In an ongoing discussion of trauma, our
original objective involved an attempt to understand why the
survivors of Hephzibah
House (HH) experience a failure to protect themselves, especially
after immediately leaving the home. Some survivors also experience long-term problems with self-care and self-protection problems, even into adulthood. Though this
information pertains directly to them, it also pertains to anyone who
has experienced significant trauma.
We've examined the childhood
roots of victimization that certainly contribute to lack of this
particular lack of self-care, but we've yet to consider this feature
directly related to PTSD. When people develop Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD), a condition that quite often results when the
affected person has been unable to avoid painful circumstances, it
creates a pervasive sense of pessimism which arises from the physical
response of survival which fails to shut down after the trauma threat
has resolved. One of the ways a person lives out that pessimism
comes through the idea that self-protection will be futile. Just as
developmental factors contribute to a person's failure to
self-protect, so does their sense of pessimism.
Beliefs About Self
Before Trauma.
Prior to significant trauma, most people experience a type of
optimism that suggests to a person that they are generally safe and
can expect certain predictable, positive things from their
environment. If healthy and not strongly affected by the pitfalls
immature parenting in their original family while growing up, most
people tend to see themselves in positive terms – as good, capable,
and talented. They tend to assume that their futures will be
positive.
Following Trauma.
PTSD shatters and transforms most of those optimistic assumptions.
As a matter of survival, the person no longer feels safe but
anticipated continued threat, giving substance to the cliché,
“waiting for the other shoe to drop.” The traumatized
person becomes well acquainted with helplessness and vulnerability,
and in some sense, they become subconsciously preoccupied with it.
This pessimism also turns inward and
creates the feeling in a person's sense of self that they should be
ashamed, but it reaches beyond the circumstances that prevented them
from favorably avoiding harm resulting from the trauma. Traumatized
people struggle with shame and guilt (beyond the experience of
survivor
guilt), regardless if such feelings are deserved or not, and
they bleed over into other areas of life that have nothing to do with
the trauma. Traumatized people question their own worth, tend to
feel overly responsible within other situations, and can compulsively
self-recriminate.
Beliefs About How The Traumatized
Person Fits Into the World
Before Trauma.
Prior to trauma the world seems to most people as a fairly
predictable and orderly environment with fairly sensible institutions
and basic rules that, when followed, result in predictable outcomes.
The world seems, by and in large, a reasonably fair place, wherein
responsible behavior results in safety and self-benefit. Other
people are generally believed to be good and reliable, and reaching
out to others is a worthwhile and beneficial process.
Following Trauma.
After trauma, the rules that used to apply which made the world seem
like a place that made sense seem to disintegrate for those suffering
from PSTD. The world's rules left them without recourse, and their
beliefs and efforts failed to protect them from harm. For all their
good planning and good effort, the system failed them. A person must
face the idea that life is not always fair, and as it was likely in
their own experience, the system of the world and it's predictable
nature fell apart for them.
In terms of people and as a matter of
survival, people become untrustworthy and hurtful. Social
interaction becomes a tiring and threatening process. This tends to
create the sense of isolation and alienation. As we've noted before,
certain areas of the brain shift from a focus on self to a focus on
survival and threat. Physiologically, it becomes very difficult to
concentrate on the perspective that life is a safe place and that
people (and God) can again be safe for them.
Special Considerations Regarding the
Survivors of Hephzibah House
Survivors of HH would most definitely
experience the pervasive sense of pessimism after leaving their
traumatic environment, particularly after immediate exit Some young
women report report that they were raped soon after exiting HH. In
response to this particular kind of threat, they experience what is
known as “freezing,” a response of immobility wherein they
“freeze up” in panic and seem to submit to their attacker. In
error people like Ron Williams and Bill Gothard teach that such
immobilization amounts to a sinful warranting of rape, and the girl's
own actions essentially warrant the violation in some sense.
This feature of trauma contributes to
the host of factors that promote the response of freezing which we
will discuss in an upcoming post which is enhanced by the component
of dissociation experienced by those who experienced chronic trauma.
Reasearch indicates that it is also associated with chronic trauma
and panic and has little to do with planned action, character, or
human will. Again, it is another response that results primarily due
to a physiologic response. The lamenting and guilt that follows such
a type of revictimization is also a very common
experience.
More to come.
