However, meaning-making requires information. When caregivers don’t talk to children, don’t explain things to them, or let them know what is going to happen, or punish them for their curiosity or need to know, there is a dearth of information. Children make up a story that puts themselves at the center. This is why judges and divorce experts strongly advise parents to tell their children, repeatedly, that the divorce isn’t about them and isn’t their fault.
If children experience enough trauma, their meaning making revolves around the betrayals, losses, and failures they experience in their attachment relationships. These emotional learnings/magical beliefs are at the root of chronic misperceptions and emotional attributions. They coalesce into a trauma story that slips into our subconscious, where it alters our perceptions of events in ways that reinforce itself. The story drives much of our emotional responses to significant events in our lives. In those emotional states, we may abandon ourselves emotionally, doing everything we can to avoid emotions because it is not/was not safe to feel them.
When our experiences as adults trigger our deepest feelings of victimization and loss, old patterns ignite: we are again the center of the story. If we abandon our emotions, nervous system dysregulation will result. When the autonomic nervous system is dysregulated, trauma response patterns (fight, flight, freeze or fawn) are activated. We re- experience toxic shame, rage, confusion, terror, or shut down, states we were in as children much of the time. In those states, it is very difficult to separate our triggered feelings (which have little to do with what is happening now) from what is actually happening now. When we are operating out of a trauma response state, we are unable to act in our own best interest. We can only self-abandon.
EXAMPLE: A man orders an expensive device, and has a negative experience with the device and the company. When attempting to fix the problem, he runs into more problems. He becomes triggered into rage. Every interaction he has with the company triggers this impotent rage—impotent because no amount of rage will take care of the problem. The problem is actually with the company, and the holidays, and everyone buying new devices. The company’s failure has nothing to do with him, and yet when triggered, he is certain that he is personally being cheated. He is lost in his childhood victimization story. His rage keeps him activated internally (fight) and physiologically adrenalized. His perceptions are altered by fight/flight neurochemicals. He can’t access solutions in that state, for he is in his brainstem, AKA survival mode. Solutions emanate from the prefrontal cortex. He is deep in a cycle of self-abandonment.
Breaking the Cycle of Emotional Self-Abandonment
One of the challenges to changing our stories is the intensity of the emotion we are hijacked by when our young, vulnerable, and wounded states are triggered. In our adult lives, intense emotion drives behaviors that lead to emotional self-abandonment, the internal rejection of our deepest feeling states by any means necessary. We learned to be deeply distrustful of our emotions as children because feeling these emotions made us vulnerable.
In order to heal emotional self-abandonment, we must take care of ourselves when our deepest emotions are triggered. Instead of going into battle, we need to sit with ourselves, in an attitude of kindness and care, and feel our feelings: our grief, our shame, our confusion, our rage. We need to be both child and parent to ourselves when our deepest wounds inflame. We need to learn ways to release overwhelming emotions when we are triggered (see this website, EFT tapping & Deep Pressure Touch); to treat our emotions with the respect they deserve.
How to begin dismantling the cycle of self-abandonment:
- Show up for our feelings. This is a crucial step. Taking care of ourselves when we are in the midst of an emotional flashback is the key to healing complex PTSD, because “taking care” stops the cycle of self-abandonment (http://pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm). Care is the opposite of abandonment. To identify and release overwhelming emotion, use journaling, EFT tapping, deep pressure touch (kealakea.com), self-compassion meditation (www. selfcompassion.org). Often deep grief is released when we meet these feelings, even if the triggered emotion was rage or fear.
NOTE: Often a critical voice inside asserts that you are unworthy of self-care, self-love, and self-compassion. Ignore that voice. When we are in the throes of an emotional flashback, it is our emotions that need our care (http://pete-walker.com/shrinkingInnerCritic.htm). - Create a data driven story. This can be done by asking 2 questions:
- Is this really about me?
- What is my data to support that?