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All trauma is upsetting. That’s what trauma does. It upsets the status quo. That’s what trauma is. It’s an upset. By its very nature, trauma involves disappointment.
The more an organism is prepared with resources to ‘cope’ with trauma the better off they are because this means they can ‘get over’ the trauma and get back to a state of status quo faster. Without enough of the right kind of resources, the slower a return to the state of status quo becomes. Or, without enough of the right kind of resources, a return to a state of status quo is impossible.
Available resources are directly tied to a very real state of safety and security in the world. Having enough of the right resources means that we can achieve a return to the desired state of safety and security relatively quickly and easily.
Survivors of severe early infant-childhood abuse trauma had things happen to them in their lives way before they had the inner or outer resources to effect a return to a state of safety and security – because if they’d had an environment filled with the plenty of safety and security in the first place the traumas of abuse would not have happened to them in the first place.
That’s what an insecure attachment ‘disorder’ actually is. The state not only of trauma but of scarcity and depletion of inner and outer resources, which creates unsafe and insecure status in and to the world, built itself right into the growing body-brain-mind-self from the start.
This means that the necessary status quo state of safety, security and calm connection is missing. The normal physiological state for early abuse trauma survivors never was a status quo state of well-being. Because this calm, safe, secure state is missing in our very body itself, survivors of early abuse trauma can struggle the rest of their lives just trying to figure out what this GOOD status quo state even feels like.
From there we have to figure out how to GET THERE from HERE – HERE being our trauma-built state of inner disequilibrium.
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Dr. Diana Fosha is one of the most hopeful and positive experts within the field of trauma, attachment and healing that I have encountered. Here’s a link to one of her 2002 articles that I highly recommend, written primarily for professionals working with traumatized clients. Because so few of us have access to any therapy at all, let alone to effective therapy with truly competent trauma experts, what Fosha says in this article is important for we survivors to know on our own:
TRAUMA REVEALS THE ROOTS OF RESILIENCE
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Here is the link to her book: The Transforming Power of Affect : A Model for Accelerated Change by Diana Fosha (Hardcover – May 5, 2000)
I haven’t had the opportunity to read it myself, but I include it here because it is the feelings related to trauma that tend to trap me in some other place than a calm center of connected well-being.
Sometimes it seems as though all the powerful abuse trauma-related emotions that were going on within my body from the time I was born, that were not identified, recognized, differentiated, named or understood, just sat there within the cells of my body waiting. Well, not only did they wait for a time they could make their presence known, they expanded and multiplied astronomically until they broke through the numbness and the blankness of all of my dissociation to become the ‘animals’, the rampaging beasts they often seem to me to be within me today because I did not grow up with a body-brain-mind-self that was able to recognize them as friends and allies.
Rather my reactions to life, with all the trauma triggers that are built into me, often disrupt my ongoing equilibrium – what little of it I can manage to find for myself. My reactions to trauma triggers stimulate emotions that are not integrated together in a modulated, right-limbic-social-emotional brain built with stability, safety and security within it. This region of my brain along with the rest of my brain and all the nervous system components that it is connected to, was not built with ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ regulatory abilities within it.
Where my experiences within my environment should have been able to hook themselves together in ongoing ASSOCIATED patterns of being, they were instead created in DISSOCIATIONAL patterns that are often profoundly disorganizing and disorienting to me today. Often the best I can do is try to identify these patterns so that I can find the ‘willy-nilly’ way things were connected together inside of me and try to piece them together differently in more orderly, organized and oriented ways.
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Here is another book, again one I haven’t yet read but that looks vitally promising:
Sweet Sorrow: Love, Loss and Attachment In Human Life – Paperback (June 2009) by Alan B. Eppel
“In this volume the author proposes that it is the interplay of love and loss that lies at the epicentre of the human story. Support for this proposal is taken from neuroscience, art and psychoanalysis. It will also introduce the reader to important ideas and findings from Attachment Theory. An exploration of the relationship between love and loss can lead us to some understanding of the meaning of our lives. It shows how love and loss are inextricably bound at the centre of human experience, and form the essential dynamic of the human struggle.”
“Alan B. Eppel has been a practicing psychiatrist over the past thirty years and currently is director of Community Psychiatric Services at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Hamilton, Ontario, and an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.”
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I mention this book in connection with the topic of my last post, +MY FOGGY POST ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT AS A TRAUMA TRIGGER, because the state of feeling disappointed is for me a very real experience of being in a state of disorganization and disorientation in my body in the world.
Expectations are a required ‘food’ for our brain as it works to combine information we have about our self in the world in an integrated way. Our body-brain-mind-self processes life through ongoing feedforward and feedbackward information loops that take into account everything we know about our self in the world – IN TIME.
I complained in my last post about the invisibility of the root word origins for the word ‘disappointment’ in our English language. Thinking about it more clearly today, I realize that just as individual people begin very early in their lives (hopefully) to recognize, identify, discriminate between, name and manage all the different emotional experiences we are capable of, so must the words that name these emotional states of being also go through some kind of growth process themselves.
‘Disappoint’ is a word related both to ‘appoint’ and to ‘point’. Our right brain is our imaginal link to experience and contains within it a veritable ocean of potential meaning. As we use words the two hemispheres of our brain pass information back and forth between them – sort of like pouring water from one glass to another until a level of balanced equality exists between the two containers – as we seek to gain understanding about our own self in our experience of our life.
I believe that ‘disappointment’ is intimately connected with overwhelming heartbreak. As our brain-being tries to get along in life, we orient and organize our self IN TIME by using information as reference POINTS. In fact, without reference points, we cannot orient and organize ourselves at all.
These reference POINTS IN TIME exist in us where associations have been successfully and satisfactorily made. Those of us whose body-brains were formed within abusive traumatic early environments suffered far more dissociations in our experiences than we did associations, and are therefore suffering from a scarcity of these required reference points in time.
What could our inner self compass possibly find as reference points in a world of madness, abuse and trauma? How could we establish our self with any stability in a dangerous world of chaos? What could I point to as a KNOWN, as a dependable GIVEN in the world as I grew up?
I knew really only one thing as a given and one thing only: I was terribly BAD and not only deserved everything that my mother did to me, not only earned everything she did to me, but I evidently liked and wanted her to do what she did to me because I CHOSE TO REMAIN BAD. According to my mother, she magnanimously offered to me every possible (saint-given) opportunity to change my ways, and I never made the right choice. I chose to defy her efforts with every breath I took.
How could I possibly use any information I got from that environment to find a stable inner or outer POINT of reference in the world? What was the POINT in my even trying, though I DID try as hard as I possibly could to BE GOOD, not knowing I was absolutely and fundamentally and permanently being set up to fail? After all, according to my mother, being born ‘the devil’s child’ did not even get me started off in life at the starting point of even being a human being in the first place.
Did I ever reach the POINT as a child of not trying? No. Did I ever surrender or give up? No. I didn’t see that I ever had a choice. I just formed my entire being around the information I was given and kept on going.
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It is not a stretch of reality to consider ‘disappointment’ within the context of its right-brain meanings. It involves every aspect of ‘point’ we can think of with our left brain. We really come into this world as a single one-dimensional POINT in time and space. From there we are supposed to be able to grow and blossom and bear fruit in our lifetime. Some of us are born to parents who seem completely intent on stomping the life out of that little tiny point that is us from the moment we are born. What we do, then, is survive IN SPITE of our parents.
That is the primary POINT of life – to stay alive in it.
When we experience our emotions and reactions in the present, the POINT of origin of our emotions lies in our body as it was formed way back there. A pinhole-sized point of light continues to expand over distance and time. The older we get, the more complex life becomes, the wider becomes the range of influence that our emotions can have in our life.
When severe trauma of abuse forms a person, the expanding rays of light from the early origin point of emotions suffers from distortion. We then live with those distortions unless and until we can bring healing to all the wounded places within us – a job of a lifetime.
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Looking at Webster’s:
POINT
Date 13th century
Etymology: Middle English, partly from Anglo-French, prick, dot, moment, from Latin punctum, from neuter of punctus, past participle of pungere to prick; partly from Anglo-French pointe sharp end, from Vulgar Latin *puncta, from Latin, feminine of punctus, past participle — more at pungent
And tracing connections back through
PUNGENT
Etymology: Latin pungent-, pungens, present participle of pungere to prick, sting; akin to Latin pugnus fist, pugnare to fight, Greek pygmē fist
Date: 1597
1 : sharply painful…..
and through the synonyms to ‘pungent’ to
PUNGENT implies a sharp, stinging, or biting quality especially of odors <a cheese with a pungent odor> POIGNANT suggests something is sharply or piercingly effective in stirring one’s emotions <felt a poignant sense of loss — applies to what keenly or sharply affects one’s sensitivities <a poignant documentary on the homeless>
POIGNANT
Etymology: Middle English poynaunt, from Anglo-French poinant, poignant, present participle of poindre to prick, sting, from Latin pungere — more at pungent
Date: 14th century
1 : pungently pervasive <a poignant perfume>
2 a (1) : painfully affecting the feelings : piercing (2) : deeply affecting : touching b : designed to make an impression : cutting <poignant satire>
3 a : pleasurably stimulating b : being to the point : apt
STING
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English stingan; akin to Old Norse stinga to sting and probably to Greek stachys spike of grain, stochos target, aim
Date: before 12th century
Here I begin to see and feel the ‘image in the word’ as it relates to the origins of disappoint – sticking one’s self with a dry, sharp spike of rustling, life sustaining grain
PRICK
Etymology: Middle English prikke, from Old English prica; akin to Middle Dutch pric prick
Date: before 12th century
1 : a mark or shallow hole made by a pointed instrument
2 a : a pointed instrument or weapon b : a sharp projecting organ or part
3 : an instance of pricking or the sensation of being pricked: as a : a nagging or sharp feeling of remorse, regret, or sorrow
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And of course, looking from the angle of Latin pungere – related to the origins of ‘poignant’ I see this connection:
PUNCTURE
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin punctura, from punctus, past participle of pungere
Date: 14th century
1 : an act of puncturing
2 : a hole, wound, or perforation made by puncturing
3 : a minute depression
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Our abusers punctured us full of holes. Full of wounds, we continued onward. Every time we were physically, emotionally, mentally hurt, our chance for building an ongoing safe and secure, organized, oriented attachment with our self in the world was ruptured and not repaired. Every time we were hurt in any way, deprived, terrorized, terrified, we suffered from a disappointment based on how things are MEANT to be in the world for little ones who are completely dependent on their early caregivers.
How possible would it be to empty the ocean with a sieve?
First we were ‘poked full of holes’, wounded nearly beyond belief by the same people who were supposed to love us, cherish us, protect us, provide for us, defend us, and help us become integrated ‘associated’ people. Then we are supposed to take our punctured selves out into the world and NOT be disappointed?
Maybe every single time I recognize the state of disappointment in myself I can learn to identify how that disappointment POINTS to my wounds. From there, maybe I can begin to find ways to exercise my resilience to repair them.
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Stop the Storm 