Unique Approaches and Individual Differences In Healing Trauma
The French psychologist Pierre Janet described trauma as “the illness of not being alive in the present.”
We study Trauma to explore and understand how it affects our biology, perceptions of our world and our psychological and emotional functioning in that world.
Trauma encompasses distressing or disturbing experiences which can leave us frightened and anxious. These experiences are part of life!
They test our resilience.
When I wrote my book Speak from your Heart and Be Heard: Stories of Courage and Healing, I didn’t set out to write about trauma and healing. But when I finished and looked back at my stories, I discovered I’d written about my own life experiences as well as fictionalized traumatic events in the lives of my clients. Readers agree. Their feedback and reviews affirm that the stories are about healing trauma!
These days, people use the words “trauma” and “traumatic” a lot—in relation to all kinds of experiences. Let’s look at a relevant definition?
Let’s define what we mean by a traumatic event:I believe Trauma comes in many forms, not always of a violent or life-threatening nature.
Failing an exam, being criticized by a parent or partner, even forgetting our lines in a play—can be traumatic for us. I call these “Everyday Traumas.”
Something like 9-11 or the Vietnam War would be considered a “Horrendous Trauma.”
Trauma expert Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk talks a lot about the suffering and traumatic effects of both 9-11 and Vietnam. He’s worked with many people affected by those events and describes trauma as something horrendous, that makes you stare with horror—”you can’t possibly imagine what you would do and you think your life is over…”
The doctor tells a story about a five-year-old boy—wise and compassionate beyond his years. The boy lived near the towers in New York and witnessed the 9-11 fires and people screaming and jumping out of windows. The heartwarming part of the story is that the boy drew a large round object underneath the people jumping. When asked what it was, he said, “it’s a trampoline to catch them, so they won’t die.”
In his groundbreaking book, Dr. Van der Kolk notes that Trauma is an experience or event that produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity and an alteration in the system that filters relevant from irrelevant information.
Trauma can indeed create various changes in the brain. People respond to and process trauma in very different ways.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
Have you ever wondered?:
Why some people are able to overcome their grief over traumatic events and cope successfully to become happy and fulfilled while others remain hopeless and stuck?
It’s a question that puzzles many of us:
In my short fiction collection, characters confront painful traumatic issues and challenges. In the three stories, The Promise, Monitored and Seduction, the main characters show resilience. Mirroring real life, had healed and transformed their lives.
The stories offer us hope and some unique approaches to healing trauma.
In my story, The Promise, Ned and Misty are characters who meet and fall in love. Each experienced significant trauma of the “Horrendous” type in their childhoods. Misty and Ned show us how two individuals respond so differently to such traumatic events.
I was inspired to write their story after I’d been reminiscing about a beautiful and talented, yet troubled, young woman who’d sought my help many years ago. “Val” earned her living by pole dancing in a club. I’d found her account of the trauma in her early life chilling and upsetting.
I was curious about art of pole dancing and as I watched You Tube videos of champion dancers, I became enchanted by their creativity, flexibility and strength.
I began to imagine a story about a dancer. The dancer became Misty, a main character in The Promise. Misty’s story was partly inspired by Val’s. Words flowed onto the page.
The character of Ned was drawn from a snapshot of a man I’d found, with a soulful and searching look in his eyes. I called him “Ned.” Ned surprised me by finding his way onto the blank pages in front of me.
As it turned out, Ned became my muse and narrator of the story. Misty joined him a few pages later and my affinity for the story and admiration for the characters began to grow as their tale unfolded.
My heart went out to them. Their childhood losses were traumatic. Both carry memories of their trauma but Misty heals while Ned remains haunted. They are characters of different temperament and background who deal with trauma in different ways.
I hadn’t set out to show the differences, but the contrast between Misty and Ned’s responses leaped out at me when I went back and read what I’d written about them.
As a child, Misty witnesses her little brother being brutally beaten. In the following scene, Misty is describing what happened and the emotions she experienced when her brother was beaten by their maid:
Misty rose and began to pace, twisting her hair. “One day, I came home from school and heard shrieks coming from Billy’s room, I heard Jezzamine’s shrill voice cursing him. I ran the stairs two at a time and flung his door open. I saw Billy, hunched on the floor, Jezzamine beating him with his plastic toy mallet. She kept hitting him, again and again. I ran to call my father, but she saw me and caught up with me. She pulled the phone away, ripped the cord from the wall and bolted out of the house.”
Misty is fortunate to have the kind of caring described by Dr. Van der Kolk. He says, “people who live in deeply caring and accepting environments handle traumatic events better than those living in harsher environments.”
Misty intuitively understands she needs to draw from healing sources to transform her life. She is blessed to have nurturing parents and caregivers. A family friend and mentor, inspires her to study dance. Later, Misty excels in her dancing career. She finds another source of support, this time from her troupe of dancers and develops an intuitive sense of her body as healer.
Ned is not as fortunate. Early in life, his emotionally distant father abandons the family and Ned becomes caregiver for his mother.
Nurturing and a strong support system weren’t available to him, as he grows up.
Instead, Ned appoints himself Superman to his childhood friend and sweetheart, Sabrina, and promises to protect her and keep her safe. but is stricken when he’s unable to save her from drowning.
One evening, as Ned and Misty sit by the fire, she reveals her story to him and tells Ned how she came to be a dancer. Then, she asks him about his background.
That’s when we learn that Ned is very private and not comfortable revealing his inner thoughts and feelings. He may secretly believe that it would be dangerous to talk about his past. He may think to himself, “If Misty knows about my past, she’ll think badly or less of me.”
Ned certainly doesn’t want to talk about his past. He’s never really come to terms with what happened to Sabrina and has always blamed himself.
When Ned responds to Misty’s question about his background, he simply stutters, “Swim team and rowing club in college. Worked my way through an engineering degree and…”
Ned then narrates to the reader, “I’d fallen in love with this beautiful woman…I’d have done anything for her. Except talk about my childhood.”
Ned goes on to tell the reader about his childhood and Sabrina:
“I had promised to protect Sabrina, keep her safe, not let anyone harm her. We had a secret ceremony and made a pact in blood. She smiled. Her round, fresh face so innocent and trusting…
It was a crisp autumn day when it happened. I can still see Sabrina, her flaxen curls flying, skipping rope with her friends. I can hear them chanting the rhyme as they raised the rope in the air and brought it down in a sweep. Especially Sabrina, giggling as she jumped the highest.
I’d grown tired of waiting for Sabrina … so I drifted back to my house. But, when the commotion began, I ran back. I can still hear the hushed voices of the town folk, see their faces.
Sabrina had slipped away from the group. She must have been looking for me by the river. No one knew what happened. They thought she’d stumbled on the steep rocks and fallen in, carried away by the churning current. Sabrina didn’t know how to swim.”
So these are the memories Ned has and the burden he carries with him; he remains stuck and traumatized from his loss and because he was unable to save Sabrina.
As an adult, Ned gets flashbacks of his time with Sabrina and his failure to save her. After he meets Misty, he’s unable to untangle himself from his memories, which lead him to take dangerous actions. He hasn’t found a way to heal from his wounds as he must, if his relationship with Misty is to grow.
So, if we we’re not like Misty and haven’t had that nurturing and support, how can we move toward healing?
THAT’S A GREAT TOPIC FOR MY NEXT BLOG! STAY TUNED!
If you’d like to share your story, we’d love to hear from you.
Please see my Contact page on this website.
“Creating characters and watching them take on a life of their own is an amazing experience. Kind of like giving birth.”
HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Dr Kixx
Dr. Kixx Goldman
https://www.drkixxgoldman.com
drkixxgoldman@gmail.com
Speak From Your Heart and Be Heard: Stories of Courage and Healing is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle and some independent bookstores.