How You Adapt to Your Trauma to Survive (And Steps to Heal)
“Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.” — Michele Rosenthall
Experiencing abuse changes our brain chemistry and our physiological response(s). This is an un-fun truth, but not a hopeless one.
When we experience abuse as a child, we are usually at the mercy of our parents and caregivers. Abuse, including neglect, physical, and psychological is overwhelming to anyone, but especially to a child who has no control and is wired or encouraged to love the very people who are being abusive.
Unfortunately, the concept of love and pain can be deeply intertwined and children can participate in behaviors that ‘help’ to maintain a connection to their caregiver, and simultaneously protect themselves from actual or anticipated harm. It is too devastating for the child to recognize that their parent is harmful, so they internalize that the abusive behavior is a reflection of them, and “something must be wrong with me.”
The child has to implement certain ‘strategies’ in order to survive abuse or mistreatment, and these come at a psychological price.
These can vary greatly, and present in different combinations: They may daydream, not feel safe in their body, suppress their needs, diminish their voice, make themselves small or compliant, become hypervigilant to emotional cues, withdraw, fear the outside world, lash out at others, dissociate from reality, have self-loathing thoughts, or numb their emotions.
This is not to be blame-heavy; our brain and these ‘adaptations’ are saving our souls by keeping us intact psychologically in unfair and unjust situations. They occur with the purpose of protecting us, understanding, anticipating, and minimizing the potential ‘risk’ and effects of further abuse whilst maintaining some level of attachment to a caregiver(s).
We cope with the psychological tools that are accessible to us, even if we aren’t conscious of them.
Because though abuse is never a child’s fault, the child learns — consciously or not — what factors influence an escalation, or how to ‘cope’ if it does occur despite attempts to navigate it effectively. A daunting, unfair, and near-impossible task.
Developing such strategies on the surface seem ‘maladaptive,’ but were actually fundamental to keeping a corner of our souls and spirit intact. However, these protective knots have to be untangled later in life.
So, we may have survived, but once we are out of the grasp or control of our caregivers, we have to examine the impacts of abuse, and how they may influence our lives in the present. Otherwise, these behaviors have the ability to impact the trajectory of our lives.
Specifically, our body can lock our pain into our psyche and physiology long after the threat has passed, and we can act as though we still have to be on the chronic ‘lookout’ for pain, cues of abandonment, and/or stay in situations or circumstances that mirror old feelings of worthlessness or helplessness.
If we stay in this holding pattern forever, we will seldom reclaim our body, and our voice, find our authenticity, participate in life, or develop close and healthy connections with other people.
Here are some patterns to think about and steps to address them:
1. ) Reacquaint yourself with your body, and its accompanying emotions.
This is not just about mindfulness and ‘watching your thoughts,’ it goes deeper into learning how to physiologically connect to your body, identify its sensations, and feel safe to do so. You have likely become disconnected from your body, and have to learn to rebuild connection in a safe way.
The sweet spot is building a tolerance and sense of safety to experience our emotions without being reactive to them.
Practical steps:
- Identify where you feel emotions in your body as they arise and train yourself to experience your emotions.
- Learn some grounding techniques to engage your senses to reconnect to your body and the present moment.
- Engage with a therapist who can sit with you while you express and learn to ‘tolerate’ your emotions again.
- Cognitively understand that you don’t have to act on every feeling, they can come and go, and that you are not your feeling.
- Develop a personalized tool-kit for self-soothing (e.g. listening to music, going for a walk, yoga, dancing in your room to release an emotional valve, etc.).
2.) Notice your hypervigilance to clues of threat, or where you may ignore or bypass them completely.
Being abused by a caregiver messes with our threat detection system because we had to ‘overlook’ certain abusive behaviors in order to exist in that particular circumstance. Furthermore, when you are hurt by people who are supposed to love you the most, you can also learn that no one is safe, and carry a residual and chronic suspiciousness that prevents you from building healthy connections. This can result in a combination of tolerating unhelpful dynamics, and/or being on the constant lookout for signs of unkind behavior; a prickliness that pushes people away.
The aim is to understand that you could interpret benign behavior as challenging and that you must develop a healthy sense of discernment grounded in the reality of how other people are showing up practically through their behavior and actions. It is to realize that conflict can be normal and is to be expected, but not to the extent that you are emotionally or physically unsafe.
Practical steps:
- Look at your patterns of interpersonal connections and reflect on whether they are psychologically safe, and reciprocal, and whether there is a balance of giving and receiving.
- Reflect on whether you have pushed away, ‘tested’ others, or run away from opportunities that felt ‘good to be true’ because they came ‘too easily.’
3.) Notice if you are overstaying in jobs, relationships, or dynamics which are corroding your soul.
Being exposed to pain intertwined with the attachment of a parent-child dynamic can be challenging because we may have normalized a certain level of pain in our lives and interpersonal relationships. That is, we have a higher threshold for pain.
This is not to say that we ‘attract’ harsh people or situations, it’s that we may not have the regular ‘red flag’ detectors, and people can, unfortunately, prey on this. Think of it this way: You had to swallow your ‘medicine’ of craving love and care as a child alongside poison; abuse and/or neglect.
As such, you may have built a ‘tolerance’ towards poison or dynamics that mimic something harmful in your past. This is not to victim-blame if you experience abuse in later life, the responsibility of harsh behavior (s) belongs to the perpetrators of the world. Rather, it is to help you understand that your pain threshold may be skewed and requires a deeper understanding than the average person who did not experience trauma or abuse.
Practical steps:
- Recognise that what you’re retraining yourself towards is consistency, follow-through, and reciprocal dynamics. Practical actions trump the fantasy of what ‘could be.’
- Understand that conflict is a normal part of life, and facing it directly as it arises leaves far more potential for a dynamic to shift rather than holding onto resentment and letting your soul or needs to be chipped away.
- Understand that you have the choice now as to who and to what extent you engage with people in your life, and you are under no obligation to carry on a relationship because of shared history if it is not emotionally nourishing to you.
4.) Get to know yourself, and connect to your deeper interests.
When we had to suppress ourselves in order to survive, we can lose the deeper connection to our inner voice. This can result in us not knowing who we deeply care about, engaging in study, jobs, or relationships out of autopilot, rather than because we’re attuned to the drumbeat of our soul and authenticity.
Practical steps:
- Understand that it will take time to know yourself, or the facets of yourself that you may have had to suppress for your safety. This is not a race, but our life’s journey, particularly after abuse. Practice patience with yourself.
- Take an experimental, curious, and data-collecting approach to your interests. You don’t necessarily have to make a 180-degree shift, you can start by being gentle and curious about different avenues, hobbies, and careers by taste-testing the buffet table of life. You can enroll in a class, talk to a mentor, visit a new city, or engage in a creative hobby. Start small, and build from there.
5.) Be careful of making your past your entire identity.
This is not to say that we should pretend that we haven’t been hurt or impacted by our past. Understanding our past is necessary to provide a context for our psychological tender spots and unhelpful behaviors.
However, it is our responsibility to address our wounds when we have the learnings, resources, or tools to do so, and to actively participate in our healing. It is the difference between having a tender scar from our past versus refusing to address the wound and bleeding into your adult life and onto others around you.
The aim is to feel and understand our pain and story so deeply that it no longer has to dictate our lives moving forward. That is, rather than just retelling our story we are actively addressing and tweaking the aftermath behaviors, and taking steps to rebuild in a different direction.
Practical steps:
- Be careful of carrying an entitlement as to how you treat others because you’ve experienced trauma or abuse. It does not give you a free pass to treat others poorly or remove you from reflecting on your own unhelpful behaviors.
- Share your story, but balance this with the journey of healing and what you are doing practically to not repeat cycles of the past to future generations.
- Understand that you can both listen to and hold your pain psychologically and pivot towards building a nourishing life at the same time.
6.) Hyper-independence.
Learning that the people closest to you can aren’t safe can result in the reasonable shut-down of certain aspects of our hearts. It can be tempting to shut out the world and say “I can do everything on my own!” However, we are social creatures, and we need each other; the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our connections. A couple of close friends you can be deeply vulnerable with, who are there for you and vice versa, can be a psychological balm and scaffolding from which you can rebuild your life.
Practical steps:
- Review the quality of your connections if you have them, whether they are reciprocal, and engage accordingly.
- If you are friendship or connection starved, start to ‘test the waters’ of connection with others; find an online community that is positive, and attempt to connect or reconnect with nourishing people from your past if you’ve let connections fade, start a group-based hobby.
- Remember that cultivating a friend-family can be an important psychological milestone; it is saying ‘no’ to that which is not healthy, and ‘yes’ to the fact that you deserve nourishing connections akin to family, even if they are not blood-related.
Overall, addressing and dismantling the ‘adaptive’ strategies implemented for your survival requires great courage. In doing so you can untangle the knots of your psyche, develop a healthy discernment and present-moment engagement to your life, pivot towards connections that are reciprocal and nourishing, and reclaim the dismissed corners of your body, heart, and voice.
It is possible.
© Marianna Jaross 2023
Note: This article is independant of my professional association(s) and workplace(s).
