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The Holiday Season can be a Trauma Trigger Trap for unsuspecting infant-child abuse and trauma survivors.
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I am still working on my main post for today about the meaning of the word ‘symptom’, but in the meantime I wanted to present this information from About.Com about Borderline Personality Disorder and the Holidays. I present this information in memory of my mother, and in memory of her traumatic early infant-child history.
I think difficult emotional states surrounding the Holiday experience can be passed on down the generations just as any other trauma can be. This is particularly true with holidays that are supposedly child centered. If trauma surrounds a family’s experience of Christmas in the past, it can be especially true that a child will remember Holiday Season traumas – in their body – without having conscious memory of the facts of the related traumas they endured when they were very young.
I found in my mother’s mother’s own 1930 writings a reference to exactly this kind of Holiday Season trauma when she wrote the following:
“As I remember, the late fall [1929?] everything was normal and happy at home. Christmas is always an unhappy strain of feelings to me. Constantly I made conscious effort of not throwing arousing antagonistic attitudes in my husband [sic]. “
And where did my grandmother’s difficulties with the Holidays come from? No doubt from her own early experiences in her own childhood that nobody EVER openly talked about.
Adults can try all they want to try to hide family discord from young children, but humans are emotional detection experts from the time we are born. It is important to remember that the kinds of emotional distress and traumatic family experiences contained within the Holidays has the power to impact infant-children within their BODY memories for the rest of their lives.
The Holidays thus provide an excellent opportunity to practice changing intergenerational patterns of stress, distress and trauma! Never that I know of was my mother ever able to admit the truth that the Christmas Holidays were NOT always happy, charming, or pleasant during her childhood. Why are we so willing in America to practice denial about the truth about Holiday Season trauma?
As I have said before, denial is itself a form of childhood wishful magical thinking. Because the Holidays are supposed to be these perfect childhood blessed magical times, it is probably exactly HERE that we are most likely to find massive denial present. Childhood magical thinking (that turns into denial in adulthood) is a perfect fit for Holiday Season emotional set-ups for disaster.
The Holiday Season can be difficult for a lot of people. From my point of view, it will always be those who did not experience infant-childhood safe and secure attachments, and therefore themselves as adults now have some version of an insecure attachment disorder that will probably be the most high risk people for having emotional complications around this season.
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Just as the Holidays provide a perfect match between the practice of adult denial and fantasy because, after all, Christmas is SUPPOSED to be a magical season, it also provides a perfect stage for trauma dramas to continue their repetition on down the generations. No matter how much effort caregivers of young children might exert toward disguising their own emotions and internal traumatic dilemmas about the season, their sensitive – and often already trauma sensitized offspring – will be able to detect the underlying truths. The Holidays thus continue to be fertile ground for the transmission of ongoing adult unresolved traumas.
Any adult who did not experience safe and secure attachments within a benevolent infant-child environment had some form of emotional dysregulation built into their forming early developing right social limbic emotional brain. This emotional dysregulation came from their caregivers who also experienced the same patterns in their own childhood. These patterns are formed not only into the early brain, but also into the early forming nervous system on all its levels.
For those who are trying very hard NOT to pass down their own traumas to their own children, this Holiday Season can provide a perfect opportunity for deep, profound and fundamental learning about how insecure versus secure attachments operate. Insecure attachments happen when adult early caregivers are so consumed and overwhelmed on their own insides by unresolved trauma experiences that they lack the ability to be present for their children.
Children are supposed to be front and center in their caregiver’s life. Caregivers are supposed to be able to have their own attachment need system turned OFF so that they can care give to their young ones. When adults cannot experience their own internal state of safety and security in the world, they cannot provide this experience to their offspring. We can start our efforts to be present for our children by becoming honest and very clear about the truth of how the Holiday Seasons felt to us when we were young. Trash the fantasy. We are fooling no one, not ourselves and certainly not our children.
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If you follow the links provided by About.Com concerning helpful information for those suffering with Borderline Personality Disorder and their loved ones, you will find specific ideas about handling the emotional dysregulation that the Holiday Season can so easily present and amplify. Remember that we are experiencing all of our life with the tools (our brain and nervous system) that were formed in our own early infant-childhood.
Emotional regulatory abilities are not automatically built into an early traumatized little one’s body in an ordinary way. But it is here that we can begin to practice our growing consciousness about how our changed body-brain-mind-self actually FEELS and how we can consciously change our experience.
We can understand that every difficulty we experience around the Holiday Season is connected to our own early experiences of trauma in unsafe and insecure attachment environments. Our own unresolved trauma is NOT what we wish to pass down to our children. How willing and able are we to actually not only KNOW the truth about our own early trauma – and if we had early trauma at all it certainly did not magically skip over the Holiday Seasons of our childhood? How willing and able are we to actually TALK to our families about the truth of how we feel?
Attachment experts use the presence, absence and quality of child storytelling as a gauge of secure or insecure attachment in children who are old enough to talk. Adults need to encourage children from the earliest ages to TALK about themselves having the experiences of having the experience of being a person alive in a body in the world. This is a continuation of the face-to-face emotional-self mirroring processes between an infant and its early caregivers (primarily the mother) that directly build the right brain in the first place.
It is NEVER too late to add safe and secure mirroring processes between people into our lives. These interactions not only form the early right brain and form the foundation for all future body-brain-mind-self growth and development – but they help to HEAL the same for those of us who did not experience these interactions in the beginning.
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Another extremely important point to remember is that for people like me, the Holiday Season can trigger all kinds of dissociated experiences. My mother’s chronic and severe abuse of me, that started when I was born and happened for the next 18 years of my childhood, was very likely to be suspended during ‘certain’ kinds of experiences: Picture taking events. These included birthdays, any kind of holiday in which a pretend safe and secure attachment HAPPY time was created by my mother inside of bubbles that had nothing whatsoever to do with my ongoing REAL experience of being tormented, tortured and abused by my mother.
Because the abuse seemed to be suspended during these events, and because I was more or less allowed to join with the family during them, and because during these events I was given permission by my mother to be ‘happy’, I COULD tend to continue to pretend that these events were truly special, safe, secure and happy.
They were not. They simply created more dissociational bubbles of experience that I could not remember in any coherent, ongoing story of my life. Remember, the inability to tell a coherent life story is one of the MAJOR hallmarks-symptoms of adult insecure attachment patterns and of dissociation. All kinds of pictures still exist of ‘happy Linda’ during these ‘happy events’. All dressed up, curls in my hair, opening presents, holding an Easter basket – well, come to think of it I don’t know of one picture of me on a birthday being the center of attention. But, anyway, you get the picture and my point.
See: *Age 8 – The Reindeer Envelope – My Own Art Work Analyzed By Me – The Art Therapist
My mother’s ‘nicey nicey’ treatment of me on ‘special occasions’ such as holidays fed into, strengthened and perpetuated the trauma bond that I had with her as my caregiver. You bet my body has the truth about all these memories!
It has taken me a lot of time and effort as an adult to get to the point NOW where I can clearly see that my mother’s creation of ‘happiness bubbles’ around holidays, that supposedly let Linda out of her miserable captivity of trauma and abuse, simply gave me new dissociational experiences that could not be fit into my ongoing experience of myself in my life. I never even tried. I was already a refined, expert dissociator by the time these experiences filtered into my reality.
So think about these types of patterns in your own life, and think about how your experiences of them might be impacting your own children’s experiences. Why perpetuate the hype? Are we safely and securely attached today in any of our relationships that we can let ourselves know our own internal truth about how trauma has infiltrated all of our experiences, including the supposed ‘happy times’ of our traumatic infant-childhoods? Are we continuing to try to create dissociated ‘happy bubbles’ out of the Holidays that have nothing to do with the ongoing nature of our reality?
Because current statistics show that about half of our population had safe and secure attachments in their infant-childhoods, we already know, then, that the other half of us suffered from some deprivation related to attachment. This other half of us ALL experience (my bet is) some form of infant-childhood trauma memory, deep within our body memory if not consciously, related to insecure attachment experiences around the Holiday Season. This is a REALITY that does not feed into FANTASY.
It is helpful to make this distinction particularly because the Holiday Season is based in fantasy in all but its most direct Christian historical ties. It is, perhaps more than any other time of the year, a season when unsafe and insecure attachment trauma histories will appear – one way or the other – to give us emotional (from our body’s memory) big trouble if we are not as conscious as possible about the reality of our infant-childhood life. We can take appropriate care not only of ourselves, but of all those around us who depend upon us not to transmit our trauma drama histories on to them. (HINT: Think of this as a Trauma Altered Development allergy to all the fantasy perpetuated about the Holiday Season.)
This is so true that we could actually benefit from attaching a huge consumer warning sign to the Holiday Season: “BEWARE! This season is most likely to trigger your early traumatic infant-child memories if you have them!” It is from this point of awareness that many of us need to prepare for the holidays. What can we learn from — and how can we change and heal from — our own history of early traumas – no matter where they may be lurking?
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About Borderline Personality Disorder: Distress Tolerance for the Holiday Season
| In the Spotlight | More Topics | |
| from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD The holiday season is a really hard time for so many people. There are expectations that we will be joyful, or surrounded by friends and family. But for many this is not the reality, and the holiday season can bring extra stressors on top of the expectations. This week, start preparing by practicing some new skills to help with distress tolerance. |
What are Distress Tolerance Skills?
| In the Spotlight |
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Not-So-Happy Holidays?
As the holidays approach, lots of people with BPD (and people with BPD in their families) struggle. Holidays are complicated!
“Go-To” Coping Skills
When you are having an intense emotion, it can be hard to know what to do. Unfortunately, many people with BPD turn to unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to cope with emotional pain (e.g., self-harm, substance use, or aggression).
More Topics
- Conditions Related to Borderline Personality Disorder
- Treatments for Borderline Personality Disorder
- Getting Help for Borderline Personality Disorder
- Life With Borderline Personality Disorder
- For Family and Friends of Individuals with BPD
- Living with BPD
- What is BPD?
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