insomnia & hyperarousal

Hyperarousal is a primary symptom of CPTSD or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One of a host of symptoms for long term childhood trauma survivors, hyperarousal is one of the top reasons for insomnia. And as I have been personally working on insomnia this summer, hyperarousal has gotten in the way. In a big way! Hyperarousal occurs when a person’s body suddenly kicks into high alert as a result of past trauma. Also known as fight, flight, freeze or fawn, it is an automatic response. Even though there may be no present danger, pathways laid down in the early years of life continue to operate. How do I explain this? Let me begin with a story from my own childhood.

My brother and I were excited because it was Saturday, our favorite day of the week. Saturday morning cartoons, pancakes for breakfast and time to play with our best friends, Julie and Sally Smith. The same age as we, they lived across the road and were kind and fun to be with. Julie and Sally were the oldest of five siblings, and their parents were always welcoming. Their family was an oasis of peace unlike my family which was a sea of constant threat.

Surrounded by broad fields of tobacco curing in the hot Virginia sun, Julie and Sally’s house was not far from our own. Her parents were sharecroppers and though they were only children, Julie and Sally worked in the fields alongside their parents harvesting tobacco that belonged to someone else. Someone else owned the land. Someone else owned the shack in which they lived and someone else owned the tobacco that broke their father’s back to plant. Working the fields gave their family the right to live in that shack and enough money for food till the next planting season but not much else. 

The neighbors often whispered about the Smith family’s poverty behind their backs. “At least they keep the kids clean,” I heard one of my mother’s acquaintances say. Everyone felt sorry for them, but I wondered if the neighbors had known what was going on at my home would they have felt sorry for us. Poverty did not keep the Smith family from showing us kindness. We might have been middle class, but as far as we were concerned, Julie and Sally were the elites. We loved them and we loved their pitiful broken down old house and their equally broken down yard dog that always greeted us with a wagging tail despite his skinny ribs. 

We played all afternoon at Julie and Sally’s house that long-ago Saturday. Our toes were as brown as the dust of their yard by the time the sun began setting in the west. My brother and I hopped on our bikes to make the quarter or so mile ride home. The path followed a dirt lane and ran right beside some railroad tracks.

“What is that?” I shouted as I slowed my bike. My brother’s eyes followed the point of my finger. There in the center of the railroad on top of the ties and between the rails lay a lump of unmoving black fur. 

“It’s an animal,” my brother yelled. 

A terrible feeling rose from the pit of my stomach and stuck in my throat. Too distraught to work the pedals, I climbed off my bike and began to push. My brother followed suit. I knew without getting any closer that the animal laying on that track was our beloved English Shepherd, Smut, and I knew instinctively that she was dead. 

A blood curdling scream left my brother’s throat. “Smut!” he screamed in despair and began to cry—gulping in tremulous breaths of air between shouts. “It’s Smut.” 

I joined in with his howls. We stood there screaming the screams of childhood panic and sorrow for several minutes neither of us daring to approach our precious friend. Poor old Smut. Such an awful name for such a wonderful dog, but that was how my mother did things. 

“That dog is as black as the smut left by the charcoal in the fireplace,” she said when Smut arrived as a puppy. We children were not allowed to name her. My mother alone had that honor.

Faithful and true, Smut would lean against you as you sat on the front steps, her brown eyes filled with empathy as you related your troubles. Good old Smut who played with us and never did my brother or I a bad turn. Our only ally, Smut was dead less than a mile away from home. It never entered our minds to call out to our parents. They were the last place we would have gone to for help.

Pushing our bikes, we finally made it to the house, the loveliness of summertime wildflowers obscured by our tears. My mother sent my father to get Smut’s body. He loaded her in his truck with a shovel and brought her home. My mother never showed pity for anyone except the family dog. It was the only empathy I ever saw her give. She told my father to bury Smut underneath the willow tree in our front yard. She was sad for Smut. She ignored us.

Filled with theories of what had happened, my mother offered her opinion. “She probably had a heart attack.” 

My father was annoyed. “It’s just a dog. You kids stop crying or you’ll get a whipping.” And we knew he meant it.

I looked at my brother and bit my lip. We both hid our tears but neither of us ever got over it. To this day we can’t talk about it. Bonded by the trauma that was our childhood, the constant lack of empathy, pervasive threat and the fear of punishment caused us both to grow up struggling with anxiety, depression and a host of other symptoms including insomnia. When we told Julie and Sally what had happened, they stood beside us under the willow and wept. Our parents never noticed.

Childhood trauma is not about one incident. It’s not even about overt abuse. It’s not about normal parental mistakes or ordinary human frailty. It’s about feeling terrorized by your parents every waking moment of every single day. Of having your emotions frustrated and destroyed. My parents ruled over a system that crushed us. They used us to cope with their own problems and to avoid dealing with their own childhood trauma.

When you live under a cloud of constant threat, it destroys everything that is good. It takes away the ability to find a restful place in life or the experience of joy, even the fellowship found in grief. We did not go to our parents for help. Instead, we got off our bikes and screamed—bereft of hope.

For childhood trauma survivors, the root of insomnia is found in the arousal system. And I quote from my own therapist’s notes. “We are all wired to have an arousal response. This system is part of your ‘threat scanner’ that alerts the brain and body there’s a need for a fight or flight (or freeze) response to help you in situations of danger or threat. If the arousal system ‘stays on’ it can impede sleep and can take the form of physiological arousal (difficulty relaxing), cognitive arousal (racing thoughts), or conditioned response (learned response). 

The more I read, the more I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This was why I had struggled with insomnia for so long. The hyper-vigilance created by trauma was continuing to work without my knowledge or even consent. It is so strange to see the neuropathways laid down in early childhood still operating on auto-pilot sixty years later, but there it was. For survivors, it is the axel of the wheel, the bulls eye, the target, the center of it all. And it comes from our old frenemy, the amygdala. 

Ah...yes...the amygdala. That part of the brain mentioned so often in trauma work. The brain’s major processing center for emotions linking memories, learning and senses. And listen to this, the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight!!!! The part of the brain most damaged by the constant stress of early ongoing childhood trauma. I had never heard this about insomnia before, and frankly, having only arrived at the place where I felt I was well enough to work on my sleeplessness, I am shocked at how bad it is, how long it has gone on, and what an impact it has had on my life. I knew it was related to trauma, I just didn’t know how much.

.This also explains why I get so angry when someone tells me I’ve trained myself to be an insomniac or why I fly into a rage when my therapist suggests that part of the cure will require “sleep restriction.” On the surface, cutting out naps and only getting into bed when sleepy sounds legit. To my ears it sounds like more abuse. To be “triggered” is to light up the amygdala to threat. These so-called insomnia cures feel like a flame-thrower.

This is why insomnia for trauma survivors is complicated. It involves much more than just changing a few bad sleep habits. If you feel frustrated by this information, welcome to the club. It is maddening. Although it helps to know why insomnia is so difficult for survivors, knowledge alone will not bring about change. When you begin, you are going to feel like giving up. The old frustrations and ensuing hopelessness will rear its ugly head. Writing this series of articles has been the only thing that has kept me from quitting insomnia therapy myself. 

I want to be able to go to bed at a normal hour and have a life the next day so I’ve made a decision. I’m not going to quit. I don’t want trauma to win. Let’s stick it to the suffering together and defy trauma, in order to embrace joy—and get a good night’s sleep! 

In order to receive a free pdf copy of information about insomnia including concrete ways for change, please send a request via email to hello@defytraumaembracejoy.com