Tag: Coping Skills

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Tolerating Trauma

  • Sometimes the most tragic of stories are the ones we have a hard time finding empathy for.
  • Instead, we can create distance from the story, person, or situation by finding ways it couldn’t happen to us, in our lives, or in our community. 
  • Sometimes that can look like denying it could happen to or near us. 
  • Other times we create a narrative about how the person participated in creating their painful experience
  • Something like: “if they had lived their lives differently, more carefully, this wouldn’t have happened to them, and so I can feel secure that this won’t happen in my life because I would be careful in ways they were not”
  • This is a natural response; we are trying to keep our sense of safety in the world as we know it intact.
  • While natural and often automatic, it is important that we own it as OUR response to OUR sense of vulnerability and OUR fears that this could happen to us.
  • Too often, how someone may or may not have participated in the outcome of their situation becomes the focus of the conversation with and about people who have experienced something terrible
  • While accountability, when due, is an important part of prevention moving forward, we can be tempted to hold someone TOO accountable for their tragedy as a way to help ourselves feel safer in our lives. 
  • There are unfortunate consequences to this style of coping by distancing for all parties. Learn more about the impact of this in today’s post.  

Have you ever found yourself hearing a story about something horrible that happened to someone, only to find yourself distracted by your internal effort to look for a reason that couldn’t happen to you or in your life? 


Some version of “this wouldn’t happen to me because I live my life in a such a way where I am protected from the possibility of this horrible thing happening here, to my family, or to me”.


Examples include: “My child couldn’t drown in a pool, I would have a gate up.” 


or


“I would never be out that late in that place”


In those moments we are doing something very natural, which is trying to keep our sense of security in our world intact after hearing a story that leaves us feeling profoundly unsafe.
As Bessel Van Der Kolk writes, “We all want to live in a world that is safe, manageable, and predictable, and victims remind us that this is not always the case”.


It is natural for us to want to feel safe in our lives, and having these protective thoughts is ok – and for many of us very automatic.  It is important, however, that we recognize when we think in this way it is a response to our sense of vulnerability and our fears that our lives could be shattered in the way we are hearing about.


If we don’t recognize this is OUR protective mechanism, rather than an objective reflection on the situation, there can unfortunate consequences to you, the person sharing their struggle, and your relationship with that person. 

If the focus of our response is on how safety could have been preserved if they acted differently we leave a person whose sense of safety has been shattered feeling isolated, and at times ashamed or like the outcome is entirely their fault*.

We can, in an effort to hold on to our sense of safety and order, develop blindspots about threats in our community that could impact someone more vulnerable than us, and eventually us. 

Responding in this way to someone’s vulnerability when they share their story shuts off your vulnerability from you AND from them, creating disconnection.


There is no one “the right” way to respond in these situations, but be on the lookout for your own need to feel safe interfering with you ability to hear someone else’s pain or story.

Notes:

  1. Quote is from page 196 of the Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. Full citation: van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
  2. *I do not mean to undermine the importance of accountability when it is due. Instead, I want us as the listener to be on the lookout for our desire to find a way that this couldn’t happen to us. Sometimes we have trouble accepting that someone may truly just be a victim and some times terrible things happen despite reasonable efforts to prevent them. 
  3. It is not your job (unless you are a therapist) to tolerate hearing all the gory details of someone’s traumatic situation. Instead be mindful of your own protective mechanisms when someone is being vulnerable with you and sharing their difficulties. It is always ok to hold a boundary around what you feel able to hear and when you feel able to hear it.
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Emotional Blocking

  • Our emotions continue to effect us even if we don’t perceive them
  • Even if we don’t feel or notice our feelings they can still have a major impact on how we process the world around us
  • Some of us believe our emotions don’t influence us, and we are ruled only by logic or reason
  • Some of us know we have feelings, but they slip away and escape us before we can really make sense of them
  • This post is for those of you who feel like your emotions are far away or hard to hold on to. There will be posts to come to help you sustainably get in touch with your inner world
  • To get better at noticing, feeling, and making sense of our emotions we need to learn how to turn the volume up on our feelings in a way that doesn’t overwhelm us, but has emotions stick around long enough for us to make use of them.
  • Emotions are complex, but they involve brain and body changes in a feedback loop. We can learn to tap into that feedback loop to help us be in better touch with our feelings
    For those of us that have a hard time registering what we are feeling starting with our bodies is often the more accessible entry point.
  • Each feeling has combination of body sensations and brain changes that make it distinct. We can learn to pay attention to those body changes and stay present with them as a way to help us connect more to our emotional world. 
  • Remember: if something feels like too much, return to grounding skills.

Thus far I have written a lot about feeling overwhelmed by emotion, the times when we are filled to the brim or feel like we are bursting. For many of us, however, we have the opposite relationship with our emotions, we struggle with not being able to hold on to our feelings; they slip our of reach, or just aren’t there.


At times, it’s not an intentional pushing down or away, it’s just what happens, like the feelings don’t ever really seem to bubble up. Other times it may be more intentional. Some of us have come to believe that emotions are a waste of time, or we we’ve trained ourselves “not to have them” and consider ourselves to be ruled solely by logic and reasoning.


As Daniel Seigel writes, there are consequences to this non-experience of emotions too, “When we block our awareness of our feelings, they continue to affect us anyway. Research has repeatedly shown that neural input from the internal world of the body and emotion influences our reasoning and our decision making. Even facial expressions we’re not aware of…directly affect how we feel and so how we perceive the world.”


In short, what Dr. Seigel writes is that even if we don’t notice our feelings are there, they are. Even though we aren’t conscious of them, they impact us, our decision making, and how we perceive what’s going on around us. 


So, for these folks, we want to help you learn how to turn the volume up on emotions in a sustainable way. For that to happen, we need to help you tolerate the experience of your emotions, which have probably been whittled down because at one point they were too painful, or perhaps you came from an environment where they were not welcome.


We can help you increase your ability to notice your internal world by helping you work to be more connected to your body. Emotions are complex, but they involve brain and body changes in a type of feedback loop. We want to help you plug into that feedback loop by being more present with your body. That way we can help you work to notice and gradually hold on to the emotional signals within you.


There will be more on how to do this, but keep your eyes peeled for mindfulness and body based posts to come.

Notes:

  1. The Daniel Siegel quote comes from his book, Mindsight. (page 125). Full Citation: Siegel, Daniel J., Mindsight : The New Science of Personal Transformation. New York: Bantam Books, 2010.
  2. The theory of emotions (the part about emotions being a feedback loop that involve brain and body changes) is a brief summary of what is laid out on pages 87 – 88 and page 137 of Marsha Linehan’s DBT manual. Full Citation: Linehan, M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford Press.
  3. If you are eager to start working on increasing your awareness of your emotional world run yourself through the exercise of taking some core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, joy, confusion), and sit quietly. Work to pay attention to what happens in your body as you bring up a memory that includes each emotion. Each emotion has a distinct feeling experience in our bodies, and we want to become aware of how those feelings manifest in each of us. Knowing “what” they feel like and “how” it feels in our bodies, and being able to tolerate that feeling helps us become more able to identify and tolerate emotions as they come up naturally in our lives. Be sure you have mastered grounding skills before trying this, it may be overwhelming to start “turning up the volume”. If so, consider starting only with emotions that are more tolerable to feel and get to the more difficult ones once you’re comfortable there. 
  4. Wondering why on earth you’d want to feel your feelings – especially your negative ones? Read this post about how are emotions are like “traffic signals” in our inner world .
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