Trauma: Causes, Effects, and Remedies
Today, our focus is on trauma. Jason Farmer of Recovery Allies talks about the causes of trauma, the effect of trauma on families, the path to addiction that many follow, and possible remedies.
Trauma is the response to external pressures and experience. Um, something can be dislodging and disorienting. It's a natural response to something that's happened. Everyone has the opportunity to experience trauma. And one of the things that I was taught very early on is that pain is personal to the person who's experiencing it. It's okay to be experiencing trauma, to have a traumatic response to whatever's going on in your life.
Trauma can affect the family in a variety of ways. It can express itself in a learned behavior, transferring a response to something that's happened outside of the family to someone within the family, especially. So if a young person experiences trauma at school, from someone in a position of authority, they go home, your parents are authority figures…they're going to transfer that experience back onto their parents. You could have a traumatic experience on your way to work, and then you come home and you transfer that…like that comes out within the family. Another way that trauma can express itself within a family unit amongst siblings - something happens outside of the family and then gets transferred to the siblings. What's really interesting is that sometimes trauma can happen ancestrally, like say your grandparents or your grandparents' parents.
Something happened in their upbringing or just their everyday life. And that learned response gets passed on unintentionally sometimes to the descendants and that sort of learned behavior keeps getting passed on and on and on. And we don't know it, we don't know that it's happening. Sometimes we don't understand why someone could be responding to (us) this way. One of the trauma responses that's coming to mind right now is disappearing. Like if I'm having an experience outside of the house and I come home and the response to being around other people is I just want to disappear. Whether it's into a book, out to the garage, into video games, you know, not intentionally setting time aside, time to go out and work in the garden or to do something productive, but where I'm really trying hard to escape, that might be a trauma response.
Substances are easy to go to when it comes to trauma response, because it's that gateway out of my body because when we experience trauma, the body keeps the score. And when that's living inside of me, the first thing that I want to do is get as far away from it as possible. And if I can't get out of my body physically, I'm going get out of my body a certain way. One of the things about trauma responses: it's a life support mechanism, it's designed to help me to feel safe so that I can stay alive. Unfortunately, when trauma instances are not addressed, processed and resolved, those behaviors, those life support systems, outlive their intended purpose and they can actually start causing more harm, which is what leads to unhealthy and unhelpful behaviors within the family dynamic. Which can cause other people within the family to respond to with unhealthy and unhelpful behavior like drinking and using, going gambling, video games, porn addiction, etc.
A life support system that's outliving its intended purpose. So having dependencies is normal. It's absolutely normal. We are dependent on our parents. When we are growing up, we're dependent on others in society for our food. All of the things that we have today are because we are dependent on other people doing things. So having dependencies is normal and healthy. When those dependencies start causing more harm than good, that is outliving their intended purpose. And a healthy, appropriate response is to recognize, “Oh, maybe this isn't working anymore and what do I need to do? What do I need to add to my life support system? And what do I need to let go of?” and there's lots of different ways to experience the “letting go” process. Letting go is healthy and natural and normal…and also scary and terrifying.
The idea that I might have to let go of something that's brought me so much comfort, regardless of the pain that it may have caused my life is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my own experience in recovery. And I see it played out over and over and over again with all of the families that we work with, coming to terms with the grief that comes with letting go of this, this companion, this friend, this behavior, this thing that helped to keep me safe, that I've come to identify myself with, I've built friendships and relationships and a life around some of these things. And so then what do I do? Does that mean I have to let go of all of these things? Maybe. Sometimes it's a very simple adjustment to perspective, letting go of key behaviors as opposed to lifestyle changes. You know, there's a myriad of possibilities. The point is that there is hope. There's hope for people who are experiencing trauma. And if you think that you might be experiencing trauma, chances are you are and that's okay, because we all do it. We all have it. And I really think that it's important for me to note that, specifically for men in today's society, it's okay to experience trauma. It's okay to not know how to navigate the feelings of, “Oh, that didn't feel very good. I don't know what to do”. It's also okay to not know what to do. And to ask for help From people who really just want to help
I guess I could say there are several remedies to trauma. The remedy depends on the experience. What I have found in my work is that the remedy lies in the admitting, the attending, the addressing (of) the trauma and then the resolving of the trauma and to resolve something is to re-solve something. So I've had this experience that's changed me and I created a solution for it. So that solution, that dependency that maybe has outlived its intended purpose, needs to be resolved. So that experience, that memory, that event that's living in my body needs to be resolved and it can be resolved in a myriad of different ways. Like there's, there are professionals that help, there's coaching, there's mentorship, there's getting out and getting connected to your community, like connecting within your family. Example: chaotic family system. Everyone's just kind of around not really getting along. There's all these things that are happening. (But) You take one day out of a month and you set aside two or three hours, which is a really long time and everything that has happened up until that point does not matter for the next two or three hours, you're going to come back to it at the end of those two or three hours. It's totally an option.
But in that time, this is this thing we're going to do. We're just going to hang out with each other. We're going to talk about what's working. One of my favorite practices with re-resolving trauma is, and working through trauma experiences is working with what is working, what's needed, and the creative solutions. It's really easy to focus on. What's not working, what the trauma is and what the anger is, What is true is that 85% of what is, is actually working because if it wasn't, we would be having a much different earthbound experience. So if I can turn my attention towards that 85% of what is working, It's easier for me to look and say, “Okay, if all of this is working, I can now look for what's needed because it's true.” Some things aren't working, but it's not about, “Oh, this isn't working.” It's like “This IS working and now what's needed?” And with those two things, that allows me an opportunity to make creative solutions. And within the family unit that could be collaborative, like creative solutions. And that's just one example of the ways that I like to work with re-solving the solution to trauma.