The Lie that Trauma Teaches You

The Four Kinds of Trauma

Every day I encounter individuals that have endured trauma, often childhood trauma involving emotional, sexual, or physical abuse, or all three. But there is a fourth kind of trauma that is insidious, but no less damaging: neglect. I will be diving into neglect as a particularly dangerous kind of trauma in a later post, but for now suffice it to say that these four kinds of trauma all do what I'm about to discuss right now: teach you a LIE.

This lie is powerful and can be extremely difficult to dislodge from your thoughts. It is pervasive, and it often has unconscious ramifications--meaning that you will act as though you believe it, even if you consciously don't think you believe it. Moreover, these beliefs will be incredibly emotional. That is, they will trigger all kinds of intense emotions like fight or flight, rage, tears, terror, and everything else you can imagine. Sound strange? It really isn't. In fact, unconscious beliefs undergird pretty much everything we do. A belief is simply a prediction, and the brain is a massive prediction-making organ (among many other things). And emotions are out innate motivation system. When we feel a surge of emotion, it is always to DO something--attack, run away, pursue a possible lover, etc. And these are all rooted in the deep evolution of our species. As such, these emotional unconscious beliefs can be powerful movers of our inner world, and they often can override what we consciously and rationally KNOW.

Emotional Beliefs Can Override Reason

And soo, if you come to believe, say, that spiders are incredibly dangerous, you may totally freak out any time you see one, even if you KNOW that the particular spider is completely harmless--like say a granddaddy longlegs. So sometimes merely knowing that the given experience is, right now, harmless, doesn't seem to make any difference. Our emotional beliefs are too strong to be convinced by mere reason. We need stronger medicine to deal with them. There is a very good reason for this--emotional beliefs emerge, as I mentioned, because of evolution. They are triggered defense (or mating) responses that have contributed to the survival of our species, so they can be incredibly convincing! Why? Because all of the individuals in the millions of years our species and our proto-human ancestors that didn't have these responses all died out!

So emotional beliefs--especially unconsciously acquired ones--can dominate our conscious life and make us (in some cases) utterly miserable. At the root of most depressions, for example, is the belief that there is no hope for us to be happy. That nothing we do will wind up successful. That there is "nothing out there for me". Even if these sound absurd on the surface, it can be VERY difficult for someone to "just get over it" if the source of these beliefs comes from an unconscious emotional source.

The Lie that Trauma Teaches You

So then what about the four kinds of trauma? Well, generally, trauma teaches us at an early age one thing: you don't matter. When we are children, we absorb a HUGE number of beliefs, and most of them are unconscious. We do this because we need to understand the world we live in and our defensive instincts--those emotional systems we inherited from our distant primate and mammal (and even reptile!) ancestors--use the conscious beliefs our big brains have created in order to judge when and where to "kick in". If we believe the world is an incredibly dangerous place and nobody can be trusted, then our defensive emotional instincts will be on overdrive all the time.

In the case of trauma, the belief we acquire is that we do not matter to other people. And the reason this causes such an intense emotional reaction is because we are extremely SOCIAL animals. In the history of humans on this planet, only those who cared intensely about what others thought about us survived because most of our survival strategies involve group cooperation. A human that is cast out of the tribe has a drastically lower chance of survival, so we are OBSESSED with what others think of us.

So when caregivers fail us, this belief comes to dominate our experience because it actually helps us survive. We let other people walk all over us, we continually berate ourselves for the slightest imperfections, we constantly take care of everyone to our own detriment, we cling to people who mistreat us because otherwise (we believe) we are in danger of being cast out, and since in the ancestral environment that is a DEATH sentence, we will avoid it appropriately: like the death threat it once was. We carry this belief from then on, unfortunately, because Nature tends to stick with what works, even if it is unpleasant, rather than try to change things up. In time, of course, it is possible to change this belief, and some people who suffered childhood maltreatment do in fact do this--but I can tell you this: it's rarely easy, and it usually requires a lot of inner work.

Maladaptive Attempts to Heal

In response to this lie, people will react in many ways, because feeling like this is utterly miserable. Some people will react with a narcissistic defense: oh, I don't matter? No Way! I'm instead going to cling to the belief that I am the ONLY person who matters! This is an ego-fantasy that is adopted in order to protect the extremely damaged ego underneath. An even more extreme version of this would be antisocial personality disorder, or extreme psychopathy. If the world is so dangerous, I will defend against that by being vicious, unempathic, and uncaring, attempting to screw over everyone I come across! There are many other ways that people try to "undo" the LIE trauma teaches us, too: rage outbursts, severe desires to control everything in their lives, and addictions of all kinds.

Fantasy Representation

In fiction we don't often see people who simply suffer under the yoke of the belief that "you don't matter". Rather, we see characters who try to "fix" it with the above maladaptive behaviors, and many times these folks wind up as villains, but not always: consider Batman. He has taken the trauma of his parents being gunned down seemingly at random and responded by trying to single-handedly take down all injustice. It's kind of nuts, but it certainly makes him an interesting character!

Superman is another hero with this issue--his entire civilization was wiped out and he attempts to correct it by taking on the weight of the world. It's actually quite similar to Batman's reaction, but done on a different scale because Superman has godlike powers. But this idea of transforming trauma is not a new one. Beowulf lost his father in a frivolous raid, and for years was considered a lazy coward, until he took on Grendel, in part, to prove himself. More recently, the character of Glokta in Abercrombie's First Law trilogy is one who suffered immense trauma as an adult, and his way of dealing with it became inflicting pain and suffering on others as a way to cope with the lie of trauma.

Healthy Healing

Our unconscious emotional beliefs CAN change with time. We continue to update our beliefs our whole lives. It's just that the early beliefs tend to affect us longer because they happen first. But they can change. The trick is that they don't usually change simply because we point at them and say "that is an irrational belief!". For whatever reason, that often doesn't seem to work very well. Rather, what we need are transformative EXPERIENCES to counter the earlier traumatic ones. These include psychotherapy or hypnotherapy, but can also be spiritual experiences, or encounters with people who, through long time interaction, prove themselves to care. But one thing underlies all of these possible transformations: unless you tackle the unconscious belief head on, and find ways to engage it on a real, human, and emotional level, it will not change. In other words, simply talking about it in the abstract, while not engaging with it on the deeper level, "down in the bones", will not convince those defensive emotional centers that anything is truly different. This is what is often symbolized in fantasy narratives of the hero facing the monster in the cave--a universal theme. This means the person trying to change the beliefs has to face them head on. They have to do hard introspective, and deeply challenging work.

Because, after all, if our deeper beliefs were easy to change, we would be extremely malleable--that wouldn't be good either, would it?

Until next time,

EG