Healing Trauma and Attachment Wounds
Trauma is when we are overwhelmed by things that happen to us, events or extreme stress. Our nervous systems react to these things to try to keep us alive by priming the body to fight, flight or freeze. Our brains are changed by trauma. All the emotions, thoughts, body sensations, behaviors and reactions that we experience in that moment of trauma and threat are stuck and not stored as other non- traumatic memories are stored in the brain- they are like fragments of the memory all disjointed in our brain. Our survival brain is still sending the signal that we are in danger, even if the danger happened a long time ago. If one of these parts of the memory get triggered, then we can re-experience it all as if it’s happening right now.
Unresolved trauma can lead to physical health symptoms, avoiding doing things that you used to, feeling flat or depressed, struggling to develop satisfying relationships, anger, difficulty focusing, feeling very negative about yourself, not trusting others, feeling very intense emotions that are difficult to regulate.
“Any event that has a lasting negative effect on the self or the psyche is by its nature traumatic.” (Shapiro)
Trauma is also subjective – what is traumatic to you may not be traumatic for me. If an extremely stressful event happens and you have no support, lack safe connection with others, continue to live in chronically stressful circumstances, you are more likely to develop PTSD. So it very much depends on your unique experiences.
But here are some events and experiences that can be traumatic:
- Violence, assault, rape
- Car accidents
- Natural disasters
- Intimate partner violence
- Emotional or verbal abuse
- Parents who are violent with others or each other
- Emotional or physical neglect
- Sexual or physical abuse
- Divorce or separation from parents
- Parents who are dealing with mental illness or PTSD or substance abuse
- Living in a chaotic, scary environment
- Being rejected, abandoned or bullied
“Often [the] lack of nurturance from loving caregivers is coupled with inadequate protection from dangerous situations or people.” (Arielle Schwartz)
Complex Trauma
Trauma can be complex especially if children experience some of the above repeatedly at the hands of their parents or they are not responded to with caring and safety after a traumatic event. As Francine Shapiro, the founder of EMDR therapy says early childhood experiences of trauma interrupt the development of an integrated sense of self, leaves one with a deep sense of shame or guilt, a lack of feeling safe and inability to express needs appropriately.
Attachment Wounds
Attachment wounds are often intertwined with these abuse and neglect or traumatic events. They are more about what you did not get that you should have gotten from your parents in terms of safety, comfort, protection, attuned care giving, a sense of belonging and that felt sense of your parents or caregivers really delighting in you as your unique self. The absence of nurture has impacts on our brain development and limits our resilience. Children need to be consistently cared for by care givers who are regulated and dealing with their on emotions effectively so that they can be calm, responsive, and safe to help the child regulate their own immature nervous systems. And if this is not the response we get from our care givers, we struggle alone with overwhelming emotions that make no sense to us as children. We internalize the messages of being too much, needy, bad because we reacted, not being important or enough and start to believe that we are not ok and others are not going to love us.
How do we heal?
The best news I know is that we can heal the impacts of trauma and attachment wounds. We can change the impact of adverse life events to allow you to feel whole and worthy.
EMDR I offer EMDR therapy, a highly effective and proven technique that allows us to stimulate the neural networks in your brain that hold the memory fragments of the traumatic event and allow the brain to process all the pieces of the memory and link it to more positive or adaptive neural networks. For example, a client who was abused as a child and has a deep sense of shame even though their adult self knows it was not their fault. The EMDR will target certain memories that represent this memory network that holds the sense of shame and fear and allow it to link to the ‘adult brain’ that knows it is not their fault. The goal of EMDR is to alleviate current symptoms, decrease or eliminate distress from disturbing memories, increase a positive sense of self and decrease physical symptoms.
Attachment Based Parts Work A neurobiologically informed trauma perspective, views all the symptoms, behaviors and legacy of trauma as survival resources or adaptive strategies to deal with circumstances beyond our control (Janina Fisher, 2017). I view your depression as part of the autonomic nervous system’s freeze response that was once meant to help you stay safe, but now has you stuck being depressed in the present. We can make sense of your own unique experience by learning about the natural nervous system responses to threat, that are outside of our conscious choice. It can be helpful to view ourselves as if we have parts that hold each of these survival states: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Submit, Attach. Many clients feel relief to understand themselves in this new way. This does not mean you have multiple personalities, it just means that there are these parts of you still holding the pain and fear of childhood or previous experiences. And they are still trying to protect you with the only way they know how- to get really angry when someone disrespects you- so you are not hurt more, for example. Complicated to explain. But our goal is to befriend all of our parts and create internal attachment bonds with yourself. When we mindfully notice all these parts, understand them and give them the compassion, safety and empathy that they needed as children, they are not so reactive. And you become more integrated, whole and secure.
Nervous System Regulation And Resourcing Trauma treatment requires that we help the body to feel safe, grounded and in the present. Often it is less ‘talk therapy’ focused, because we know that talking about traumatic events can cause you to be triggered and dysregulated, which does not benefit you or heal you. We need a ‘bottom up approach’ to help you to start to notice your body’s reactions, where it is holding the stress or dysregulation and to change your breathing, relax your muscles, learn how to get a felt sense of safety in the present. We can learn how to do vagal toning to help your vagus nerve pick up more signals of safety and send the message to your brain that you are safe. Think of it like we have to help the body send that message to the brain because with trauma, the part of the brain that ‘knows’ you are safe, is inhibited. In addition, we can incorporate developing positive resources. This is a practice of using imagination to develop a felt sense of a safe and calm place, your own nurturing or protective characteristics, a felt sense of being cared for or a time when you felt capable or confident. When we use imagination to heighten the feeling of these experiences, it’s creating and strengthening a neural network that helps you feel and know those experiences as if they actually happened. That changes your brain!
Trauma is a huge topic and everyone’s experience is unique. Please contact me 303-455-2409 to see if I am the right person to assist you in your healing.
