Читать книгу Overcoming Shock - Diane Zimberoff - Страница 10

Chapter 1

SEEKING REFUGE—A CREATIVE WAY TO HANDLE SHOCK

Trauma. In psychological settings, we use the term frequently and we treat clients to undo the damage caused by trauma. This has been done effectively for years for many clients…but not all of them. Because it turns out that trauma isn’t such a “one size fits all” term. In fact, it’s become something of a controversial word among mental health workers as we debate how to use the term and how to treat the problem.

We’re convinced after so many years of working with trauma that it can’t be used with just one meaning or treated with just one approach, because of the nature of human beings. In biology, there is a term known as “homeostasis,” where the body tries to maintain a balance point for optimal health. Like a tightrope walker, the body doesn’t have to keep strictly to the midpoint—an exact body temperature or pH level—but it does need to remain in a constant state of flux to keep very near to that midpoint. The tightrope walker who isn’t making minute adjustments every second falls. The same is the case with the body.

For nearly a hundred years now, we’ve used the term “stress” to talk about any kind of environmental factors—from food to pollutants, from germs to physical accidents or abuse—that push the physical body out of homeostasis. So, on the one hand, it’s the cause. But on the other hand… what do we call it when we’re not in homeostasis? We’re “stressed,” or we have stress. So the term is used as both cause and effect.

If we’re pushed too far out of balance, stress is no longer stress. Then it becomes disease, whether as an ulcer, heart attack or other serious condition. In the end, this might just be semantics. We change the term, however, to recognize that the stress has reached a new level and to describe—with the name of some disease—the resulting symptoms.

Yet stress doesn’t just impact us physically. It also impacts us psychologically. As with our physical bodies, our minds and emotions need to continually respond to the environment to maintain a healthy, balanced state. When life and/or other people push our buttons, we are stressed mentally or emotionally. Hopefully these are minor stresses and we can keep our balance and our psychological health.

When we are stressed often enough or deeply enough…we no longer call it stress. We call it trauma. Like stress, trauma is used to mean both the cause (the traumatic event) and the effect (the trauma that needs to be treated). This is where we’ve reached a state of psychological imbalance, something we’re not able to recover from without treatment.

In fact, it’s more complicated than that, which is why choosing the right professional is so important. Because stress becomes trauma and trauma becomes complex trauma—what we’re calling “shock” in this book—on a gradual basis. There’s no magical point at which stress becomes trauma or trauma becomes shock, because it all boils down to an individual’s ability to handle the stress and to maintain balance before it reaches these deeper conditions. Where we really see the difference is in therapy, where people respond to treatment according to the depth of trauma they’ve experienced. Without the right tools for more than one depth of trauma, a professional really can’t help all the clients passing through his or her door.

What we can say is that the younger someone is at the time of trauma, the more likely it is to be a complex trauma or shock. The more intimate the relationship with the abuser, the more likely it is for the trauma to become shock. The less chance there is for safety, the more certain the danger, the more likely it is to become shock. The more pervasive the trauma, the more it is repeated and the longer the period of time over which it is repeated, the more likely it is to turn to shock.

When we pass by stress and enter into levels of trauma, we begin to see a split taking place, a sort of division between someone’s essence, or “soul,” and the ego or personality. The greater this division, the less the soul or the “real person” is controlling the ego aspect, and the more this ego comes under the control of an “other,” which we discuss next. When this happens, less of the person’s soul is able to function and accomplish his or her true purpose in this world.

THE LEVELS OF TRAUMA

You can gain a sense of how trauma becomes more severe and pushes us into different psychological responses through illustration. In the classic movie Home Alone, a child is left at home by accident and discovers that some crooks are going to try robbing his family’s house, believing it to be empty. So he takes it upon himself to outdo them and he rigs the home to defeat them. The movie was written as a comedy but, given that situation in real life, it would be a horror film for most children, especially the younger they were and the more they believed in the power of adults.

Think of a child in that situation, alone at home and seeing through the windows that the house is under attack. Two men dressed in black with masks over their faces have parked their car out front and are coming toward the door. The child feels powerless to do anything about it, so she may react in a number of ways depending on her previous experience. This could include tendencies she came into this life with, what some may call karmic or God-given tendencies.

One reaction would be to go outside the house before they reached the door and scream for help. Another might be like the boy in Home Alone. She might grab a baseball bat or some other form of defense and do what she could to protect herself. But most children find that option very difficult, because in most cases, the marauders coming at them are not only more powerful than them physically, but also psychically, since the magical thinking of a child gives adults a kind of “bigger than life” power. So, more than likely, that child is going to lock the door and hope they don’t break in.

If the men try the door, find it locked and decide to leave, the threat is gone and—depending on the child—the stress of the event may not become traumatic. That is, it might not have created some kind of lasting psychological effect that needs to be treated. Granted, the child may be more aware of the world she lives in, but this isn’t necessarily an ill effect. This is an analogy for those things we see as threats around us that put us on edge, that stress us psychologically and that may have us withdraw or hide temporarily from a situation—maybe not physically but psychologically. As the threat passes, though, we can easily return without having been traumatized.

Let’s say, however, that the men don’t give up so easily and they break through the door. So now the child has to run deeper into the house and hide, perhaps behind a couch or under a bed. This is much like the way too many children have to run and hide more deeply within themselves from threats—not so often from intruders (strangers), but more often from those in their lives inflicting emotional, physical or even sexual abuse. Here, especially with severity and frequency, abuses or other violent situations become traumatic and cause the kinds of divisions or splits we’ll discuss later in this book.

The child hopes at this point that she has tricked the intruders by hiding and that this will carry her through the trauma. But suppose they find her under the bed. Now what is she supposed to do? They have physical control over her at this point and there is nowhere deeper into the house for her to retreat. So the one remaining option she has is to cut ties with the environment entirely, for her essence in this circumstance to fully break away from reality so that it’s protected from what is happening to her body. We and some other therapists refer to this primal level of dissociation as “soul loss,” requiring “soul retrieval” in therapy.

There are times when we protect ourselves psychologically in simple ways from those around us—in ways that may stress us, but that don’t cause any lasting damage or split that requires therapy. The more we are threatened, however, the more we need to retreat into our own inner “house,” our own psyche. The deeper we go, the deeper a split may become. With the deepest splits from shock, we find that part of the soul itself is disconnected from a person, and as part of the defense process, the ego may associate with the abuser who is causing the shock. We see this dramatized in George Orwell’s metaphorical novel, 1984, when Big Brother’s brainwasher O’Brien says to Winston Smith, the victim of his abuse,

We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.¹

SHADOWS

Let’s briefly mention shadows here, because while they aren’t the focus of our book, they represent the response to a milder form of trauma. As we’ve said, any kind of psychic split from trauma is effectively a loss of some aspect of the individual, which is then replaced with an “other” who fills the void where the loss occurred. In the following chapters, we’ll illustrate the deeper splits of trauma and shock.

In the case of shadows, the trauma is real but more tolerable and the “other” remains closely connected to the original “me.” The split is put out of sight or “in the shadows,” so to speak. But it’s not an unconscious replacement that the ego is unaware of. Instead, this shadow is an identity of convenience, functioning in alliance with the ego to pursue their mutual goal of ensuring safety and satisfying needs. The shadow uses means that the ego would not, either because it is deemed to be bad or because it’s beyond the capability of the ego. In either case, the ego’s plea is, “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” Whether it is manipulation, seduction or being devious or defiant, the shadow replies, “Oh, but I can.”

As with other forms of trauma, the victim introjects (incorporates attitudes or ideas into one’s personality unconsciously) the traumatizer’s powerful qualities into the shadow. In other words, the tactics used by this shadow are determined by those of the source of the trauma, either mimicking them, standing in defiance of them or attempting to mollify them. If the source of trauma is a raging father, the child may develop a shadow that rages, one that stands in judgment of rage or a shadow that fearfully tries to anticipate the father’s needs and meet them before rage can erupt.