healing childhood trauma pt5

Processing the Pain-Sadness & Confusion

If you don’t know that emotional pain is part of healing childhood trauma, you might think you are crazy or that healing is hopeless. Neither of those things are true. Pain must be processed and it takes time. In my previous blog, I spoke about breaking through denial. For survivors of trauma, denial is just one of the techniques the brain uses to survive. I want to mention two others; numbing and dissociation (splitting). 

Numbing behaviors include many things from using drugs to sleeping too much. Anything you do to keep feelings and memories quiet can qualify as numbing. 

Dissociation is a way to manage feelings by psychologically removing yourself from a memory or an event. You might even know what happened, but you cope by separating yourself from your feelings and emotions. Some dissociation is so strong there is no memory of the trauma. 

Despite the protection of numbing and dissociation, eventually feelings will demand your attention. And when they do, you will feel like everything has gone haywire. It’s a little like listening to an old transistor radio. Your emotions keep cutting in and out and scratchy distortion interferes with the signal.

These survival mechanisms are the brain’s way of trying to protect you—most especially during the trauma. If a child feels under constant threat, the brain learns to cope by denial, numbing and dissociation. The difficulty comes when we are no longer under threat, yet continue to live as though we are. It’s not so much a habit as it is neuroscience. Your brain has formed pathways that are so powerful, you will continue to feel terrified even though your trauma has ended. 

You need help addressing these survival mechanisms. They are your brain’s default—not your fault. A therapist can help guide you to understand the symptoms. Support groups and trauma informed yoga can teach you a way around the old neural pathways to create new ones. Meditation and prayer have been invaluable to me in taking down the threat level so that I could get to my emotions and consequently process the pain. Other resources will appear at the bottom of this article.

Trauma injures the deepest places of the heart so that life grows dim and no beauty can penetrate. I exist in a place of darkness, constantly afraid. My brain searching for threat. My heart resigned to the misery that is life. Why? Why does childhood trauma do this to us as adults? It doesn’t make any sense, or does it?

It was 1966 and my mother had just arrived home from the grocery store. As she passed by, the smell of sugar wafted from one of the bags. I knew it before I saw it. Cupcakes! My favorite thing in all the world. My mother had bought cupcakes. I lifted my nose to sniff.

“Get out of the way,” my mother growled as she gave me a rough push. I stumbled backward nearly falling. She set the groceries on the counter. 

I was hated. That was common knowledge, but my heart still leapt at the thought of cupcakes. I helped bring in the rest of the grocery bags, hoping to make her happy. Dodging my mother’s frown, I searched for the wondrous treat. There they were, lodged between the celery and the bananas. 

Looking up, I saw my older brother, Jimmy, leaning against the door frame ready to take flight at the slightest sign of trouble. Far wiser than me the scapegoat, Jimmy knew how to be so quiet my parents hardly noticed his presence. 

“She bought cupcakes,” I whispered in his ear. The smell of little boy mixed with dirt rose from his skin. 

His hazel eyes grew big. “Don’t touch them,” he warned. 

My mother placed the cupcakes on the kitchen table.  “You can have them after you eat your dinner.” She turned her angry eyes toward us and scowled. “But you better eat every, single bite.”

Tonight’s recipe was one of her favorite concoctions. She called it goulash.  A strange mix of tomato sauce, hamburger, shredded carrots and unknown spices was plopped on my plate. It looked like canned dog food, but I managed to swallow it down. Peeking across the kitchen table at Jimmy, I smiled. We were both finished. 

Reaching for my cupcake, I took a big, long, lick. The icing was sprinkled with tiny sugar flowers. I crunched one between my teeth, lost in the wondrous joy of the moment.

Pinching talons interrupted my reverie as they dug into my upper arm. My mother gritted her teeth against my cheek. “How many time do I have to tell you not to eat the icing first?” She shook me hard.

Dragging me to the den, she took a switch and rained hot welts across my legs. “You’re not to eat the icing first. You’re not to eat the icing first.”

And that was the way it was, all the years of my childhood. Jimmy and I lived under the threat of annihilation every single day. Terror and rage were the norm. There were no boundaries—sexually or any other way. My parents could do whatever they wanted and that was exactly what they did. For me, the worst abuse was not sexual or physical or psychological. It was being so hated you were punished just for existing.

This story is the type of situation that causes the symptoms of Complex PTSD. Captivity and unremitting threat. Notice my confusion in the story. I think that cupcakes must mean my mother is happy. Then, I try to do what I think will make me safe and wait until after dinner. Even that isn’t enough. It never crosses my childish mind that eating the icing first would cause my mother to attack.

To someone who has never dealt with childhood trauma being beaten one time for eating icing seems like a small thing—even silly. Maybe my mother was in a bad mood. Maybe she was just having a bad day. We all do and say things as parents we regret. I’m talking about something much different. When you live with parents that are constantly confusing, who send mixed messages. Who make you feel hopeless and undermined and under constant threat, it damages you. Your brain fights back keeping you safe with denial, numbing and dissociation. You grow up to believe the world is untrustworthy and that people will always betray you. 

When I first began healing, I thought the sadness and confusion would never end. Once I broke through denial, I realized my parents were not the people they “told” me they were. Nor were they the people the community thought they were. They were abusive, unpleaseable, angry, unhappy people who took their frustration with life out on my brother and I. Instead of dealing with the terrible trauma of their own childhood, they turned on two helpless children and sacrificed us at the altar of their own selfishness.

The truth caused profound sadness. Right next to that came confusion. As you can see from the cupcake story, my childhood was a confusing place, and just as confusing was trying to understand how these two people I wanted to love more than anyone else in the world could do such things. Like a charred trash heap, I picked through what was left of my life. The painful past as present as if it were still happening.

I had to go over events many, many times in order to process sadness and understand my confusion. I had to allow myself to cry and grieve. Sometimes I thought all the oceans in the world were not enough to contain all my tears. 

To defy trauma is not easy. Every small step toward healing makes a difference. For a time, you must set aside joy. That’s okay. It is enough to take each day for what it is. 

Specific resources for healing trauma:

Forward Facing Trauma Therapy—Healing the Moral Wound by Eric Gentry

He also has a website with online support groups and many video classes on specific techniques to heal both on YouTube and Udemy. 

Camea Peca, PHd, Sonomic healing, with Arizona Trauma Institute on YouTube

The CPTSDfoundation.org. Information, virtual support groups and much more