Childhood Trauma: How Did You Survive? What Are Your Trauma Responses Now?

When I meet a potential new client, I am trying to figure out:  How Did You Survive Your Trauma Experience(s)? You adapted perfectly to an awful situation. This is what therapists call Resiliency. The brain responds to trauma to help you survive.

How did you do that? It is important to know as it is not always obvious. You may just think it is your personality. Trauma responses are not your core personality, although they impact or shape it.

Part of assessment and getting to know each other in the therapy space is determining what those responses are and which ones are no longer serving you, or even harming you.

What helped you survive but now makes it seemingly impossible to connect when dating?

What helped you survive but makes seemingly impossible to live/function in a peaceful, quiet workplace? Do you feel only panic?

Is it time to change and heal?

Trauma Responses Direct and Indirect

I think of the trauma responses you learned in childhood as Direct responses, that is my way of assessing or conceptualizing.

If you had a mean, angry alcoholic father you may have learned to be hypervigilant to every move he made, or intonation of his voice to protect yourself from physical abuse. You may have learned to hide, a flight response. These are direct and immediate, but likely to follow us into adulthood in some form.

I think of Indirect responses as the trauma patterns and symptoms that developed later in your life, due to your experience of childhood trauma. Depressive symptoms and anxiety/panic attacks are examples. The nervous system is changed by trauma, causing anxiety. It is also harder to trust people and this can lead to anxiety and depressive symptoms. We are a social species that takes comfort in attachment. But what if you have learned being close to others is unsafe?

Another example of Indirect trauma responses are the behaviours learned to mitigate the trauma symptoms listed above as well as others ex. Flashbacks, panic attacks. You may drink or smoke weed often to regulate. Another common behaviour is binge eating, again to regulate affect, calm your nervous system, as it releases relaxation/pleasure chemicals.

Trauma Responses Positive and Negative Life Impacts

Some trauma responses may still work for you some of the time. Shocking right? Bare with me!

Hypervigilance is an example as this may be uncomfortable and exhausting, but also may be something that helps you and you have come to rely on. It may result in you scanning your partner to see what their moods are, a skill learned in a violent household. This may make you a sensitive partner but also result in you worrying they are upset with you after a bad day at work, fight with a friend, over-personalizing their moods.

Numbing emotions, likely completely unconscious, becomes a built-in regulation system so feelings do not overwhelm.  But feeling numb is uncomfortable too and means you may not feel connected to people the way you want to. You may be numbing out in important conversations with someone special to you, as this is natural and protective for you. But they may end up upset, feeling unheard.

As a trauma specialized therapist, I am assessing this complexity and we are deciding what to heal and change. I do not want you to lose the ability to use trauma responses that you have learned to depend on all at once, but to pace and change gradually as you learn other, better ones.

Some Common Trauma Responses/Behaviours

You may experience some or many of these below. This is also not a comprehensive list.

Intellectualization is often learned in a family in which feeling was punished or unsafe but thinking was acceptable or even encouraged, seen as strong. So thinking is a safe space for you but feeling, not so much.

So healing may need to include befriending feelings with a goal to sit with them in safe way. Start with easy feelings, gaining confidence not going into big, intense feelings until you have built the confidence to deal with smaller ones. You need to feel resourced before big feelings and deep trauma work is safe.  You may feel almost an emotional phobia if feelings were directly punished in your home. This means it is important to expand your window of tolerance slowly.

Numbing is the experience of feeling nothing. This is not a typical human experience. When you check in with your emotional centre we never feel numb, unless you have learned this to protect yourself. You can feel calm, content, disconnected…but never nothing or numb. This is simply not how we evolved. This numbness needs to be healed so you can fully engage with life.

Avoidance behaviour can look many different ways.

You may simply avoid being close to people as this triggers intense feelings, or even trauma responses.

You may avoid conflict, always try to get along and not upset anyone.

You may avoid anything that triggers post traumatic stress symptoms ex. Sex if you have a history of sexual abuse.

In extreme cases you may feel so unsafe you experience agoraphobic reactions, struggle with leaving your home or be in the world.

Flight responses can be very literal for some. Agitation builds, a relationship gets too intimate and you find yourself taking a job across the world. You may then repeat this pattern to avoid getting close to people or relying on others. Best to be hyper self-reliant, believing people can’t be trusted.

Dissociation may have become natural for you. You may dissociate when feelings increase in intensity or if you are exposed to external stimuli that triggers a traumatic memory ex. Smell a perfume your abuser wore. This can make some things easier, but if your trauma began early in your life, it may feel like you have no control over this dissociation, losing time.

The Faun response refers to trying to please others to self-protect and avoid conflict. This may be true if you had a Narcissistic parent that took up all the emotional space in the house, leaving you with little or no space of your own.

You may have picked up on your parent as emotionally fragile and you took on a Caretaking role to sooth them. Soothing them may have made them better able to take care you, so it was literally survival motivated.

Faun is a trauma response that often results in people finding you likeable, you may be validated socially. This can make it hard to want to change it, but you know it hurts you, making it hard to access your true feelings, needs and personal voice.

The trauma response of Fight or aggression is not usually played out directly with an abuser, but indirectly ex. The school bully. It can be an acting out response to ill treatment at home.

This can look like criminal behaviour.

It can also look like irritability with a partner after a period of emotional intensity.

You may find you are judgmental of others often.

The Freeze Response is a survival response that creates a shut down in the system, usually to survive aggressive impulses in an abuser. This response can be hard in adult relationships as your brain seemingly shuts off when overwhelmed, making it hard to access feelings and needs and, of course, communicating them to a partner or friend.

Nightmares and flashbacks are horrible right? Intense nightmares with terrifying content or even seemingly benign content but feeling terrified within the dream. It can be so intense you wake up and can’t get back to a calm enough state to go back to sleep.

Flashbacks are waking memories of the trauma so intense it feels like you are reliving the traumatic event. While awful, this is a natural healing response in which the brain is trying to stimulate healing, process the trauma(s). It means you are ready to get treatment and heal what happened to you.

Unhealthy Childhood Trauma Coping Behaviours

Coping behaviours serve a function in your life that needs to be respected in treatment. We need to replace unhealthy coping with healthier strategies as the need to affect regulate is still real for you.

Binge eating may help you regulate affect.  

Self-harm functions to change your feelings quickly or pull you out of a numb state.  

Substance abuse may help you deal with feeling sad or really agitated.  

Trauma changes our central nervous system so we may feel agitated often and need regulation strategies.

Drinking alcohol or overusing prescription pills creates other problems in our relationships and health, even if it works in the moment.

If a lot of these symptoms and trauma responses sound familiar, including the negative sides to them, it may be time to heal and get treatment.

Getting Treatment for Childhood Abuse

This will include building new coping mechanisms that calm the central nervous system ex. Meditation, exercise.

This may include couple counselling to get your relationship in a more secure place and enlist your partner as an ally in healing.

Sex therapy can help you process, regulate and enjoy great sex.

You may need to work with your doctor to get your sleep better regulated. You may be ready to try an anti-depressant.

You may want to see a therapist to learn affect regulation. This may be learning how to turn down the intensity. It may be bringing small feelings into your life, gradually exposing you to them as you have learned to not feel much at all. You may want to try trauma work to process and heal trauma directly. You may want support in learning and implementing healthy coping strategies into your daily routine.

We are here! Book now.

Lisa S.