Trauma Pairs Best With Resilience
But only if we make the choice to put them together
Hello,
It’s Sunita here.
Once upon a time there was a little girl with a broken brain...
This little girl thought everyone’s brain was like hers for a very long time.
Growing up she worked hard on being a good little girl.
She was a conscientious student who did well in school, got along with everyone, and made sure she caused no fuss. As a successful grown up she believed she had many reasons to be happy and fulfilled. And she was quite right about that.
But that was not the whole story.
Deep inside, even as a very young child, she knew something was terribly wrong. She did not connect this vague unease to her broken brain until she hit a wall much later in life. (What she was experiencing for many decades was actually much more serious than ‘vague unease’ but that was all she could allow herself to consciously feel at the time)
I’ll share more about this little girl with a broken brain in future posts and tell you what happened to her when she went hurling into that wall. You can get ahead on that story by getting Stripping: My Fight to Find Me.)
Trauma breaks brains.
Tragically, when infants, toddlers and children suffer trauma, they don’t even know that their brain is broken.
Traumatized children, if untreated, can grow up with no conscious awareness of their disabilities resulting from the impact of their specific trauma on their brain, body, mind and soul. They see, feel and experience the world with their broken brain, fully absorbing the devastating impact of their trauma without knowing it exists.
Such children (and adults as well) live with a wide variety of life long crushing trauma related illnesses, dysfunctional coping mechanisms, broken relationships, and self sabotaging behaviors, with often little, to no understanding of the direct connection between their suffering, and the trauma that caused it.
Researchers report a significant relationship between ACEs, neurodevelopment, and long-term health. The chronic nature of childhood adversities may lead to allostatic load and resulting cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune system dysfunction. Indeed, ACE research over the past few decades provides evidence for a relationship between ACEs and diabetes , depression, anxiety, mental disorders, and obesity.
Source: Alhowaymel FM, Kalmakis KA, Chiodo LM, Kent NM, Almuneef M. Adverse Childhood Experiences and Chronic Diseases: Identifying a Cut-Point for ACE Scores. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Jan 16;20(2):1651. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20021651. PMID: 36674405; PMCID: PMC9863315.
I used to be unable to see the natural pairing of trauma and resilience.
Once I started to work on healing, initially, all I saw was darkness and destruction. As my unconscious began to become conscious to me through, and in therapy, I felt pain and more pain. But that was just at the start of the journey. Things changed.
My traumatized brain had me deeply identifying with my learned helplessness. Resilience was not a conscious vocabulary choice or automatic behavior for me. Chronic and recurring adversity does that to us.
Not being able to see ourselves through anything more than a narrow opening of an opaque window of our distorted mind is a salient feature of the broken brain.
But I thank my lucky stars that when I crashed as an adult, there were people around me, especially my mental health care professionals, who recognized that I was resilient (how else could I have survived to build a successful life despite my trauma?) and knew that there was a lot more resilience in me to tap into as I started my journey of healing and recovering from my complex attachment and childhood trauma.
I only recognized how resilient I am after a considerable amount of my lived experience of recovery.
I used to feel pairing trauma and resilience was in some way dismissive and disrespectful of the suffering that trauma inflicts on us.
That’s not true!
Resilience and trauma are two sides of the same coin.
It is because of our inherent resilience that we are able to heal when the right circumstances come about. And recovery is aimed at developing resilience so we may face life’s challenges with strength, equanimity, and resourcefulness.
re·sil·ience
/rəˈzilēəns/
noun
noun: resiliency; plural noun: resiliencies
1.
the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
"the remarkable resilience of so many institutions"
2.
the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
"nylon is excellent in wearability and resilience"
(source: Oxford Languages)
I recognize that sharing the literal definition of the word resilience does not provide nuance to the evolving, complicated, complex and still nascent conceptual understanding of resilience being a stable trajectory of healthy functioning after a highly adverse event/events.
Some resources that I have found useful in understanding resilience in the context of post traumatic growth are as follows,
Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives ( published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology) to be useful in gaining a better understanding of the topic.
“In this paper, inspired by the plenary panel at the 2013 meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Dr. Steven Southwick (chair) and multidisciplinary panelists Drs. George Bonanno, Ann Masten, Catherine Panter-Brick, and Rachel Yehuda tackle some of the most pressing current questions in the field of resilience research including: (1) how do we define resilience, (2) what are the most important determinants of resilience, (3) how are new technologies informing the science of resilience, and (4) what are the most effective ways to enhance resilience?”
Resilience after trauma is one of the most compelling phenomena in contemporary traumatic stress research. Nugent NR, Sumner JA, Amstadter AB. Resilience after trauma: from surviving to thriving. Eur J Psychotraumatol. 2014 Oct 1;5. doi: 10.3402/ejpt.v5.25339. PMID: 25317260; PMCID: PMC4185140.
Now on to trauma.
trau·ma
/ˈtrômə/
noun
1.
a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.
"a personal trauma like the death of a child"
2.
MEDICINE
physical injury.
"rupture of the diaphragm caused by blunt trauma"
The American Psychological Association defines trauma as an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, crime, natural disaster, physical or emotional abuse, neglect, experiencing or witnessing violence, death of a loved one, war, and more. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships, and even physical symptoms like headaches or nausea. While these feelings are normal, some people have difficulty moving on with their lives.
It was not easy for me to recognize I needed help for trauma.
It was harder for me to ask for help.
And it was hardest for me to accept the help I was offered.
That’s what trauma does to our mindset and belief systems. It tells us in no uncertain terms that we are unworthy of help.
Coming to terms with my reality took tremendous courage.
But, with an iron will, professional help, and the unconditional support of those around me, I managed to activate the resilience reserve (metaphorically speaking) I had deep inside me to tap into my true, strong self.
You may think I’m arrogant or even ungrateful to those who were instrumental in my recovery by putting my iron will on the top of this list.
A case could be made for that. But I credit myself, above all other factors that came into play in my recovery because it is a fact. I share this belief with you so you too may be encouraged to look inward and start the work.
The first step of my journey of healing was from my singular desire to get out of the negative, self sabotaging, and unhealthy loop of trauma drama in my life.
No one can help us until we are ready to change.
No change is possible in our life or environment until we refuse to go on the way we are. We can have some surface changes but they will not stick. We will invariably go back to our patterns of underestimating ourselves and leaving chips and chunks of our precious life on the table.
That’s a damn shame!
Because there is more to us than our tragic stories.
There is more to us than what someone did to us.
There is more to us than the limited, distorted and incomplete versions of ourselves we learned to live as.
We are more, and way more resilient than our weakened minds believe we are.
But we must do the work!
There is no free ride to the land of strength, resilience and self actualization.
We all have to go through the process of excavation to locate our resilience reserves. We all have to separate the facts of our life from the idealized stories we had to tell ourselves to survive. That’s not easy.
But as I wrote in this post at the beginning of the year, neither is living by proxy.
Are You Going To Be Fully Rendered?
Hello, It’s Sunita here. It's complicated. We arrive at birth with our true self. But we have not yet, for the most part, as a species, used that understanding in how we parent. We parent with the tools we have inherited. These tools are at best, limited in their usefulness at the top end of the …
You are worthy of help.
You are resilient.
We must choose optimism.
We must chip away at the stigma of mental health suffering.
We must find solutions and relief from depression, anxiety, otherness, dissociation, despair, fear, constant over vigilance, people pleasing at the cost of our own sanity and well being, repression of our true selves, and living contingent upon the approval and acceptance of others.
We must pry open the conversation of childhood trauma and how it destroys us at the very core of who we are.
We must find ways to talk about the transgenerational nature of attachment and childhood trauma without blaming and pitting one generation against the other.
We must find our way back home.
And lastly, I sincerely hope that as you continue your journey of healing, or get ready to take the first step towards recovery, you remember that trauma pairs best with resilience!
Cheering you on, always and until next time,
Moving forwards,
Sunita
PS- It is important to state here that my iron will in itself only, but most importantly, propelled me to seek help. My will and desire to get healthy was not the source of, or provide me with the specialized professional medical/psychological care my condition needed. I categorically do not espouse self care as a form of treatment for trauma, mental illness or any illness for that matter. If you believe you have a history of trauma you must seek professional help without haste.
If you are in distress/crisis, please call 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline immediately.