lovely, helpful & friendly, or a manipulating, useless pain in the butt. You are here on earth, your experience is uniquely yours, whether nice or not, it is your ride. No one can take that away from you. Let this be your starting point.
For those who have asked me what they can do right now**:
I have written this in a way that can allow the start of a healing process. If you dedicate some time to reading this, so sit down and let the truth of it sink in, you can start a very powerful process of getting out of a debilitating mental state.
You will be stripping off coping mechanisms in the form of beliefs that underlie ‘character traits'. Many can be let go off by just absorbing the pain they carry, and will not leave you exposed to the full glory of your fight-flight-response unprepared, but as you proceed, you will encounter the fully functional ones. So proceed with care. (Usually, if you completely go for this, full-time, you can strip off the 'dead wood’ so to say by yourself for a good year or 2 before you arrive at the fully functional coping mechanisms. But this depends on factors such as your age etc. Just stay attentive to your patterns of shedding and recovering, you will start to recognise their different elements & phases. I do advice you seek the help of a therapist to guide you safely on this path, as I realise that the pull of certain beliefs can be so strong that people can get caught up in them.
To start off, just becoming aware of these 'character traits’ as symptoms, facilitates you being able to start simply observing them objectively throughout the day, through the eyes of an adult, instead of feeling bad, ashamed or afraid of them.
They're just adaptations that are no longer necessary for your survival. They are outdated survival-responses. When you start experiencing them as such, they will very slowly start to transform. So don't reject them nor any of the unpleasant but very normal, understandable, logically occurring emotions (such as shame, guilt, worthlessness, regret) linked to them. Allow them by simply witnessing them. Be prepared for intense pain & anxiety (which is strongly expressed in the body) and seemingly unsurmountable difficulty with this simple sounding idea; it's going to drive you around the bend. The pain is a harmless pain that you are finally allowing to be felt. Same for the increase in anxiety. It doesn't feel any less brutal, i know, but it is still relatively harmless.
You are aware of thoughts judging the emotional pain linking into your childhood beliefs, such as: “these feelings are overwhelming me". Of self-defeating conclusions: “I'm no good. Feeling this way must mean there's something wrong with me. Look at the state I'm in. I'm the only one that has this. What have i done to deserve this.” etc. Whenever these types of interpreting & judging/analysing thoughts pop up, always focus your attention on the neutral point of view of your general awareness. Not on the fears and thoughts of a child. Not on the impulse to 'fix’ your thoughts, of trying to think your way out of it. The time has come to stand up for yourself, to liberate yourself from the past.
How is there a neutral point in you when you seem reduced to a heap of throbbing feelings tearing through your body?
It seems impossible to focus on 'being aware' at first when there's so much going on, I know. But there's a place you're about to discover, where you are safe from being triggered into connecting to the various storylines going on in your mind and to your past conditioning, and thus keep this vicious cycle going. If you gently move your focus away from your thoughts, emotions and sensations to focus on this neutral point instead, you will eventually get out of this prison of pain.
You see, there is in you a neutral point of consciousness where you can rest, away from actively engaging in thoughts, whilst at the same time being aware of everything that is happening: every perception, thought, emotion, physical sensation and action. You start shifting your attention to the basic point of view of simply being conscious, even whilst everything is happening inside you.
This seems an impossible contradiction at first. Like neutrally, calmly observing your body and mind being in the throws of a panic attack. But that's exactly what that neutral level is going to provide you with; a completely safe platform from which you can observe the mayhem. You are starting to finally separate the you from the inherited cluster of beliefs, coping mechanisms, their associated emotions and resulting physiology that you've been identifying with, having assumed that this is your character.
Naturally, at first you will forget your passive witnessing/observing and get drawn in. Over and over again. Because just focusing on being conscious, being aware, seems like an empty, boring, useless nothingness when compared to all your thoughts & feelings, so naturally your attention tends to go to where it's busy. You are also conditioned to 'do something’ about feeling awful. Just letting it happen will feel like you're giving up on yourself. The opposite is true.
Each time you decide to focus on being aware, whether you succeed or not, you are already starting to weaken these neural pathways. Small steps.
It's not going to be easy. But:
You will have more resources now than you had when you were a small, dependent child simply because you have aged: you can make decisions about yourself now. The beliefs you hold can't know that; they're just beliefs, thoughts. (Thoughts & beliefs can't think for themselves that it's time for them to leave your brain now because they're outdated. They're just one-dimensional patterns of data you’ve once adopted or created. These patterns hang around for as long as you refer to them in making actual decisions or decisions or confirmations about who you are as a person.)
But you can. You are an adult now.
Example
A typical example of an unhealthy cognitive inheritance is the combination of hopelessness & despair and the self-sabotaging actions and self-defeating thoughts that naturally and understandably flow from them. They belong to the helpless child that had no choice in accepting them, not to the adult you have become.
Gently let them go by first completely allowing them to be there. Don't let them stay repressed. If you don't allow your childhood emotions & thoughts to surface into your conscious awareness, you can't see that they are no longer valid nor can you make the conscious decision to let them go. But don't take them seriously either: if a kid tells you you can't see him because his hands are covering his eyes, he's telling the truth from his perspective, based on his experience and his beliefs (Why do children hide by covering their eyes? ). So allow your childhood perspective to be, but don't start reasoning with it. There's no need to. Just notice that this viewpoint is no longer true. This is enough.
Your brain was working fine back then, just as it is working just fine now; the inherited contents were the problem. Because you identified with them. I.e. you took them to be you rather than the inherited contents of your brain that you can make decisions about.
Your only option was to build upon what you were given in order to somehow function. Allow painful emotions and thoughts to be there whilst at the same time knowing the perspective they present is not yours, and you will gently let go of it at your own pace. With understanding. With grace. With patience. With compassion for yourself.
And if compassion isn't possible yet, and quite likely it isn't, just simply be present with whatever is coming up. It won't be pretty, because it is all based on the fears you had when you were a child, imagining monsters. Monstrous beliefs about yourself and the world are at the basis of your current suffering. But these feelings are not terrifying, only at first, because you don't yet know that they're harmless. You're an adult now; go look, there's nothing there that can harm you. It will just take some time experiencing them before you lose your fear. Then, they will dissipate.
To repeat:
You simply experience them by not getting drawn in. Only observe. Simply witness he thoughts, convictions, emotions and sensations objectively, without interpreting them, analysing them, judging them, without criticising yourself for having them, thinking you are pitiable or drawing any other conclusions from them. So, just observe them, from a neutral point of view. You can slowly relearn relating to them this way. Slowly accepting that it is safe now to allow the space for any feelings. Just shine the light of your adult consciousness onto them. You will be able to lovingly let them go over time as your interactions with life provide opportunities for updating beliefs and feelings.
Discontinue the old story line of despair, defeat, hopelessness, of criticising yourself about being unable to change anything, do anything. Helplessness. It once was correct. Just as once your clothes’ size was correct for a 6-year old.
The brain is amazing. But you have to instruct it. Running from it will only tell the fear-based neural pathways in your brain that a state of fear is indeed the correct reality.
It will find a new equilibrium if you decide to let go of old beliefs & coping mechanisms that are no longer required for your (emotional) survival. But you'll only see that after you've let them go. So you're going to have to take a leap of faith. Into the unknown land of emotional health. You're likely the first one to do so in a long line of generations before you.
So: allow everything to be, but turn your focus on your ‘being aware', over and over again.
Doing this thousands of time a day is normal.
When you feel ready to do more, start journalling at the end of each day to slowly unearth the hidden beliefs that no longer serve you. Start meditating. Learn proper, abdominal breathing. Check out autogenic training. Whenever you feel overwhelmed and prefer to do something other than observing & allowing, I recommend EMDR:
Short introduction:
Longer processing:
You'll go through a few unsettling shifts in the way you look at life, the world and your place in it as old beliefs fall away.. it's going to be terrifyingly uncertain, this moving outside of your 'comfort’ zone. A new world, a new way of relating to everything inside it. Be patient with yourself. Boy, do you deserve to be patient with yourself; you've been surviving this entire time.
If loving or having compassion for yourself is too big a stretch right now, being patient with yourself, with the slowness of your journey, is effectively the same thing. You take your time.
If you pass periods of depression and continuous activation of your fight/flight response, and this is to be expected, allow all thoughts, sensations, emotions and thoughts to be, but keep yourself in the place of being a passive observer of it all. It's a small place at the start, but it's there, for everyone, including you. You're not a special headcase. I hope you can hear me. I haven't had a single patient who didn't tell me that they were.
Don't identify with anything you feel and think. Don't attach meaning to it. Don't explain any of it. Don't interpret. Don't conclude. You're only experiencing the past in emotions, thoughts and really threatening physical sensations.
You're strong enough now to pass through these unsurprising, understandable stages of reclaiming what is yours. That is best done from a place of nothingness, with all your conditioning stripped away from you, and the dread this logically leaves bare, ie depression. It's just a lifetime of compounded, neglected fear and hurt. You are not a victim of the grim, barren feel of this hurt, it doesn't have the power to incapacitate you; that's the interpretation you had as a child.
This is a natural, vital stage that you need to go through, not a place to stop. You have survived this far, you can pass this, too. Focus on the seeming nothingness of 'being aware’, as often and for as long as it takes.
(And if you can't, simply observe this too, this inability to do it yet and the thoughts about this, until you can. Keep at it. It will get dark. But just observe that; it's not you, it's the interpretation of the past & related emotions & feelings that you're finally allowing to be experienced. You will learn to relate to the feelings and thoughts differently over time, to reduce your childhood fear of them, until they've lost their seeming power.)
You can choose when to stop this process, because if you continue, you may find yourself stripping off so many layers of conditioning, that you find yourself wondering who you actually are.. This is a liberating and beautiful place to arrive and a promising moment for people who seek enlightenment. But in this age of focus on identity, it can be quite confusing.
So unless your goal is to become enlightened, to end all suffering, I advice that when you have arrived at the point where you can calmly respond to every day situations rather than react from previous conditioning, you stop.
