Do we Have to Call it Trauma?

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ TS Elliot

Over the years of my practice I have come to know key themes which sit at the heart of what it is to be human, and regularly show up in a person's therapy journey. Each time I sit exploring one of these key themes with a new client, wonderfully, I learn something new. Learning I take with me into my own life and to the next client I sit with. Repetitive, relational alchemy.

One such theme often enters as a question - do I have to see it as trauma? And we are inevitably discussing what therapists term little t trauma. The trauma we all, regardless of the privilege of our childhood, experience. These are the repetitive, often unintended, relational misattunements of our childhood.

Behind the question many of us don’t want to blame, or feel anger towards, our parents - ‘they were doing their best’, ‘it’s a difficult job’, ’they loved me’. For some who experienced financially advantaged backgrounds it is hard to allow themselves to know the emotional deprivation they experienced in an environment which in so many other ways felt privileged. Others may be reluctant to disrupt a healthy present day relationship with their parents by dredging memories from the past to talk through in therapy.

Whatever we call them - little t trauma, childhood wounds, relational wounds - it is important to explore these relational misattunements. We need to give voice to our experiences, not the experience as it has been cemented in family folklore e.g. you were a difficult baby, you always struggled to share, you had terrible tantrums, you were a shy thing. 

Once we start to talk from our experiences, we are bringing a loyalty to ourselves, and a good therapist will gently hold the emotions that get stirred in that. Yes we can hold a kindness towards our parents and the challenges of their task, and we can also allow ourselves to feel anger, hurt, and disappointment for our younger selves.

Giving permission to notice how experiences and the messages they carried in the formative years of our family of origin, is essential to understanding the make up of our unique learning ground for what it is to be in relationship, how to love and be loved. We can start to understand our unique adaptive relational blueprint. The blueprint we step forth into the world with. Relational patterns that have come to feel so familiar, as if they were innately us, just our personality …. Yet they are just an us in response to ...

Lise Bourbeau offers an interesting framework for thinking about these relational wounds of childhood and the arising adaptions, which she categorises in five soul wounds -

    Rejection

    Abandonment;

    Humiliation;

    Betrayal;

    Injustice.

I can already feel the pull to push these words away. They, like the word trauma, hold a weight which maybe doesn’t quite feel right, which we don’t want to level at our parents, which we don't want to see in our own experiences.

Bear with me …

Remember miniscule misattunements, if there is a repetitiveness to them, can cause damage, and give rise to learnt patterns of adaptation designed to keep us loved and safe within our family environments. For instance betrayal, could look like inconsistency in a caregiver’s presence, moments of not being there when a child needed support, rupturing the ability to trust. Belittling jokes or thoughtless comments can chip away at self worth, and lead to humiliation. This can come with a learning to prioritise others to gain care, or in what more recent literature has explored as a fawning response.

These arising adaptions, learnt ways of responding and being, are often more readily identifiable. They don’t challenge our family loyalties, but they often enter therapy in frustration, self attack or self loathing. Learnt ways of being which we know don’t serve us but feel very hard to interrupt -    

    fierce independence, and a struggle to delegate;

    over-giving, over-enduring, absorbing blame;

    taking on the needs of others before your own;

    highly disciplined, perfectionist;

    Reluctance to show vulnerability or depend on others;

    Withdrawal or becoming emotionally distant;

    Diminishing yourself in response to feeling too loud, too visible, too needy,  too messy.

The list is not exhaustive, you might be reading it and shouting yes that's me, you’ve got it, or you might want to add one or two more of your own … 

I have tried to illustrate in this article how therapy offers a way of challenging the assumptions we hold about ourselves; retelling our past with our own voice; bringing tenderness and understanding to how our relational history developed and shaped us.

This enables a softening and acceptance towards ourselves. The experience is empowering, as we can learn more active, fulfilling ways of being in relationship - with others, with ourselves, and with the world. For 'We need not be branded by the first pattern. Once the deforming mirror is smashed there is the possibility of wholeness, the possibility of joy’ Anais Nin