Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being

Someone was sharing with me this week various struggles they are having as a parent, which I could relate to. Partly it was about the challenges in parenting a child who is so different in personality, and partly it was about unwelcome criticism of her parenting style from others.

I was then listening to a podcast with Lisa Marchiano on Meaning making, Motherhood and the Journey of Individuation which sums up what I suspect is actually going on in this situation. Lisa says:

“You’re going to project your stuff on your kids. There is no way that you are going to get through any amount of time with your children and not meet those parts of yourself you cut off and sent backstage (the aspects of yourself that are unconscious but we see in others, our blind spots)”.

I know from my own journey that this is what is going on for me in any situation that is triggering, and I can project onto anyone, it is just the nature of parenting that makes the scenarios so intense and frequent. In fact, so much so, that Lisa quoted Fay Weldon who said “the best part about not having children is that you can go on believing you’re a nice person”, which makes me chuckle.

However, throughout the conversation I was having, what I could feel was this sense of deep longing within the mother to be seen, I suspect this longing comes from the parts of her that were denied, suppressed or disowned in her own childhood.

We talked about her childhood, not so much about details of it, but more the relevance of her own experiences which, like me, she felt were fairly normal. Neither of us had experienced anything that would be typically recognised as traumatic in the sense of physical or sexual abuse, domestic violence or any of the other big-T traumas.

But I know trauma is not just the big stuff. In fact, trauma is not an event, it’s the reaction to an event (or ways of being chronically ill-treated) within our bodies, that becomes stuck and replayed again and again when triggered. What most people don’t recognise is their own trauma, because it has been normalised.

In the movie The Wisdom of Trauma, which features Dr Gabor Maté, I also got a glimpse of Frizi Horstman’s Step Inside the Circle documentary that I found impactful. Frizi runs the Compassion Prison Project and gets right to the heart of the issue by getting everyone to stand in a circle and to take a step forward with every question she asks that the person identifies with.

She starts with “While you were growing up, during your first eighteen years of life, if a parent or other adult in the house would often insult you, put you down or humiliate you, please step inside the circle.”

It quickly becomes evident that – as Dr Robert Block says “Adverse childhood experiences are the single greatest unaddressed threat facing us today.”

The point Dr Gabor Maté really impressed upon me when I first read his work a few years ago, is that trauma is more pervasive than in just those we recognise as being locked in a prison. In fact if the prison guards were asked to step inside the circle (or the prison management, or those working in the Justice department, or the elected politicians, or – for that matter – the lady living down the street) then I suspect it would be become very evident that trauma is omnipresent.

One of the most striking examples Dr Gabor Maté often cites is the crying baby. Babies are helpless; they have very little at their disposal to signal their basic needs. They cry because they are hungry, tired, want connection (need connection), are too cold/too warm, need changed and so on. Yet even today there are parenting methods that actively advocate letting a baby cry without intervention in order to train them (when to eat and sleep to the parent’s – or otherwise deemed healthy - schedule).

Even as I type this I can feel how triggered it makes me. I am incredulous at how little is known about human attachment and attunement among people generally. I want to scream, I’ll be honest. How is it possible that people cannot see that leaving a baby to cry without any intervention teaches that baby, that person, that they are alone, their needs are not important?

There is a time to teach children to wait, sure, but it comes later, once secure attachment and attunement are established.

What does attunement look like? Teal Swan says “Ask yourself the following questions...

·        Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me?

·        Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not?

·        Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way?

·        How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

Healthy attunement means feeling understood and having those feelings honoured.

Healthy attachment means taking mutual joy in spending time with, and being connected with someone.

So as I was talking to this lady about her childhood, I asked her – since it was seemingly so benign in its normalcy – whether she would (if she could) send her own child back to live in her own childhood? This created an immediate sense of perspective.

I wondered, why is it she and I seem to share this sense that it was okay for us to go through our own childhood experiences, yet we didn’t want to consciously repeat them with our kids?

In Terri Cole’s book Boundary Boss, which I’ve found both insightful and practical, she says “Get a picture of yourself as a child, every time you look at the picture practice compassion...beam yourself with pure love.”

I’ve had childhood pictures up for a while, and pictures of my partner as a child, so I can have compassion in the times I’m seeing a hurt child acting out rather than a self-regulated adult.

Yet when I look at my own photos it is not compassion I feel. It is more a sense of inadequacy, like maybe this child – me – deserved the childhood I had. Notice I’m being honest here about how I feel. My intellect does not agree, my intellect knows that a four-year-old cannot be inadequate and that any sense of inadequacy was likely a projection upon me.

In fact if I were to be faced with one of my own kids’ feeling a sense of inadequacy I would be quick to take them in my arms and beam them with pure love, no doubts. Yet when faced with myself as a younger child, I lose all desire to. Isn’t that interesting?

“As a child”, as Dr Gabor Maté explains, “we are born feeling our connection to our parents and we are reliant on them for survival. Being rejected by them in any way, big or small (over an extended period), is devastating. So when we are rejected, we have a choice, to reject them or reject ourselves (or more likely parts of ourselves). But we can’t reject them as our survival depends upon them.”

And through Dr Maté’s work, and that of many many others like Teal Swan and Claire Zammit to name a couple of those often quoted by me, I have come to recognise that right there denotes the kind of childhood trauma I’m suggesting lives in probably every person on the face of the planet.

Now I’m not saying every person would feel in some way ashamed of themselves as a child if they looked at a photo of themselves at a young age. I suspect only those of us who have internalized the feelings would.

To add some depth, I’ll go back to one of my favourite explanations of all time on this, summed up exquisitely by Teal Swan:

“When our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1.      disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble, where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism as “The child who externalises their experience, projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear they experienced and cannot tolerate themselves”). Or

2.      being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm (otherwise defined as the child who internalises their experience and persecutes themselves).”

She goes on to explain that neither state is healthy. “It is not a fulfilling life to spend all your energy obsessively trying to keep yourself safe by attuning to other people at the expense of tuning out to yourself. But the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble...

You cannot attune to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot attune to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality.”

I’ll never forget talking to my mum about her childhood before she died. She did not readily share details during her life, she was simply what I would have called very dark on her father and her eldest brother; her father being an abusive alcoholic and her eldest brother was a half sibling who abandoned his family of birth, as his father before him had abandoned them.

My mum, like a lot of people, never saw any value in revisiting those childhood experiences; she couldn’t fathom why anyone would partake in coaching never mind counselling, perhaps because she felt herself adequate enough and externalised her experiences.

She certainly did not believe she was in any way held hostage to her experiences, which is what most of us would like to believe I suspect.

Yet there I was talking to this mother about her parenting and, as she recounted the beautiful demeanour of a coach facilitating a class she was attending, she was moved to tears as she related to me the gentle way this facilitator spoke to and nurtured her audience. In turn I was moved as I saw so clearly how the little girl in her desperately wants to be related to.

Instead she had experienced harsh words, and little warmth and affection growing up. And she internalised this, thinking she must be getting these harsh words because something is wrong with her.

Frizi Horstman, of the Compassion Prison Project, concludes “We are all magnificent, beautiful humans, but we have trauma fogging our vision of ourselves and others”. She makes the point that when we are triggered, we are in our flight-fight mode. Learning how to recognise this and regulate our nervous system is the key to accessing our magnificent selves. Certainly we cannot do this if we are stuck in survival mode.

So if you feel like something is wrong with you, or something is inherently wrong in others, there is, we are all experiencing an ongoing cycle of trauma, passed unconsciously from generation to generation. Our job is to wake up to it, heal and help others. As Gabor Maté says, it appears clearing trauma is the zeitgeist of our time.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will? How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You and Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.