Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Trauma: How It Rolls and Surviving It

Severe trauma hits when least expected. The "punch in the gut" trauma can be handed to us by society, the economy, close family, long marriage partners and the like, and will frequently land on us just when we had no idea it was a pending event. This is why they called this quality trauma severe. It is currently referred to as "how life rolls," a very impersonal phrase invented by one who demonstrates no pain regularly, or would pretend he could not feel it.

Although I have been through a few traumatic events myself, I never considered the resultant pain of the common anticipated trauma to be as debilitating as a trauma for which I was not prepared. The traumas that hurt the most are the ones that keep us in the net of illusion lacking the truthful reveal that could have protected us. It makes us feel stupid or provides a megashock as we were thinking that an improvement was coming which never comes, anticipated preparedness only to find out we prepared incorrectly, experiences in "loving errors" with unanticipated upheavals of response (separation and divorce, or a revelation) a responsibility gone wrong, and that which I fear to be the worst, the unfortunate death or disappearance of a fiercely loved child. What then? Time heals all wounds? Give it time and you will make friends with it? What kind of solace comes from those phrases anyway? These and a token will still buy a ride on a subway train. Equally as important as the effect of the trauma is how we deal with it.

Try baby steps at first, (an overused cliché.) How about starting with a new kind of music in your life, preferably that without words? Classical is adequate as long as it is not somber or depressing. It gives you a background distraction and/or accompaniment for the newly acquired rattling pieces of your brain. A new temporary love source, wherever you choose to find that, might also help but this can be exceedingly tricky. It is best to seek a confirmed loner, or a confirmed lover, who seems to recognize and understand your situation better than you expected. Good luck with that, especially should you choose incorrectly and innocently wind up doing to them what life has done to you when the affair is over. In the case of an affair and temporary love, remember that everyone has feelings, even the perfect bastard who uses people. As soon as you speak of leaving, you might suddenly become the most desirable pair of legs they ever knew. Then you will have guilt and trauma. "Are we having fun yet?" will become your daily anthem and homemade weekly lasagna dinners to whom you used may become your penance. Still, if the choice is made carefully you might yield some temporary and hopefully dependable stress relief for the duration of your needs. Try never to hire someone for this; it only leads to blackmail later.

You could also write your horrible story down and then burn it with a match in the kitchen sink, or go through the effort of hiding it in the attic. You could start your writing with, "why did this happen to me," or "why did you do this to me when I trusted you," or "why did you lie to me when you hired me." It will not cure your symptoms, but again there is remarkable wisdom to learn from writing things down; once you see it on paper, you begin to "feel the story" from an outsiders perspective, rather than how it traditionally translates in your own head. If there is some respite from this exercise for you, then that is good too. It may feel good to write, "Give me a break!" among your words of rage to universally demonstrate how stupid the offender was or how good you were to put up with the problem for so long. People do this because it indeed gives them a break. Who deserves a break more right now that you with your stress. However, if you do avoid this phrase in your journal of the memory, you may secure your more honest recollection of your event, as you are capable, closer to how an outsider would view this report than how you or your friend might view it, which might help you to recover quicker if you are more committed to the truth of the matter than recovering from your own pain. It just depends on how you are coming to this exercise. You might actually say after reading what you wrote, "Oh my God, I seem to have made a mistake here" and it might be justified which is not to be confused with the guilt response of "Oh, its all my fault. If I had done this better, earlier, longer, more convincingly, the whole thing might have turned out differently. (This is covered below in greater detail so just hang on.) Getting the hurt out of your heart and onto a piece of paper, and then hiding it in the attic has been compared to a very long wake. The "body" of your complaint has completed a death of sorts by being released from your heart and onto this scrap of an envelope you might have written on with your eyebrow pencil. See, it's all on a piece of paper now, not just inside of your heart! Burning or burying this note of revelation in the back yard has been compared to an actual funeral with the intention of bringing some closure to the trauma you sustained. If you decide to keep this graphically documented recount accessible to yourself for later life lessons and reflection, then it's up to you what you do with this next, which could be dangerous and not in your best interest at all. There is always the possibility of sending it to the newspaper, which is not encouraged, for your sake as well as the sake of the offender, who may find a loophole in your work agreement to sue you soon for what he calls slander.

Another option to you is counseling. You get to scream, yell and cry at a professional stranger who will study your patterns and tell you all the recurring themes they witness in you. With luck and prayer, they will instruct you about the current ways people are dealing with this quality pain. To generate a positive response in you, the methods of stress relief they try to teach you must be different than the way you dealt with trauma before. If it sounds different to you, try it! After you have explored these paths with them, they might introduce you to a group who hurts just like you do, and then you can compete with each other about who has the worst story. If that works for you, do it! If it does not work then you still have other options: yoga, drugs, meditation, volunteering, and ministry of community needs, defiant niceness, or a truly exhausting task of revamping your present career aspirations and trying to make money a different way altogether (which you may not be up to yet.) I once knew someone who became a sea biologist after a divorce from a long time marriage. Before the divorce, she was a bookkeeper. This worked for her.

The best advice I ever heard for stress-management was about learning to love yourself, which of course I did not understand at all the first time I heard it. Whitney Houston had just made a record about the hero lying inside of you; I did not understand that either. What does learning to love yourself mean, especially if you are a long-time addict at spending all your time loving everything else in life but yourself (working mothers of children who have pets and tons of friends are among those who would qualify in this category, but there are also other qualifying subjects.) When I first heard this advice, I hoped it meant buying Evan Piccone shoes at Bloomingdales. Then I got the bill. This option might be part of your solution if you are financially independent. In my case, the way I finally translated this into words I could understand, was "taking care of yourself in the way it pleased you to look and feel before the trauma of losing what you lost - the child, the job, the creep, the business, all of the above." Blocking your own memories in stressful times is often a self-generated stumbling block, and frankly it is harder than finding Sangria in Zimbabwe to get around this blockage. The tricky part of identifying your good feelings from before trauma is that when you are raw from the "fresh cut," you don't really wish to return to that space for any reason in your mind. You are gunshy. Those memories belong to the hurting part of the pain package you are protecting yourself from. As you tend to guard yourself from further injury you can't remember what made you feel good back then. Learning to love oneself again becomes harder to do because you have to wait for this important component piece to show up without pain. Have faith and trust, and encourage yourself ("I can do this!".) You will remember when you do not feel threatened by reaching back anymore. It will show up in a semi-dream state when you awake one morning, or while driving home alone in a silent car. This is an important part of your recovery. You basically want to remember, you're just having a little trouble entering back into that world.

If you do achieve locating the file of "Feeling Good" in your cabinet labeled "Before This Happened," you might just begin to try imitating yourself from that previous time as you remember it. If you can recall these feelings then it indicates advancement on your part toward overcoming the pain. Look! You anticipated pain from the package but you overcame it and plucked out the memory before the yet smoldering coals burned your fingers. Good for you! If you can subsequently imitate the "feel good state" successfully, you may then find yourself "pleasing enough" to test the waters with another family member, another child, another spouse, another boss, another lover here and there, and/or even another creep just to prove to yourself that you can feel good if you want to, and that the offender has diminishing control over that part of your psyche. It is however, by no means, to be confused with a total rehabilitation and the end of the self-healing process. Do not be cavalier in this effort as when you fail in your initial attempts, it will be easy to give up; small increments of time investment over a longer span of time than we would give to less of a stressor, are suitable to be successful here.

Next, it is helpful to experiment with a genuine-appearing smile in front of a mirror, and the assertion of asking people "how are you today?" The mirror helps you to identify what this question looks like coming from your currently dehydrated positive presentation. You want to be convincing when you try it outside, so practice and use your mirror for this often. You may even be ready for a little small talk, and again remembering the small increment of time suggestion, keep the small talk very small for now. Avoid people who use lots of words to say simple things like "Oh look, the first spring flower!" As soon as they begin telling you about their Aunt Betty's garden and how it differs from their mother's planting, pretend you are having a fainting spell and get out of there.

Grief on your face at the new job or in the grocery store is more likely to be controlled with simple smiling verbal offerings to familiar faces. You should also consider that in your new training course as Commander of your Own Recuperation, no negative utterance while performing this task is permitted even if you can only manifest a weak smile for the recipient. If you can stick to this protocol then a giant step should be celebrated privately. As time goes by you may increase the duration of these incremental offerings to an hour or portions of an hour. In exhibiting "stress free" hours (keeping in mind that actual feeling "less stressed" is different from the "practiced-mimicking" state) you will begin to relate more positivity to the world around you. Somehow this promotes a belief in yourself, although I have never wrestled down a verbally suitable explanation connecting the two concepts. People begin to innocently prompt you with a response mechanism when you are positive. You say something positive and they say something positive and the process goes back and forth. Keep it brief for now. Sooner than you think, you will begin to realize that you can handle longer and longer positive interchange. This has been tested and it just works (no explanation.) As a side-note, be aware that this is physically exhausting in the beginning and that you might even require more sleep to continue to pull this off on a daily basis. At least remember to raise your legs when you get home. Restricting every muscle in your body temporarily to achieve this task needs to be offset by a reward of some sort. You may need to offset this with a whirlpool now and then at a nearby health club, and extra half hour in the sac to sleep each night, or the sex you contracted for with the understanding bastard described in a few paragraphs above. Your curriculum manual indicates that you are not allowed to gaze out a window into the quiet countryside at any point during these hours of positivity, because that can only lead to a numbing revisiting of the stressful event you are trying to overcome. In addition, your cover will be blown and then you will have to find another new job or a different grocery store. This is a wonderful building tool for regenerating self-reliance and perhaps causing some repair of your self-esteem in the process. It is undeniably another step toward your independence from the original hurt and your sensitivity to its pain.

Public opinion of your dilemma and the verbalization of it around you can be the hardest load to carry under these conditions, whether it is well-meaning and to your face, or continuous gossip behind your back. No one really wants that pity once they begin to heal themselves anyway. You, the victim is trying to overcome the experience and the gossip continues to remind you of it, thus keeping progress and the achievement of it just out of your reach. Being the subject of the water cooler conversation du jour is embarrassing in itself. It might not hit you as evil if the whole office is talking about your divorce in a loving way and sympathizing with your plight ("How sad she is going through a divorce at this time,") but wait until they begin confabulating details of how he left you for a desperately ugly woman, or how she left you for an abusive man indicating it was better to tolerate abuse than to tolerate you! This easily gets further out of control and begins to roll like a snowball until the real reason for the divorce becomes that you personally needed to partner up with Big Foot or Zena the Warrior Princess to keep yourself satisfied in a healthy marriage or balanced relationship (gender preference selection required here,) and so then it was really all your fault that you got that divorce that everyone thought was such a crime committed against you in the beginning. Why not implode these nonsense scenarios altogether and send it out to a quick death in the circular file? Even though you might be looking for support from friends, the support you get from the workforce has a very poor percentage in "feel good" ratings on the chart. It is always the biggest office gossiper who has the courage to come to you afterward and talk about your plight to your face. The words you provide will then be contributed to the fund of shared office knowledge when next they all need a cup of water at the same time. Meeting gossip about yourself head on in any form with a display of positive strength will effectively challenge the actual validity of the gossip. This is the best self-protection method on the market today as I see it. It also builds your selling skills in case you need a job at a convenience store in the future, which frankly may be all that is available soon in this economy. A current analogy in today's world would be antivirus software for your computer. It shoots the virus down quickly by not allowing it to eat away your program. Another small step achieved - good for you!

When you need a hug try giving one to yourself using your mind. We all know that imagination is powerful, but after childhood and when the adult reality of life sets in, the thought of a self hug conjures up silly visions of extra long arms embracing oneself on very small chairs in a kindergarten setting. This phenomenon actually is alive and well on an adult level, but although we hear the words, we remain inept. If your heart really hurts, buy a late' (to stimulate your awareness, or some juice to give you electrolytes.) Take a long time to drink it, labeling this as your "break from reality time." Remember that stress is your reality right now, and the new program of positivity, whatever dosage you are employing to conquer it, is your therapy. Again, use your new positivity to think deeply about something absolutely new and refreshing in your mind even if it is a little far out (as long as it does not hurt you,) like taking a fling with yellow begonias along your sidewalk this year, the value of buying a farm within city limits, or perhaps the worthiness of a first time visit to Tibet. Learn how these one minute forced self-distractions are effective by practicing them on the way home in the bus, soaking in the bathtub, waiting in the dentist's office where any distraction is a gift from God, and continue to try to give yourself that hug in your mind. This exercise is performed so that you can produce the "self-caring but still alert and aware" scenario you will need on a schedule devised by you. This is good quality self-help at night when you are alone in bed staring at the alarm clock, or at a boring business meeting where your wandering brain could turn your face into the vengeful expression of the Wicked Witch of the West for all to see. It is natural for you to then develop a panic attack when you are met with the response of "fear" by all those sitting around you who are waiting for you to produce a burning broom. Now it will be time for you to reverse gear quickly, which might lead you to say something inappropriate like "steamboat" when this month's budget totals are innocently requested by the Chairman of the Board who was not in touch with anyone's facial expressions around the table as he was recording his own notes (or doing a crossword puzzle in his lap beneath the table.) Can you follow my urgency to have you understand this? If you do not complete this exercise appropriately, keep practicing until you get it down.

Well, at this point, I think you have done all the hard work now for to secure your own protection and reduce your sensitivities to this stressor by about even odds (50%.) It seems you have achieved all the outwardly appreciated tricks to get you a chance to blend in with the world again. The inside repair work, being a very personal thing, is not so easy is it? Funny as this sounds, the methods for repair of your inner psyche are likely to come from a silence within yourself. I find I am never able to do that work inside until the outside affect is secured under any traumatic event - severe or otherwise. But, once protection is secured I pass into a state of "self-inspection." Others will call it prayer which does not require the saying of recited prayers, but is more of a prayerful state of silence. A third group will label this self-healing method as meditation and will assume a yoga position. A fourth group will just go to the Bahamas.

Given the time and the practice required, the above tools reviewed and considered deeply over the period of about at least a month could indeed help you to make friends with the cause of stress that threw you into the original ditch. If you cannot make the full recovery on your own, you will at least have a good idea of the direction you need to go in to achieve some or all of the recuperation with help. The little solace gained when you first heard this phrase might increase magically from a thimble full until it becomes an embracing whirlpool of enchanting relief. You will know that you are on the road to unconscious dismissal of this evil power when you are capable of not thinking about it for at least 12 hours at a time. Twelve hours is a long time for you to be able to meet the requirements of the world after experiencing a truly traumatic event without any retrograde thinking. For those of you who do not meet this milestone, you must begin the exercise all over again from the beginning. If you are still failing at achieving meaningful results after 8 seasons, it is very worthy to consider joining a convent of nuns who are nonverbal. If you do succeed in the above exercises you will also generate some lasting insulation. All these tools are available to you again to practice or reflect upon when and if you need them. Overcoming your stressor took hard work; these protocols were difficult because they were directed at self-improvement and survival. You may also have inherited the gift of a sixth sense about trauma. This may enable you to be more careful about your paths in life, but surprising not all people get this gift in the process of self-rehabilitation, so I never describe it as an automatic given. You will have to check whether you have attained this skill over the next year or so - you will probably know by then, even if only in a vague way.

Remember the pain you felt was brought on by a wrong turn in a path you previously felt happy to walk along. Is it not really necessary to detour around every potholed path just because we stepped into one and sprained an ankle. Like every other injury, after the splinting is removed or the surgical wound heals, we marvel at how we can get back to living with the use of this limb. We may begin to recognize a pothole more effectively when we see one and reflect on the damage it could cause us (the sixth sense I referred to above.) Of course, a rainy day may bring about an arthritic remembrance of the specific traumatic event, but basically you will find yourself more capable to handle it and by now have some expertise in how to flush these things from your brain when you need to. You have experienced a megavolt shock; perhaps the result was more of a broken ankle than a sprain. Granted, you are not a light switch, turning on and off at someone's will, but essentially you function well and probably better than the guy sitting next to you on that bus or subway train. Not everybody is strong enough to rebuild their life in a healthy way; some will be bitter and broken by such an experience. But you have been healed by your powerful mind and the world will celebrate this in many ways with sunshine and happy vibes. You can feel these vibes now! Let your growth be accompanied by prayers for guidance and for preservation, and of course remember to give great thanks and praise when closure finally comes.

Wishing you many happy vibes and satisfaction in your life -

Alice Elizabeth Cagle July 25, 2010

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