The Effects of Early Relational Trauma (2001) [pdf]

https://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreIMHJTrauma01.pdf

by sensiquest • 2 years ago

203 195 2 years ago

One book that really resonated with me was "The Deepest Well" about the epidemic of childhood trauma and its deep and measurable impact on health outcomes for adults. I learned that resolving childhood trauma would help on the order of curing cancer in terms of health outcomes in our society

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33413909-the-deepest-wel...

diob• 2 years ago

This stuff is almost too scary for me to read. My childhood was awful and only around age 30 did my life start to get "better".

passing_through• 2 years ago

First 20 years of my life was me waiting to get out of the environment I was in. The next 5 trying to stay alive. The past 5 improving myself, my mental health, the way I view life and relate to others.

It's all good in the end. For 25 years of my life I thought everyone faked being happy. I now know that it actually is possible to be happy :).

smeej16• 2 years ago

I've been going through a similar metamorphosis, but it didn't start until 36.

I wonder sometimes whether I'll have missed out on some things permanently because of it. For instance, every year my odds of carrying a healthy child to term drop farther, and I'm already considered "geriatric" for pregnancy purposes.

I really don't see how it could have happened any earlier than it did, and I'm grateful it happened at all because I can easily see how it could have been worse, but there's still a grief journey involved even though I try not to dwell on the things lost.

dimal2• 2 years ago

I had the same experience reading that book. It’s amazing that even though these effects are well documented, they aren’t really taught in medical school. I’ve never come across a doctor who knew anything about it. It’s really incredible and disheartening. Even when people advocate for “trauma-informed care”, they’re just talking about avoiding retraumatization. They never talk about the health consequences of trauma.

wing-_-nuts11• 2 years ago

They never talk about the health consequences of trauma.

Yeah, reading the deepest well, then reading all my increased chances for...just about every disease imaginable was grim. There isn't really a 'cure' or real treatment for it either.

I just realized, if I was at a much greater risk for health problems, I'd need to counterbalance that with lifestyle changes. I got treatment for an autoimmune condition. I started using exercise over alcohol to deal with stress. I improved my diet. I'm trying to get more sleep but that one I still struggle with.

I've purposefully made changes to lower the amounts of stress in my life. This is everything from choosing an employer with good WLB, to leaving extra time for myself to get places, to saying the 'serenity prayer' and focusing on things in my control. I cannot control everything that happens to me. I can control my reaction to it, or at least attempt to.

aidenn03• 2 years ago

I'm a former foster parent and I think we are likely to cure cancer long before we resolve childhood trauma.

RoyalHenOil• 2 years ago

Absolutely agreed. Even foster care itself is inherently traumatizing, no matter how good the foster parents are.

I was wrongfully taken into foster care for a couple months (due to police being called in a false accusation; the police took me without any investigation and handed me over to DFCS — my parents are actually wonderful and I couldn't have asked for a more supportive childhood), and it's positively ridiculous how severely it affected me.

My brother and my uncle both died when I was eight years old, and I was threatened, stalked, and assaulted by an obsessive ex-boyfriend in my early 20s (which ultimately led me to immigrate overseas to hide from him because nothing else worked) — and yet my brief stint in foster care was FAR more traumatic and affects me much more deeply to this day. Everything else barely rates a mention next to foster care. I don't expect I will ever again experience something as psychologically damaging.

I wasn't abused. My parents did everything right both before and after foster care, and my foster parents were fine. It was simply the forcible separation from my family at a young age that messed me up.

Of course, most kids who are taken into foster care aren't like me; they experience abuse at home and are in danger, and foster care is necessary to protect them. But how do you solve childhood trauma in these kids when saving them from abuse is, itself, a source of severe childhood trauma?

canjobear• 2 years ago

Are children more traumatized now than in the past? Seems like the past was harder on children.

kelseyfrog2• 2 years ago

They will say the same thing in 100 years.

lemurien• 2 years ago

Who says that? I think it’s only a question from the commenter above.

pfannkuchen• 2 years ago

I think it was probably worse during the industrial era and probably a lot better during hunter gatherer times. Not sure about agricultural times.

popalchemist• 2 years ago

The effects of trauma are not new. What's new is we have a deeper understanding of how it comes about, what the long-term effects are on both an individual and societal level, and what can be done to prevent or remedy it.

wumbo4• 2 years ago

we also talk a big game about caring about it but then still shove traumatized people to the margins.

Like honestly, should we prevent suicides then continue treating people the way they were treated pre attempt?

Weird idea of empathy.

thrixton• 2 years ago

I think it’s more visible now, but as well, I wonder if it’s just that we have more leisure time to actually worry about / deal with it.

Personally I think every child needs some sort of effective therapy to help heal the trauma of their formative years.

I use trauma freely here, there’s quite a big difference between someone who was bullied a couple of times and is naturally quite resilient vs someone who was mercilessly bullied for years on end pushing them to the brink of life.

I classify both as trauma, very different degrees though.

As well, people react very differently to similar events.

DoreenMichele• 2 years ago

The past was harder.

We generally have more resources and knowledge now. People tend to want to raise the bar when that becomes possible.

When kids suffered or died because humans lacked food security, reliable medical treatments etc, it was also generally not really the parent's fault. Knowing you could have been treated better and your parents/the world just didn't actually care about you is scarring in ways that "No one has enough." aren't.

smeej16• 2 years ago

Plus, everyone is in it together when no one has enough. Once you get to "some people could have enough at the expense of other people," victim/perpetrator dynamics show up, but when no one does, you're suffering together.

Abuse of children is isolating for the child victim in a way that suffering hardship as a family unit or community isn't. There's no sense of "I'm as safe as it gets here, at home, with these people (even if that's not very safe)." There is no place of feeling even relative safety, no sense that anyone is even trying to care for or defend you.

sobkas• 2 years ago

Are children more traumatized now than in the past? Seems like the past was harder on children.

My guess is that in the past child mortality was higher and children traumatised enough just didn't survived. And because of such high mortality no one cared to find out why.

cardanome• 2 years ago

Trauma isn't as simple as more worse things -> bigger/more trauma.

Under certain circumstances people can experiences horrible stuff with barely any ill effect while other times really trivial small things can totally break them.

Just having one stable positive relationship with an adult can make a child significantly more resilient while the child that lacks that relationship might break at a minor problem. There are many factors that determine resilience and it can vary greatly from person to person. And it is situational. Someone might be a hardened war veteran having seen it all but totally break when seeing a child getting a minor wound.

So children today might be objectively better off than in the past but it does not necessary mean their struggles are less valid, they are just different. So hard to say whether they are less traumatized or not, maybe a little bit but mostly probably just in different ways.

But yeah, the main thing is that we are much better at recognizing signs of trauma these days and people can be more open of their struggles so it might seem like there is more traumatized people when probably there is the same amount or less.

spamizbad• 2 years ago

One factor might be family size. Purely anecdotal, but I have a friend who grew up in an extremely abusive household and said directly to me that the only reason he thinks he survived his situation was because he had 4 other siblings and they all supported each other during the difficult times.

aleph_minus_one• 2 years ago

Another consideration: could it be that with more children, in an abusive household the abuse is typically spreaded out to more children, so that each individual child gets less abuse than in a smaller abusive household?

gregwebs• 2 years ago

I have read Gabor Mate's works on the subject. I think he would say that more children are traumatized today. Whether they are traumatized more deeply is another matter.

The earlier trauma happens, the more amplified the effect is. Sometime in the 1950s it became a common parenting approach in the US at least to "not coddle children". That creates trauma for a sensitive child to not have their emotional needs met (an insensitive child may be just fine). There are different degrees of trauma- others that fight wars may experience a much deeper trauma later in life. The trauma to the ignored baby is not as traumatic of an event, but the baby does not have any abilities to cope and the effects are amplified in early developmental stages.

There is less community today to help with the coping process and emotionally distant parenting styles also make coping harder. And there is less religion today- religion both provided community and sometimes specifically helps people deal with trauma.

Trauma can be generational- someone that suffers trauma is much more likely to have difficulties raising their children. Consider someone that survived war but lost their home and witnessed horrors. They may turn to drugs to cope with the psychological pain. Being drug dependent, they have difficulty raising their own children. Those children don't have their emotional needs met, and a cycle of trauma can continue.

From Mate's point of view addiction rates would probably be one way to measure the trauma of society. Drug addiction is a way of coping with severe psychological pain. Drug overdosing is becoming a leading killer in some age groups.

softwaredoug2• 2 years ago

My hunch around childhood is we’re doing better with young kids (due to awareness around this stuff). But we don’t give teenagers the independence they need to develop.

lanstin6• 2 years ago

Most of the research on child sexual abuse in the US shows that rates have dropped by about 50% since the 1970s.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201120/ search for "Evidence for a Decline in Physical and Sexual Abuse"

(searched for that to post this, and they cite %60 since the 1990s).

Freud himself discovered a tremendous amount of horrible abuse in his patients; depending on the culture, most people just turn a blind eye. People that haven't experienced it and recovered from it a bit are really good at not believing how common it is.

usefulcat2• 2 years ago

People that haven't experienced it and recovered from it a bit are really good at not believing how common it is.

Also, for people who have experienced it, it's often the last thing they'd ever want to talk about. With anyone, including people they are really close to.

There's a good chance you could have a close personal friend or even your partner and never know they had gone through something like that.

m463• 2 years ago

not believing how common it is.

I knew someone that was abused as a child. Had trouble with drugs and went into rehab. He said that ALL the people he met in rehab had been abused.

dang2• 2 years ago

If you read about the history of childhood I think it's clear that children were immeasurably more traumatized in the past. The concept of child abuse barely existed, and the relational needs of children weren't recognized at all.

That raises the question of why contemporary attention to trauma is so elevated, if the problem is actually smaller now than it used to be. There's an easy answer though: this is first moment in (recent) history where we finally have a chance to begin dealing with it.

tuatoru• 2 years ago

Children were definitely abused more in the past, but were they traumatised more?

In the past much more than today, kids had defined roles and work to do in families. The stronger sense of identity may have lessened the trauma. As may the knowledge that their peers in neighboring familes were going through the exact same things.

tsegratis2• 2 years ago

Divorce is a massive cause of trauma and increasing in the west

I organized a large group of trauma experts last week (church pastors), and although they were amazing and had clearly overcome trauma; residual selfishness and power grabbing meant a child got ignored

The same last night: a bible study with the homeless. A happy and peaceful place, though one member was throwing trauma bombs

There's not a simple switch, though having lived in war zones and done churches of, for instance Syrian refugees, unconditional love of God, and letting trauma be presented in the middle of that is deeply powerful

rsynnott• 2 years ago

Probably more traumatised, but talking about it was much more socially unacceptable (and even potentially dangerous; in many countries involuntary institutionalisation on extremely flimsy basis was very much a thing until the late 20th century, especially for women).

As with many things like this, getting hard numbers would be extremely difficult because it's the sort of thing where peoples' inclination to answer surveys honestly changes with social norms.

AndrewKemendo4• 2 years ago

In the microplastics thread, so many were ready to assign blame for so many pervasive ills to the prevalence of microplastics.

Meanwhile we have known about the devastating effect of interpersonal trauma in childhood and just shrug or worse, say “well that’s how my parents did it and I’m fine.”

Foundationally there is no problem more urgent than eliminating interpersonal alienation at every possible interaction and eliminating alienating systems.

You can’t innovate your way out of the problems a society with no trust causes.

smeej16• 2 years ago

I love that "and I'm fine" line. I see it a lot in contexts where someone is defending something that seems barbaric to me, which I would consider a very clear sign that they are not fine.

It leads to a lot of, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means," at least in my internal dialogue.

roenxi• 2 years ago

You're in a tangled philosophical thornbed with that internal dialog. It isn't a strange thing to think but as far as I can see functional humans are all barbaric. In the small scale, the practice of eating meat leaps to mind. I love a good chicken burger but let us be real about what it takes to produce one. Not pretty.

So we might have an existence problem if we go to find someone who doesn't defend barbaric practices and describe themselves as "fine". Everyone defends some barbaric practices, and some subset of them will be fine.

DavidPiper2• 2 years ago

An additional anecdote: I see it in responsibility rejection and/or attempted erasure:

- I'm fine, therefore you are also fine (it's not my fault you can't deal with this)

- I'm fine, therefore you are also fine (you exist only as an extension of me, and I'm fine)

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 2 years ago

I'm trying to be open-minded reading through this thread. I don't understand much of it at all. Everything's in English, follows grammar rules, etc. But semantically it all seems empty. I have a large vocabulary, and I haven't had to look up any of the words that aren't modern psych jargon (and few of those).

It's difficult to understand what you even mean by trauma. I understand it perfectly in a medical context, these are acute and potentially deadly injuries that must be treated immediately. In this thread? I can't make sense of it. Not 10 comments above yours, there was someone suggesting that "abuse" and "trauma" don't even correlate perfectly... which sort of seems insightful, but also confuses things even more. I could at least deal with the idea of some hidden psychiatric illness that originates from physical/sexual abuse, but if even that's the case... then what should I be taking away from this?

I can't speak for the others, but I definitely don't know what you mean. Not even slightly.

usefulcat2• 2 years ago

“well that’s how my parents did it and I’m fine.”

Broadly speaking, I've noticed a couple of different responses to going through an extended bad experience over which one has no control (for example, a shitty childhood).

Upon reaching adulthood, one response is to say, "Wow, that really sucked, I will take steps to avoid ever having to experience that again, nor visit it on my children/partner/loved ones".

Another (probably more common) response is to say, "I survived and I'm ok, it must not have been that bad. Maybe it even made me stronger/tougher/more worldly/etc".

Needless (I hope?) to say, people who tend towards the latter attitude are far more likely to repeat the same mistakes that they previously suffered from. Unfortunately this kind of attitude also seems to frequently be tightly interwoven with identity, making it all but impossible to dislodge. Thus the cycle repeats.

taurath6• 2 years ago

We often downplay the prevalence of dissociation as well - sometimes formative experiences are not necessarily even apparent. Then when they have a kid it comes flooding back, the same cycles repeat as the underlying emotional blindness is still unaided.

throwaway22032• 2 years ago

I think you're being a bit unfair with "I'm fine".

Rumination is a real thing and for a lot of people they don't find it useful, or in fact actively harmful, to draw attention to the fact repeatedly.

AndrewKemendo4• 2 years ago

Yes, dealing with past trauma is exceptionally difficult and it takes an exceptional amount of work to deal with

Much like cancer, Parkinson’s disease, etc…

You must overcome your fears to liberate yourself from your own anxieties

lanstin6• 2 years ago

And the goal of therapy and other treatments is to in fact be fine. Also a common result of child sexual abuse is to feel uniquely specially damaged in a way no one could understand. Cut off from humanity, while in fact the experience is one some percentage of people share and while it's bad it's not something that renders your life hopelessly bad. Letting go of that feeling of specialness is hard but very beneficial. In some families the abuser is the only person to be warm or kind to the victim. Their only experience of comforting touch, which is needed, becomes a weirdly special secret.

Narhem2• 2 years ago

As someone who has had early trauma it never leaves.

The worst part is knowing no one will ever understand what it feels like to have no right answers.

taurath6• 2 years ago

It’s a larger club than you might imagine, and even to the deepest depths of nigh-unimaginable mistreatment there are people who have worked through it.

Narhem2• 2 years ago

The sad part is the best way to deal with it is pretend it never happened.

Feel so defeatist but that'd the reality of being a man.

ipv6ipv4• 2 years ago

Often, traumatized individuals traumatize their children. So it’s at least a somewhat self perpetuating phenomenon that may not decay away over generations. As a result, it seems reasonable to assume that different groups could have different prevalences of traumatized individuals.

How does the prevalence of traumatized individuals characterize a society as a whole? For example, it seems that a society where the majority are traumatized should be fundamentally different from a society where a minority are traumatized.

smeej16• 2 years ago

My mom keeps talking about how much she wants grandchildren. My brother decided the trauma stops with him, so until he's sure he wouldn't repeat any of dad's harmful behaviors, he doesn't want to have kids. I'm only just now getting to a point where I've done enough work that anyone wouldn't be crazy to want to date me, but I'm doing it at an age where biological kids are less and less likely.

So I guess that's one thing that might characterize society: Lots of frustrated would-be grandparents.

NateEag2• 2 years ago

So I guess that's one thing that might characterize society: Lots of frustrated would-be grandparents.

Perhaps also many alienated grandparents, confused, hurt, and angry that their children don't want them involved in their grandchildren's lives.

https://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20230620/dealing-with-a...

https://www.alienatedgrandparentsanonymous.com/

sib• 2 years ago

A relevant good book, which I recently read, is "Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class."

https://www.amazon.com/Troubled-Memoir-Foster-Family-Social/...

igorramazanov4• 2 years ago

Attachment Theory is an interesting subject on the matter.

A few useful books which helped me with both understanding and healing (there're still problems, but it gets better):

1. Love Sense, Sue Johnson.

2. The Power of Attachment, Diane Pooler Heller.

3. Understanding Disorganized Attachment: Theory and Practice for Working with Children and Adults, David, Shemmings and Yvonne Shemmings.

4. The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk.

5. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, Sue Johnson.

6. "Focusing" practice, Eugene Gendlin.

7. How to survive the most critical 5 seconds of your life, Tim Larkin.

The first four lay down foundations, explaining the mechanics, possible solutions, will help in navigating, filtering and planning the healing.

The 5th and 6th are actual healing, former for couples, the latter mostly for individuals.

The last one is about a wisdom of violence embedded into the body of affected individuals which is likely suppressed by the rational part of the mind.

dustractor• 2 years ago

You seem to be a connoisseur of this genre of reading material. You might enjoy "Feelings Matter: Keys to the Unexplored Self" by Ceanne DeRohan.

aidenn03• 2 years ago

What no Daniel Siegel?

ramity• 2 years ago

#4 was a profound and very validating read for me understanding how the brain handles traumatic events. Thanks for sharing.

MrDresden• 2 years ago

Not to deny your experience with it, however looking up the author and the book I notice that it has drawn some serious criticisms for inaccuracies and lack of empirical data backing up claims.

agumonkey4• 2 years ago

Are these talking about the neurological basis of attachment ?

Thanks for the list nonetheless.

igorramazanov4• 2 years ago

Yes, except the "Focusing" practice and the last one about the violence.

Attachment is a weird thing, because it usually happens so early in life where there are no memories yet.

However, infants still internalize everything, they can feel, react to the environment and understand consequences of what their feelings tell them. "If I'm scared, then there's a high probability of something bad to be happen to me".

So, there are may not be rational memories to be linked to the problem 20-30 years later in life.

P.S.

Speaking from the personal experience - during the focusing practice I was able to verbally conceptualize these old feelings which became a part of my identity.

In the end, the crux was being an infant, a sensation of being blind, overfocused on touch and sounds, high sensation of exposedness and nakedness, sensation of mother's touch and realisation that she's unable to attune to me emotionally, like it's still a human touch, but similar to touching a stone.

Hence, the futile cry and scream to draw her attention out of fear to be protected.

To paraphraze, it felt like if now, I'd get tied (immobilized), blindfolded and left naked in the night Luisiana swamps.

It's weird, but I think, I actually understood why infants may cry and have a need to be seen and connected to. It seems to be so logical for me nowadays - they are humans too, after all.

resource_waste• 2 years ago

I'm a big fan of reading, but I'm not sure I'll be able to go through 7 books before my next crisis.

Surely there is another recommendation/simplification?

scoot• 2 years ago

"Attached" by Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.

A very approachable work on the subject, exploring the four attachment types (but recognising that they are on a multi-dimensional spectrum), with real-world examples and practical strategies for coping.

igorramazanov4• 2 years ago

If I'd have to pick only one book, then it'd be the second one.

cassepipe• 2 years ago

Scott Alexander's review of The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk : https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-k...

beyonddream• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing!

sleno• 2 years ago

Could you summarize some practical takeaways from all these books? To be honest I've become a bit skeptical of how much this sort of stuff helps. From what I see, our society has become much more well-versed in all this psychology-therapy-trauma material in the last 20 years, yet despite this we're taking more anti-depressants and seeing more therapy than ever. Mentally and spiritually we seem to be doing worse than ever before, especially kids.

Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff. I can honestly say the people I know who are more knowledgeable in all this psychology-trauma material seem to be the least well adjusted. Conversely, my more religious friends (Catholic, Muslim) seem happier and more resilient psychologically. Maybe it's just correlation. Maybe if we didn't have all this academic literature on trauma becoming mainstream people would be doing even worse. But it also seems possible that over-analyzing and over-pathologizing 'trauma' can have exactly the opposite effect we hope it to have.

Ghexor2• 2 years ago

I think your impression has merit and labeling people as 'sick' or 'broken' or any of the diagnoses in psychology literature, that imply just about the same, can keep people stuck identifying with their afflictions. And that there's some great value in religion that we've not found a good replacement for.

I also believe that one can go without facing deeply traumatic events for an entire life and seem to many on the outside to be doing much better than one who goes the difficult path of deconstructing oneself and their family history.

And I think our unhappiness and that of our children is well explained by our late-stage-capitalist, individualistic cultures and the rise of technology that profits from (ill-)serving our social needs.

'It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' - Jiddu Krishnamurti

igorramazanov4• 2 years ago

Pure "woundology" may indeed make things worse. There's another book which I haven't read yet about the dangers of therapy and underestimating the people's intuition and resilience - "Bad Therapy, Why the kid's aren't growing up", but the podcast with the author seemed reasonable.

It gives lots of evidences on what you've just said.

Just simply living a life, focusing on goals and targets, making mistakes and learning from them - this works too. In my case, personally, I just couldn't ignore the problems anymore. I've also made this mistake of dwelling into wounds burning out people around me and being unavailable for them instead of trying to focus more on something good.

I think, we barely scratched the complexity of human psyche, and there lot's of moving parts in person's development. There might be a bit of dehumanization and modern over-materialistic somewhat arrogance perspective - how can I stop feeling what I feel, so I could continue my business as usual?

A few things why religion helps, out of the head:

- it's an empirical study of human psyche over thousands of years

- highlights importance of intentions behind actions

- emphasizes on connection with the world

Sounds totally reasonable?

The universal practical tip would be "just live your life, pay attention and genuinely try to make good out of it", but if being specific and speaking from personal experience and a keeping it small:

- studying violence (the last book in the list) significantly reduced anxiety, risk seeking behavior and moral rigidness (e.g. what is it: "social anxiety" or "embodied situational awareness"?)

- "woundology" and focus on trauma/pain without keeping healing as a target in mind, will, most probably, just make it worse; but studying the topic still has advantages

- try to pay attention to intuition, it seems like psyche tries to heal itself naturally or at least to draw an attention to yet not understood problem/information gifted to a person about the world/life; try to find out what is the center of what draws you onto it (or maybe scorns you off way more than you yourself would expect normally): Eugene Gendlin's Focusing is a quite good tool for that

- combine both inner and external healing - with a grain of salt, as some people I've met have better outcomes with focusing on actions/thoughts (CBT), while for me a deeper body/intuition oriented inner work seems to suit better; but it's good to try and keep both in mind

- it's ok to reach for medication when it's really bad as a temporal support on the path; don't replace everything with meds, but don't reject them completely either - it's always possible to get back on track later

- things seem to get better over time, even if it doesn't feel like that in the moment: new realizations, some knots are untying, sometimes something changes radically and sometimes for the good, and it's difficult to predict that; it's obvious since it's like a personalized empirical search - it needs practice and time, although a possibility of a downward spiral is here as well

- relationships have a degree of power to both devastate and heal

wing-_-nuts11• 2 years ago

You could be seeing correlation and not causation. People with psych issues want to get better. Those that are intellectually curious tend to read up on underlying causes and possible solutions.

I will say, that while I've read a lot of these sorts of books, they've mainly helped me identify my predispositions in temperament, my blind spots, etc. If you really press a therapist on the question, they will tell you that the only real way to 'treat' this is having loving and stable friends and romantic partners. I imagine being religious can help as it grants you easy access to a welcoming community, and frankly 'god' is the ultimate parental figure for those that believe.

wing-_-nuts11• 2 years ago

You asked for practical take aways, so I'll say this:

Get good at communicating and being vulnerable. I know online spaces will tell you this is dangerous, and that your partner might leave you. Someone with this sort of background needs to be 'seen', and loved for who they are, and the only way that happens is if they truly know you. Second, realize that your partner is not the sole source of all your feelings about them. You're seeing the world through trauma colored glasses, and it often helps to take a step back, take a breath and ask yourself why you're feeling what your feeling rather than acting on it immediately.

graemep3• 2 years ago

Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff.

In very different societies. Our societies have gradually become less and less like what we evolved to fit into: small groups, time out doors, lots of face to face contact with people you are close to etc.

Some past societies were pretty miserable for many people. I am pretty sure slaves had lots of trauma and other psychological problems, but not one cared. Even where people were cared about there were no consistent records kept so maybe we do not know.

Conversely, my more religious friends (Catholic, Muslim) seem happier and more resilient psychologically.

I think religious faith and practices probably do help. However, that is not a practical solution because it is not something you can fake. You cannot just decide to believe something, and you may need faith rather than just belief to get the benefits. The benefits are a side effect of the aims of the religion (developing a relationship with God, achieving nirvana, etc.) and will not happen unless you are sincerely following the aim.

Religions have practices and ideas that help resilience, and sometimes those parallel ideas in psychology and therapy - but for the reasons above will not work out of context.

That is even without taking into account the possibility that (some) religious beliefs are true and, for example, God will (at least sometimes) answer a sincere prayer for the strength to cope with your problems. Maybe your Catholic and Muslim friends are receiving divine support - or just believing in a constant loving and perfect parental figure is a source of comfort that promotes resilience.

gosub1002• 2 years ago

my more religious friends (Catholic, Muslim)

Those religions mandate women to submit to the male or they are kicked out of the group. Of course things are more orderly when there is a chain of command and severe consequences (like losing your whole family) for demanding equality, asking questions, or questioning authority. Don't confuse the order for happiness. Ask a Muslim or Catholic what happens when you're gay, for example. Or review what the Churchs response was to child sexual abuse. In that case the social order actively contributed to more trauma!

pm2• 2 years ago

You might think it's getting by, but you've got no idea of how much damage this attitude unwittingly propagates the trauma on succeeding generations.

I've seen this firsthand in my own family, a family beset with undiagnosed ADHD and trauma from a violent patriarch, who was no doubt subject to the same abuse, lying about his age to join armies on BOTH sides of the conflict in WW2 to escape and eventually emigrate.

As for the difference in psychological resilience: it's more much more likely those who have been traumatised are seeking understanding, rather than healthy then traumatised by their curiosity. Conversely, it's been shown religious people are, as a whole, more psychologically resilient, largely due to community and the accompanying support system it provides. However, there is also a strong element of suppression within those communities, which directly contributes to the very trauma of which I speak.

If there is no communication, the abused, very often, become the abusers. And so the wheel turns.

deciplex• 2 years ago

For what it's worth, I'm mostly in agreement with you that contemporary therapy is overrated. I did have one quibble:

Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff.

In fact, and this is especially true for men, the correct response to this line of reasoning is basically "well, actually, no they didn't." The genetic lineages of most men over the entirety of human history, are extinct - we are descended from the comparative few who aren't. For example Ötzi the iceman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) has no living descendants. He is typical.

Not only that, but there is no reason to think that the surviving genetic lineages are remotely optimized for individual happiness, or for that matter individual industriousness or productivity (esp in the context of modern productive relations) or whatever other metric you want to measure people by.

All of which is to say, that even accounting for the fact that basically most people who ever lived have no living descendants, we just don't value, individually or collectively, even the attributes that would have been selected for among human populations in the bronze age, neolithic, whatever. So if we want to make those things happen (i.e. if we want people to be happy and productive) we need to create the conditions for it and we need to give them significant help in doing so, as well. That "significant help" is probably going to be something like what we call "therapy" today - though, as I mentioned above, I think contemporary therapeutic practices are doing a horrible job at it. But, there is a job to do there, IMO.

blargey• 2 years ago

Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff.

By “humans” do you mean 50%, 75%, 90%, 99%, or 99.99% of the population?

By “got by” do you mean “lived mentally strong and resilient and healthy lives” or “just managed to do enough labor to not be ostracized and cut off from resources” or “maybe they couldn’t, but nobody wrote about or wanted to remember those people anyway” or “nobody had the vocabulary to describe their state or behavior as anything more than ‘unpleasant/unbecoming’”?

petsfed• 2 years ago

I suspect that your anecdata results from the community that organized religion engenders. Irrespective of all the criticisms leveled at religion, the simple fact of the matter is that if you feel like you belong, that your struggles are not unique, and that you can talk to people who have come through similar struggles apparently intact, you will likely heal from the experience faster and more completely. That the religion can provide some explanation for why you had to experience the trauma is a neat side effect.

The veteran suicide rate is an evergreen cause of concern, but one of the major stories amongst veterans is that they leave this community where they had a very clearly defined role, with very clearly defined acceptable modes of behavior, and when you leave, all of that is stripped away. The sudden absence of community and sense of purpose is, for many veterans, an unbridgeable gap.

There absolutely are insidious downsides to such tight-knit communities (especially in response to threats to the community - vis how often the victim of clerical sexual abuse encounters further attacks from members of the church). But e.g. religious organizations have persisted for so long because there's a sort of cost-benefit analysis occurring, where the community decides that so long as the community continues to function, its OK that a few members of the community are sacrificed to protect it.

To be clear, its not like PTSD is a new thing. Catatonia, combat fatigue, etc, are stress responses that have been recognized for centuries. Its just that only fairly recently we've concluded that hey, maybe writing people off when they hit that point is a bad thing, and maybe we should invest some time in helping people before they reach that state.

_DeadFred_• 2 years ago

People in prison have more 'community' and 'support' just by the fact they are surrounded by others in a communal setting than the average person out on the street in the USA. How f'd up as a society is that?

Spooky232• 2 years ago

Who says we’ve been getting by well?

People who learn not to trust as children retain that into adulthood. Thats the core issue with many problems. It’s even a driver for PTSD - not everyone goes to war or experiences something terrible and leaves with a disorder.

Consider 100 years ago it was acceptable to beat your wife. It was not considered socially unusual for a working class man to have his children underfed after drinking his salary away. Thats an example of how humans poorly cope with the inhumane conditions of industrial society.

Trauma is in the eyes of the beholder.

I’m part of a catholic community that is a loving and supportive place. I’m not a dogmatic or “good catholic” by any means, but I find inspiration and meditative comfort in prayer. And having gone through some horrific challenges in my life, my friends and family there have helped me get through. There’s no magic imo, your “tribe” will help you get through things.

Red_Leaves_Flyy• 2 years ago

Survival is not the same as thriving. Survival is the bottom rung on Maslow's hierarchy and below that is death.

Being versed in the terminology of a subject is not the same as being an adept practitioner.

The next few generations will become better practitioners while us graybeards (encompassing down to those in high school now) will suffer from the consequences of not receiving a better education in mental wellness and lacking the structural supports necessary for that.

There are still a lot of barriers to widespread mental wellness from taking root in American culture: homelessness, poverty, class, conservatism, regressive religions, et cetera.

AndrewKemendo4• 2 years ago

Also Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown was a breakthrough book for me

steve_adams_86• 2 years ago

I found “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” extremely revelatory. It was a great introduction to the concept for me.

Funnily enough, I picked up up thinking this stuff was nonsense. Then it hit me like a bag of bricks. It was very humbling.

Since then I’ve also found writing by James Hollis very useful. One which stood out for me was “Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men”. It’s quite insightful about how modern life can afflict men, and how men can learn, adapt, and overcome these challenges. It’s refreshingly well-rounded and takes seriously the idea that men can suffer just as women do, patriarchy or not (and even because of it), and offers tools to work towards making things right.

In general his work is a great stepping stone from understanding CPTSD to then finding more nuanced models of the internal mechanisms, how to understand and articulate them, then ultimately grow beyond them. Some may find the Jungian psychology overwhelming or off-putting (I did initially), but there is real substance there.

DavidPiper2• 2 years ago

There are many types of early relational trauma, but I strongly recommend the (audio)book: "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents" by Lindsay Gibson, to anyone who thinks they might benefit from reading a book with that title.

I get that's a weird judge-a-book-by-its-cover metric, but it is excellent for working through and understanding those relationships.

dmazin• 2 years ago

Of all the books mentioned here, I can’t recommend it highly enough. (And seeing a therapist!)

TeeMassive9• 2 years ago

Finally a subject my childhood makes me "expert" at!

People often say that I have a unsavory dark humor, but it's one of the best coping mechanism out there.

My earliest memory is my mother spreading food all over my face because I didn't want to finish my plate. I remember my eyes hurting because of the pepper in it.

My father threatened to shoot the family dog on a weekly basis to make me behave.

I could not leave the house alone until I was around 12, thus making me not socialized. To this day in my 30s I have a hard time forming friendship.

They also threatened me on a daily basis to "give me to CPS". Then they actually did it for two years. I wasn't a delinquent or violent mind you, and didn't do drugs.

They would often bring me in front of the school's psychologist and he would make me cry in front of them, always blaming me, never once asking me what was going on at home.

Once I applied for a job that required a high security clearance. I had to write "all the traumas of your childhood and your adolescence". I filled two pages, one trauma per line, and I just told them that I couldn't be exhaustive because of the sheer quantity.

But I think I can stop here, you get the point.

One of the main thing is the inability of standing up for myself. By default and unless proven otherwise, I'm already convinced that if something bad happens then this is my fault. If someone accuses me of something bogus, I just accept the accusation and apologize. This got me in real deep trouble more than once; fortunately not as an adult.

Also not being able to say "no" and being of hurting people feelings to the point of absurdity.

I could do an AMA in this thread if someone's interested lol

dang2• 2 years ago

That's seriously awful.

I'm glad you have a sense of humor because that seems like one of the helpful reactions that could arise from such a nightmare.

They would often bring me in front of the school's psychologist and he would make me cry in front of them, always blaming me, never once asking me what was going on at home.

It's remarkable how institutions (the school psychologist in your case) often re-inflict the trauma that is going on at home. It's their job to protect the child, but often they do the opposite, and it's worth asking why. I experienced this myself, though in a very different context—everyone's story is unique of course.

Good for you for surviving, and best wishes for growth and healing.

aidenn03• 2 years ago

It's remarkable how institutions (the school psychologist in your case) often re-inflict the trauma that is going on at home. It's their job to protect the child, but often they do the opposite, and it's worth asking why. I experienced this myself, though in a very different context—everyone's story is unique of course.

I think the simplest explanation here is Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud. This goes for members of institutions as well, even if they aren't overworked, underpaid, and undertrained as so many are.

On top of that, abusers are often charming and highly skilled liars and manipulators. To get away with it for an extended period of time it is necessary to convince the victims that institutions won't help them, so performing abuse in front of a representative of the institution can be a ploy to reinforce their power. If the school psychologist had been likely to challenge the abusers, they likely would have picked a different authority figure (teacher, principal, &c.).

TeeMassive9• 2 years ago

Thank you for the kind words!

In my experience, and not only with that instance, power defers to power. An unruly child's pleadings will never prevail over his parents that are really good at making themselves appear as victims (http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-miss...). Or as famous lawyer Gerry Spence said, "the gentleman of the bar is there for the other gentleman of the bar".

Also, let's not deny it, I was not a nice and adults would not be nice in return and I would respond in kind. I was a reflection of what was going at home. This makes other adults not want to be nice at all. I can't count the times where I was told "oops, we forgot to bring one for you" or something along those lines.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 2 years ago

It's their job to protect the child, but often they do the opposite, and it's worth asking why.

It seems pretty simple to me why. If we were talking about a job in tech, there would be 10,000 snarky responses about how it was obvious that this project manager or that maintenance developer was just protecting their job. Same here. Rocking the boat as a guidance counselor or anything like that just invites complaints (warranted or not), and in those roles they're judged by the school administrators on how many (or few) complaints are received. Same as teachers, I think. And though I've read no stories from school psychologists, teachers who get even a few complaints find themselves unwelcome in that district.

Maybe my speculation is wrong in this regard, but if so, I can't see the flaw in it.

theshackleford• 2 years ago

I had a very similar upbringing friend, I am so sorry to hear it. It's left me with life long deficiencies that haunt me to today, even when I don't realise it. It's tough.

TeeMassive9• 2 years ago

It's always the deficiencies that are invisible that are the most vicious. You know that something is wrong with you but you can't tell what, why or what.

agumonkey4• 2 years ago

The lack of a clear notion of boundaries or self and thus ability to stand for yourself is a very subtle and deep problem. Good luck.

TeeMassive9• 2 years ago

Yeah, I always assume that I'm the one whose presence is at best a privilege. It takes a lot of effort to take my proper place and stand up for myself. I'll never forgive them for putting this curse inside of me. Now words got out of what they did to me and my sisters and they pretty much have to hide. They deserve everything bad happening to them.

MezzoDelCammin• 2 years ago

Sorry You had to go through that...

But if we're doing an AMA : mind writing a bit more about the recovery? You mentioned humor as a coping strategy, so that makes me think You've probably been through some kind of introspection / therapy. Mind writing a bit more on what worked / didn't in Your case?

TeeMassive9• 2 years ago

I would say that recovery started when I got out of the house for university. I picked a university that was at least 6 hours of driving away.

It was absolutely terrible and laborious; yet necessary. Being not socialized and not able to leave home alone for a very long time made me basically afraid of going outside the campus; I had to learn most life lessons people go through from childhood to early adulthood from scratch. People don't forgive you when you're an adult. Abusers love dependent children, even if they lament all the time that "you cost too much".

One of the things that's hard is separating the actual good parenting lessons from the abuse. From basic hygiene to on how to behave socially. Everything was laced in some kind of humiliation. "I told you this would happen, you think you're smarter than me haha!" kind of routine all the time.

I've never had therapy nor did I seek professional help. The bad experiences I've had with psychologists and other "professionals" that sided believed my parents by default were enough for me. This is not what I recommend, but I just can't let myself be vulnerable by the same kind of people again. It's like asking a severe burns victim to go through a firefighting course with live exercises. I have the chance of being smart and deeply introspective, but this is not perfect and very slow and fraught with painful mistakes. Just like most people should not represent themselves in a court of law, even if they're lawyers, I would not recommend doing that.

I mainly relied on the podcasts, shows and books from mental health professionals and also public forums, although I didn't really participate. Writing this stuff used to hurt a lot with a lot of flashbacks. Basically I did my own research, haha. Putting words to emotions and situations helps a lot, because abusers love twisting words, concepts and using logical fallacies to justify themselves. Also learning that I am not alone and that was happened to me was not right nor justified really helped a lot and was very validating.

I'm not done healing and probably never will be healed, but there is resilience and confidence that comes with successfully surmounting adversity.

minipci1321• 2 years ago

Do you have siblings? How have they turned out?

TeeMassive9• 2 years ago

I have two older sisters. They are way older than me, which means they left for college when I was very young (when I was bout 5 or 6). I don't think they went through the same stuff as me, but still lived through a lot of very fucked up shit. We live in the same city and are very close, we see each other for their kids birthday and all of that. I'm very lucky to have them.

I know why my mother had me years later, because when my father was angry he would yell at my mother "it's you who wanted another, so take care of him", but with more vicious insults. It turns out that when my mother had her first pregnancy, she was supposed to have a son but had a miscarriage in the toilet. I think this pretty much explains her using me to satisfy her emotional needs all the time; I literally was her emotional garbage can. Telling me how she feels like an ATM for the family, how she's lonely and not taken seriously by others; things that a husband have to deal with, not a child.

So anyway, my sisters began to extended family members about what happened in our house when they were young and also of what happened to me. Like me, it probably took them years to unshame themselves and flip the culpability unto the abusers. It created a scandal I think in the extended family, although always very hush hush, as is usual in small rural places.

My parents probably got a word of what my sisters told about them and then when my oldest sister got her first child, it was actually my parents who stopped talking to them. They never told me why they stopped talking to my sisters, but we figured it out. For some reason that enraged my father and forced my mother to stop talking to them but not to me. After a few years I got tired of seeing them trying to play nice and burning bridges after bridges with other family members and family friends, and I decided to cut them off. Although my sisters never made any kind of ultimatum, I could see how my parents were throwing a wrench between my and my sisters by only talking to me and not to them.

There are more details to this sordid story. It really could make for a full TV drama episode; these people love drama and being the victim. Don't fall for their game.

wing-_-nuts11• 2 years ago

Once I applied for a job that required a high security clearance. I had to write "all the traumas of your childhood and your adolescence".

Huh? I don't recall those questions on my clearance application. Was this a SF-86?

TeeMassive9• 2 years ago

Canadian stuff ;)

casenmgreen• 2 years ago

"Sex and the Psyche: The Truth About Our Most Secret Fantasies", Brett Kahr.

Silly title, but looks like a serious bit of work. Big study in the UK about ten years ago - 50k people receiving questionnaires, can't remember how many people for closer study, 50 for full day interviews.

Conclusion : sexual fantasy is a coping mechanism for trauma.

Fantasy is a recapitulation, often modified to make it more bearable, of the original trauma.

Fantasy varies between individuals, because trauma varies. Fantasy superficially varies enormously for an individual, but there is always a core theme.

dr_dshiv• 2 years ago

Self-perpetuating trauma needs to be understood (with compassion).

Hurt people hurt people.

As in, people who feel they are victims often feel they have the right/necessity to hurt others. It’s a real pattern that is hard to talk about.

usgroup• 2 years ago

I’m sorry to read about so much pain experienced by so many.

Do the people doing the traumatising typically know they are doing it? Do they typically deny it if confronted?

smeej16• 2 years ago

Speaking for my own abuser, he is the only subject in his entire world. The rest of the universe is full of objects only. He has demonstrated (to clinicians, not just to me) that he has no ability whatsoever to realize that other people are capable of feeling different things than he does, so if something makes him feel good, it makes even the little child he's doing it to feel good too.

He has said on a number of occasions that he (still, in his late 60s) struggles to believe things continue to exist when he can't see them. Even if you're sitting across a table from him and can clearly see behind him, he doesn't believe the things behind him continue to exist, even though you can see them.

I suspect he's on a pretty extreme end of a spectrum there, but that some version of that underlies a lot of trauma. Adults are doing something to meet some need or desire they have, without enough awareness that the (usually young) person in front of them is experiencing it totally differently.

Cthulhu_5• 2 years ago

I suspect he's on a pretty extreme end of a spectrum there, but that some version of that underlies a lot of trauma.

I'm inclined to agree; one can attach labels to this person of "psychopath", "narcissist", etc, but in a lot of people with that label there isn't a physical problem that they were born with, but events in their lives (often early childhood as per the article) that changed something in their brains for the worst. I don't think they were a lost cause, but they would have needed intensive therapy to try and unfuck some of what they've gone through, and it would only have worked when they were much younger (neuroplasticity etc).

Disclaimer: armchair opinion, I'm not a professional or expert.

anonuser12342• 2 years ago

I told my dad point blank he was physically and emotionally abusive and he denied it lol.

hypeatei• 2 years ago

Some here may find Pete Walker and his work around "C-PTSD" useful.

https://pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm

antman• 2 years ago

The things I have lived. I have seen a person turn to robot then to a person again multiple times. If they came close to someone they freaked and turned to stereotypical actions and wording, and then when emotionally sober they would try to pick up the pieces of the self sabotage.

I studied heavily for two years, they gave me their attention. I read reddit and relationship columns and I recognize the keywords. "Independence", "We must", "Disappeared, ghosted"

See these two videos:

Ignore the username https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b_H0V1-kQbE

Heidi Priebe all vids but specifically this it is titled fearful avoidance but it is for everything https://youtu.be/5jk7PAa8D1o?feature=shared

user igorramazanov gave a great list. If one has trauma such as consistent nightmares avoid reading the "Body keeps the score", it is about cptsd and it is too strong and triggering leave for later. cptsd is relevant to attachment problems but not directly. let me also add another tangentially relevant but very good book about borderline personality disorder "I hate you, don't leave me'

After someone has realized that not knowing why he dislikes all his partners for no reason after while is due to trauma healing can start. It takes 3-5 years of therapy and a secure partner through that journey.

blueprint• 2 years ago

surprised not to have found any reference to structural dissociation theory here

https://janinafisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/structur...

https://a.co/d/7UOPYoR

The Effects of Early Relational Trauma (2001) [pdf]

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