Maybe Mom rejects me and I feel unloved if she doesn’t have all her needs met, so I become a caretaker to satisfy all her needs and to make sure I am loved. Or maybe I am told that I am bad and this is why I’m being abused, and I believe this, because I’m being told this by my caretakers, these adults who have tremendous power and credibility. I start to act according to this new identity that’s been handed to me.
It’s important to remember, as we continue through this book together, that there is no fine line separating trauma from shock, although there are several elements we can look at that distinguish them from one another. Ultimately, what’s important in therapy is that the two need to be treated differently, for shock involves a greater separation between life essence or soul and the ego itself and for this, a different therapeutic approach is required.
DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN TRAUMA AND SHOCK
Remembering that the shift between what we’re calling trauma and shock occurs on a continuum, rather than at one defined point, and that symptoms of shock may develop differently for different people as they enter deeper levels of trauma, here are some of the distinguishing factors that help us understand the progress from trauma to shock:
1) ALTERATIONS IN THE REGULATION OF AFFECTIVE IMPULSES
As we continue along the continuum of trauma to shock and then beyond, we reach additional conditions such as borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder (DID, better known as multiple personality disorder), associative identity disorder and so on. Each is a little bit further into the witness protection program: relocation, dissociation and re-identification. “I’m somebody other than who I started out being.” Regulation of affected impulses has to do with self-destructiveness, so the further we go into shock, the more this will manifest.
2) ALTERATIONS IN ATTENTION
This has to do with the degree of dissociation, which sometimes incorporates amnesia. This includes the part of me that registers memory, so now those memories are stored in my body, because my body was here during the trauma but the rest of me was not. This is why portions of therapy involve bodywork, and why people often recover lost memories through this kind of therapy.
3) ALTERATIONS IN SELF-PERCEPTION
The deeper we go into shock, the more likely we are to identify with guilt or shame surrounding the traumatic experience, even thinking we are the cause of it. Often we give a client a teddy bear or some symbol of his or her own inner child, and ask that the client tell the child (his or herself as a child) how much he or she is loved, how beautiful and innocent he or she is. In most cases this is a powerful healing experience. But sometimes we find that a client pushes the teddy bear away, saying, “I don’t want to have anything to do with her. She is dirty, she is stupid and I hate her.” That’s an indication of how deeply embedded that individual’s sense of responsibility is for what happened to her. She is blaming herself for what happened to her as a child. We can use this technique over time as a measure of recovery, as she is able to slowly embrace that little girl instead of judging and rejecting her.
4) ALTERATIONS IN PERCEPTION OF THE PERPETRATOR
In some cases of shock, the perception is that “I am the perpetrator.” And the deeper the shock, the more this seems to be true. We call this identification with the perpetrator “trauma bonding.” This is one of the new identity options for the person who’s entered the witness protection program. And many, many times, this translates into actually becoming the perpetrator on someone else at a later time—many who have been abused in early childhood become abusers of their own children.
5) ALTERATIONS IN RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS
The deeper the shock, the more we lose the ability to trust or be intimate with others.
6) SOMATIZATION OR MEDICAL PROBLEMS
The nature of shock, as opposed to trauma, is that it is deeply embedded in the body itself—in the physical systems of the body: the nervous system, the heart, the brain, the limbic and hormonal systems, etc. This is why, as we mentioned previously, it is through those systems of the body that we can access information about the damage done and provide corrective treatment. This is a fundamental aspect of what modern medical practice is now calling integrative medicine. As we begin to understand the nature of shock and how traumatic memories are literally stored in the traumatized parts of the body, the use of clinical hypnotherapy can bring a whole new level of healing from trauma through understanding how to retrieve these long-buried memories literally frozen in the body. Unretrieved, they are silently at work, causing unease and disease in the body.
For example, a woman named Carol, along with her younger sister, was sexually abused from the very young age of three by her drunken father. After several years of this, he then brought in his alcoholic friends to sexually abuse them. This continued uninterrupted by her mother, who had to work to support the girls since her husband drank up all the money. This left the two young daughters in a nearly constant state of vulnerability, where they had to “run away to the circus,” and each developed several circus characters in order to survive the horrendous situation.
Since the traumatic experiences and memories are stored in the body, it is very common in these situations for young women to develop “female problems.” This can include painful menstrual cycles, severe endometriosis and even cancer. When the doctors try to treat the “symptoms,” the next solution is removal. Many women who have early hysterectomies often don’t know about the abuse that happened to them because they have been off to the “witness protection program.” Carol developed multiple personalities which were a result of needing to leave her constantly re-abusing father and his friends. Since her mother was unable to protect her, she developed a creative way to protect herself: literally new identities via the witness protection program. Her sister used alcohol and drugs to accomplish a similar escape from an intolerable reality, to self-medicate her shock.
Learning how to do mind-body work through clinical hypnotherapy can be the road that leads people out of witness protection and gives them the ability to return home.
7) ALTERATIONS IN SYSTEMS OF MEANING
Chronically abused individuals often feel hopeless about finding anyone to understand them or their suffering. They believe that nobody could possibly understand, and they despair that they will never be able to recover from their mental anguish. They have been exiled, for that is the nature of witness protection. You are cut off from every relationship that you’ve had, and you’re denied the possibility of creating new ones because that would only endanger your safety. The whole idea is to be invisible.
We have been using metaphors of running away to the circus and the witness protection program to describe children’s responses to trauma. In more clinical terms, the child’s ego splits when encountering an intolerable threat to safety. This splitting defense serves a twofold purpose: one, to fragment a painful experience, rendering it less unbearable by a process of dissociation and compartmentalization and two, to attempt repair, constructing a new and less distressing narrative which renders trauma less threatening to one’s personal sense of worth and identity.
According to Donald Kalsched, an expert in Jungian psychology, trauma can be defined as what happens when a negative experience cannot be dealt with through normal psychic defenses.1 Then a second line of defenses comes into play, defenses that are invincible and archetypal (in the sense that they are not personally