[βNot feeling alive in the presentβ might have once served as an antidote to the threat of annihilation: if we donβt feel alive, the threat loses its power to terrify us. Depression might once have provided a cushion against disappointment and being overwhelmed. Hypervigilance enables even children to stand guard over themselves. Numbing and loss of interest allow the individual protection against grief and disappointment: if you donβt care, it doesnβt matter anymore. Anger pushes others away before they cause harm or, worse yet, before the survivor develops an attachment to them.
It would be rare in the mental health treatment world to think of these symptoms as adaptive strategies made possible by the bodyβs instinctive survival defenses. But from a neurobiologically informed perspective, they are βsurvival resourcesβ (Ogden et al., 2006), ways that the body and mind adapted for optimal survival in a dangerous world. In the worst of circumstances, our survival resources save usβat a cost. By disowning the trauma, or the anger, or the need for contact with others, we lose or deny important aspects of ourselves. By over-identifying with the trauma-related shame, hopelessness, and fear of being seen, we constrict our lives and make ourselves smaller than we need to be. Both strategies, adaptive in a time of danger, become liabilities when the individual is ready to live a βlife after trauma,β free of the constrictions and restrictions needed for living in a traumatogenic environment.
In the absence of a context of meaning (i.e., a narrative) to explain their bewildering reactions, afraid to be curious or even more afraid to face the events that created a need for these responses, clients assume the worst: they are crazy or damaged or inadequate. Without specialized training in trauma, most therapists would not know to be curious about differentiating normal emotional responses from traumatic reactions, desperate communications from parts, ingenious survival strategies, or implicit memories. Because the client presents in crisis or chaos with emotional pain or signs of a βmental disorder,β we feel a responsibility to diminish or alleviate the symptomsβcurious about their origin in the childhood past perhaps but not necessarily curious about their role or their original purpose.
When the therapist subsequently encounters βresistanceβ or trauma treatments become βstuck,β our theoretical models make meaning of it, but rarely do these theories assume a creative, adaptive explanation. When clients continue to live from crisis to crisis or complain that they are not improving in therapy nor have energy for change, one hypothesis might be that they are βhelp-rejecting complainersβ or βpassive-aggressive.β Or the therapist might theorize that these clients are βborderline,β βattention-seeking,β or manipulative, βacting outβ for some secondary gain. The ashamed, chronically depressed client might be described as having βlow self-esteem.β Whether objectively accurate or not, these types of interpretations have gained clinicians little in terms of practical or successful client interventions for trauma.β]
janina fisher, from healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: overcoming internal self-alienation, 2017
