Research
in trauma demonstrates that if a person has been abused as a child,
their likelihood of sustaining abuse later again in life dramatically
increases statistically. Some of this can be explained by nurture or
factors that were missing from a child's upbringing that would have
provided for better safety.
But this does not explain the tendency
for an ex-wife of an abuser to remarry only to learn that their
second husband is also an abuser, too? What are the chances?
(They're actually higher than those who haven't suffered abuse in the
past.)
Essentially,
it is believed that this compulsion serves a few different purposes
which are all aimed at coping with trauma, however ineffectively. The
traumatized person operates under the unmanageable tension to both deny and hide from the experience of pain that produced the
PTSD, but at the same time, they also seek to purge the trauma, stress, and shame associated with the event.
If a
person doesn't get it right the first time, there seems to be some
emotional hope that they can to better in a similar situation or with
people that remind them of those who were involved in their abuse.
While
the mind becomes incredibly creative in its efforts to suppress the
memory of the event, those memories also emerge and invade the
person's consciousness and physical function because of
hypervigilance (that sensation and state of mind of waiting for the
next shoe to drop). We express our stress in some manner, believing that we're hiding it.
Another Chance?
On a
very ineffective and very subconscious level, the traumatized
individual very ineffectively attempts to work through the trauma
because of three specific unrealized objectives. Sadly, they do it with the same set of bad skills and frame of mind that they did when trapped in the midst of the original trauma.
Unconscious Goals of Reenactment
- Understanding of the experience
- Mastery of the experience
- Distraction (To manage mood with a stimulating but less threatening type of similar but controlled trauma)
Remember
that the structures in the brain that govern the survival response
have nothing to do with the “higher function” of rational
thought. We are also drawn to those things that we find familiar to
us, and if our baseline of familiar life includes abuse, we are more
likely to encounter it again.
Unconscious emotions create deep and powerful motivations which the conscious mind cannot understand. An irrational part of us looks for a way to heal by getting rid of our feelings about our old traumas by writing them off when we believe that we can overcome some new trauma. But we can only change things by moving through and facing the experience of the original trauma.
Luckily, there is a road map to help us through the process.
For
further reading until the next post:
- Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery
- Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
- Bessel Van der Kolk's The Body Keeps Score
