It definitively helps to have someone willing to talk to about what brought us to our patterns, responses, behaviors and heal together. It’s kind of sad, but it also helps to know we’re not alone in our issues and our nervous system responses. We’ve all had to deal with some sort of trauma in our lives, but many of us don’t see it that way. Dr. Gabor Maté breaks it down quite well in his book The Myth of Normal. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk talks about this traumatic cameraderie amongst veterans in his book The Body Keeps the Score. It’s what helped him and other colleagues in mental health come up with different modes and programs for healing the traumatized nervous system.
I work in health care and mental health is by far my biggest interest in the field. Trying to understand the processes not just for myself, but to help my patients understand their patterns and help them heal is important. Dr. Gabor Maté is right when he says that we healthcare professionals are not trained to talk about what gets the ball rolling when it comes to health issues and the somatisazion response of our nervous system. Some kind of trauma has let many people to react physically and develop diseases. We medical professionals just prescribe pills, request studies of refer to the specialist. Fine, we don’t want to miss any diseases, but even after all that we still haven’t found answers to some health issues and now days we practice defensive medicine.
On the other hand patients are accustomed to getting prescriptions, being sent for further studies and to be referred to specialist just to be told nothing is wrong. Then, we either treat or refer to the mental health specialists, but many patients feel dismissed. Human mental health is complex.
Damn, couldn’t have said this better.. This complexity is something I’m passionate about solving in my life time. I want more people to get the healing they need, when they need it, and everyone, not just people who can afford it!
As for people getting the healing they need, they have to accept they have a problem to start with the process. My experience has been that many, even the ones with severe traumatic childhood experiences, won’t accept such trauma occurred. We cannot help someone who does not see the problem within themselves or the ones who think they can get by without seeking the help of a professional because they cannot trust absolutely anyone. Why should they? The people they trusted are the ones who hurt them.
This is the plight of deep attachment trauma. It's why I'm so passionate about this space. That trust can be rebuilt, who they really don't trust is them Self. If they can form a healthy attachment internally with themselves first, they can start to venture out into external attachment repair as well. It's messy though, especially when you get external because there's an entire new attachment system at play too, it's a wild time, but worth the work.
It’s not easy to get people who have been deeply hurt to open up, especially children. Like a psychotherapist told me once many years ago, when we’ve been hurt or abandoned by the people who were our caretakers and protectors, our trust has been uprooted. If we cannot trust our caretakers, our protectors, then who do we trust? We don’t even trust our shadow. As someone else wrote in another post, we have to rewire the nervous system of traumatized children in order to be able to heal. It’s different for traumatized adults.
Yes, you nailed it in your comments! What comes to mind for me is "you don't know what you don't know". Did I know I had trauma in my past, yes. Did I feel different from everyone else, yes. Did I know that I quietly hated myself...maybe-ish? Did I realize they were all linked, not at all.
Only after a new unhealthy obsession with pickleball (long story) did it all start to come together. Immediately, I thought "shoot! I wish I had put two and two together, and I would have started this healing process a lot earlier."
You don’t know what you don’t know. Powerful phrase. You only start to find out you secretly hate yourself when you start your healing journey and actually start paying attention to how you talk to yourself and catch yourself trash talking to yourself and even wishing to smack yourself for feeling stupid. When we blame ourselves for the actions of others as if we can control the behaviors of others.
Our nervous system is so complex that even if two people were at the same place and both experienced the same trauma each one responded so differently. Societal norms, culture, beliefs, ingrained teachings, training, gender roles, social group dynamics, race, genetics, epigenetics and cyclical ancestral trauma and other things are involved. I honestly think it is too complex to simplify in our lifetime or any lifetime. I feel that the more I dig what drives human beings the bigger the whole picture gets.
Love this! Similar to what others said, sometimes people just don't realize the impact of the trauma. I remember reading IFS and literally didn't think of my trauma as trauma. I distinctly remember when he asks you to search for memories/parts of us that had been hurt, and I couldn't come up with anything. It was a lay-up, that I completely missed. But, to my defense, a lot of my issues are around a narcissistic mother, which were way less obvious to me. I didn't realize she was a narcissist at the time, and how damaging that was. It took several more books for me to uncover that truth. And that was me looking hard for help. I can only imagine all of the other people in the world who are unaware and not seeking answers.
Oftentimes our deepest traumatic wounds are hard to remember, they aren't even stored in the brain like a normal memory, so this isn't surprising really. What is easier to notice and can lead you to these deeper places are our Protectors. The adapted child responses we never grew out of. The Inner Critic, the people pleasing, the shutdown, the rage, the doom scrolling, the achieving, overworking, over exercising, drugs, sex, rationalizing, co-depenency, etc etc.
All Protectors guard Exiled/Traumatized Parts of us. Getting to know them is one of the best ways to learn what they are protecting, because they can tell you about it. You don't have to guess or rationalize it, or think about it, or learn about another type of therapy, your Parts can just tell you. You've just gotta learn how to listen, which is the literal hardest part, even I mess this up at times.
Yes. He gave me his all for three years and I finally realized I was holding him at arms length. Once I was all in, he shut down and it took decades for him to finally let me in. It was worth it though.
Thanks for sharing!
It definitively helps to have someone willing to talk to about what brought us to our patterns, responses, behaviors and heal together. It’s kind of sad, but it also helps to know we’re not alone in our issues and our nervous system responses. We’ve all had to deal with some sort of trauma in our lives, but many of us don’t see it that way. Dr. Gabor Maté breaks it down quite well in his book The Myth of Normal. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk talks about this traumatic cameraderie amongst veterans in his book The Body Keeps the Score. It’s what helped him and other colleagues in mental health come up with different modes and programs for healing the traumatized nervous system.
I work in health care and mental health is by far my biggest interest in the field. Trying to understand the processes not just for myself, but to help my patients understand their patterns and help them heal is important. Dr. Gabor Maté is right when he says that we healthcare professionals are not trained to talk about what gets the ball rolling when it comes to health issues and the somatisazion response of our nervous system. Some kind of trauma has let many people to react physically and develop diseases. We medical professionals just prescribe pills, request studies of refer to the specialist. Fine, we don’t want to miss any diseases, but even after all that we still haven’t found answers to some health issues and now days we practice defensive medicine.
On the other hand patients are accustomed to getting prescriptions, being sent for further studies and to be referred to specialist just to be told nothing is wrong. Then, we either treat or refer to the mental health specialists, but many patients feel dismissed. Human mental health is complex.
Damn, couldn’t have said this better.. This complexity is something I’m passionate about solving in my life time. I want more people to get the healing they need, when they need it, and everyone, not just people who can afford it!
As for people getting the healing they need, they have to accept they have a problem to start with the process. My experience has been that many, even the ones with severe traumatic childhood experiences, won’t accept such trauma occurred. We cannot help someone who does not see the problem within themselves or the ones who think they can get by without seeking the help of a professional because they cannot trust absolutely anyone. Why should they? The people they trusted are the ones who hurt them.
This is the plight of deep attachment trauma. It's why I'm so passionate about this space. That trust can be rebuilt, who they really don't trust is them Self. If they can form a healthy attachment internally with themselves first, they can start to venture out into external attachment repair as well. It's messy though, especially when you get external because there's an entire new attachment system at play too, it's a wild time, but worth the work.
It’s not easy to get people who have been deeply hurt to open up, especially children. Like a psychotherapist told me once many years ago, when we’ve been hurt or abandoned by the people who were our caretakers and protectors, our trust has been uprooted. If we cannot trust our caretakers, our protectors, then who do we trust? We don’t even trust our shadow. As someone else wrote in another post, we have to rewire the nervous system of traumatized children in order to be able to heal. It’s different for traumatized adults.
Yes, you nailed it in your comments! What comes to mind for me is "you don't know what you don't know". Did I know I had trauma in my past, yes. Did I feel different from everyone else, yes. Did I know that I quietly hated myself...maybe-ish? Did I realize they were all linked, not at all.
Only after a new unhealthy obsession with pickleball (long story) did it all start to come together. Immediately, I thought "shoot! I wish I had put two and two together, and I would have started this healing process a lot earlier."
You don’t know what you don’t know. Powerful phrase. You only start to find out you secretly hate yourself when you start your healing journey and actually start paying attention to how you talk to yourself and catch yourself trash talking to yourself and even wishing to smack yourself for feeling stupid. When we blame ourselves for the actions of others as if we can control the behaviors of others.
Our nervous system is so complex that even if two people were at the same place and both experienced the same trauma each one responded so differently. Societal norms, culture, beliefs, ingrained teachings, training, gender roles, social group dynamics, race, genetics, epigenetics and cyclical ancestral trauma and other things are involved. I honestly think it is too complex to simplify in our lifetime or any lifetime. I feel that the more I dig what drives human beings the bigger the whole picture gets.
Very interesting read. I like your style and look forward to more articles. Thanks for this one.
Appreciate it, Mark, welcome to the community!
Love this! Similar to what others said, sometimes people just don't realize the impact of the trauma. I remember reading IFS and literally didn't think of my trauma as trauma. I distinctly remember when he asks you to search for memories/parts of us that had been hurt, and I couldn't come up with anything. It was a lay-up, that I completely missed. But, to my defense, a lot of my issues are around a narcissistic mother, which were way less obvious to me. I didn't realize she was a narcissist at the time, and how damaging that was. It took several more books for me to uncover that truth. And that was me looking hard for help. I can only imagine all of the other people in the world who are unaware and not seeking answers.
Oftentimes our deepest traumatic wounds are hard to remember, they aren't even stored in the brain like a normal memory, so this isn't surprising really. What is easier to notice and can lead you to these deeper places are our Protectors. The adapted child responses we never grew out of. The Inner Critic, the people pleasing, the shutdown, the rage, the doom scrolling, the achieving, overworking, over exercising, drugs, sex, rationalizing, co-depenency, etc etc.
All Protectors guard Exiled/Traumatized Parts of us. Getting to know them is one of the best ways to learn what they are protecting, because they can tell you about it. You don't have to guess or rationalize it, or think about it, or learn about another type of therapy, your Parts can just tell you. You've just gotta learn how to listen, which is the literal hardest part, even I mess this up at times.
Food for thought.
This was both me and my husband.
Did yall overcome it?! Break the cycle?!
Yes. He gave me his all for three years and I finally realized I was holding him at arms length. Once I was all in, he shut down and it took decades for him to finally let me in. It was worth it though.
I'm so happy to hear this story ended positively!
Yeah. It would have been nice to have had this information available to us back then. I’m glad you’re helping people.
This was so helpful and so relevant to me, thank you 😊 🙏
Of course! Hope you’re able to implement some of the advice!