Overwhelm and trauma

Overwhelm is a common experience for so many survivors of trauma. We have had the experience, possibly from a very young age (before we developed a functioning intellectual mind to understand) of being flooded by feelings, experiences and chemicals which overwhelmed us.  As so many of us know a baby needs the mediating presence of a caregiver who can recognise their signals and respond to their distress in appropriate ways that connect to the child’s core self and without this we falter and feel awash in difficult feelings of overwhelm.

If we have a serious physical trauma of some kind we are also overwhelmed by a huge collusion of whatever kind that can live on inside of us, perhaps for years.  This was something I was thinking about a moment ago as I drove home in my car, I was thinking of how on any morning when I wake I have no sense of full body integration, it is a struggle to explain what I go through in the two or so hours after waking up but it is as though I have to pull my spun self together and I feel the flow of things in my system as well as the thought of not knowing how I will stand up.  I was actually flung over the handlebars of a pushbike back in 2005 and split my head open on an iron foundry.  I dont remember the full body impact on conscious level and the accident occurred at a time I was foundering to find some solid land after trauma ended my marriage and I was still working through far earlier traumas including my near death accident at the age of 17.

I do feel that most of my injuries came out of being unprotected.  As a child I suffered severe injuries due to parental neglect or over zealous cleaning.  They were : having my arm torn out of my socket as my Mum tried to pull me back from moving forward as a child, suffering 3rd degree burns to my leg and foot when Mum in a cleaning frenzy on a caravan holiday left a bucket of boiling water near my feet where I was sitting drawing, having a fish hook my Dad left lying around lodged in the webbing between my big and second toe, a severe wrist laceration when breaking a window due to being a latch key child : I had left the key inside and could not get into the house after school.  These were all tremendously overpowering experiences of neglect that led to flooding and feelings of profound loneliness, lack of protection and feeling cared for and safe.  They all comprised my body integrity too.

I am shariug about them today as I need to be mindful of how well I am doing getting out of bed and moving into my day and now much progress I have made, particularly over the past year.  Two years ago on any day I was unable to leave the house until very late in the afternoon at all and it took me until about 2 pm on some days to stomach food.  That chronic collapse/introversion/withdrawal due both to Complex PTSD and emotional abuse trauma from a recent relationship went on prior to that for over 8 years.   I still need a lot of time alone and time for quiet introspection.  I always will as a person recovering from long term PTSD.  I don’t have an image of myself as so chronically impaired now though.  I would rather see myself as a couragous survivor.  Sure I was hurt and damaged by trauma but that was all about what was done to me not really about who I am inside.

I also need to bear in mind that as an intuitive empath I cannot function in the same extroverted way as others do.  There are a lot of us out there and my understanding is that our families and societies don’t often give us a lot of help to understand who we are and how we function.  We can get misunderstood and invalidated a lot and as children if we most often don’t get the help to deal with this high sensitivity and are when we are subjected to neglect, insensitvity, lack of empathy or other trauma, not helped to feel, express and understand our emotions we can and do end up at times severely disabled both physically and emotionally as well as spirutally and mentally.

I want to share in a post soon what I am learning about emotions from a wonderful book I came across in the library a few weeks ago.  It deals with helping those who were not raised with emotional understanding to understand how unmediated, misunderstood or shamed and repressed emotions often get trapped in toddler like defences and protections.   I touched on this subject a while ago in a post on emotional age regression but in this other book he explains such emotional hijacking in greater depth.  Much depends on how sensitively our parents treat us when we react as children perhaps with anger, frustration or jealousy all of which are natural emotions a child can feel in certain circumstances.  I shared some of it with my therapist yesterday and she thought it was very helpful and well written.

We can and do end up getting overwhelmed by emotions when we have had no help in understanding how to deal with them.  This then sets us up to be more likely to be injured or traumatised in later life.  I was listening to a programme on acquired brain injury this week and it said that those who were neglected or traumatised in childhood are much more likely to suffer a brain injury or impairment.  It makes sense.  It may not only be in the laying down of neurological connections but in the susceptibility to trauma or damage which comes out of emotional neglect and lack of self protection.

As children we did not know that all of this was not about us, so why as we recover should we have to suffer stigma from friends, family or society if we suffer in this way?  Never the less we so often blame ourselves often because we were never shown sufficient understanding in the first place, but this is something we can correct later in life if we can arm ourselves with the understanding and help and skills we need to deal with overwhelm.  I hope to be a part of that process for others as I am passionate about those who suffer trauma not being stigmatised.  I see it as a life task to fight for a greater degree of love, awareness, compassion and understanding.