…And What It Doesn’t
Part Five-Developmental Trauma
We are made for relationship. Developmental trauma is broken relationship at the most fundamental level. A child who survives abusive caregivers forms a survival perspective that alters how they see others, themselves, their place in the world and most of all…love.
Caregivers use love to manipulate, to gain power, as an excuse to torment, and to avoid personal responsibility. What the child is told is love is not love at all but evil.
How does a person go about healing such a breach?
Constant fear is the norm. We fear because we have experienced terror and rejection from the people we depend upon the most. We are afraid because we have never experienced a moment of complete safety. We do not know what it is like to be able to depend upon another person. Even if we find healthier relationships later in life, our primary relationship, parent and child, has been such a betrayal, it is hard to believe anyone anywhere can possibly be trustworthy.
1)Splitting Realities - The Long Arc of Healing Over Time
As an adult, I hated myself for existing because my existence had caused my suffering. This is the perspective of a scapegoated child.
There was something inherently wrong with me. Why else would my parents treat me so abusively? And so I adapted. I hid my soul away where they could not reach it, and I figured out how to read the room, anticipate their moods, accept the blame and agree with their assessment. If I could just figure out what my parents wanted, I would finally be loved. I never was.
Dismantling Old Foundations
Dismantling such a foundation takes time. As I moved through the normal stages of life, understanding and untying the complicated knots of my family system took a long time.
I lived two lives. One enslaved to my old family system and other in which I functioned in the world. Over time, the gap between the two grew narrower as I grew strong enough to embrace the truth.
2)Severing the system
Entrenched family systems like mine rarely change, yet even as adults we keep hoping to finally gain approval, finally figure out how to make the system happy. Letting go of that hope feels life-threatening. The family system continues to ask for more. Fix me, appease me, make me happy, take care of me, it’s all your fault—and we remain a prisoner. Some people never leave and others like me, reach a point in which they cannot tolerate it any more. The choice becomes step out of the system or die.
Disengage From Harm
The only way to heal is to disengage from the harm. That means different things for different people. Some are able to move forward with limited contact. For me, going no contact was the only choice. My parents would not relent, and by the time I reached the point of creating boundaries, not only were they ignored, being anywhere near their system destroyed my ability to cope. I reached a point where I could not do it anymore.
3)Sensing Safety—Autonomic Nervous System
Trauma has a physical component. It is called the Autonomic Nervous System or ANS. When a child is conditioned by abuse, the ANS becomes programed for threat, terror, appeasement and danger and the result is an automatic response of fight, flight or flee. It is biological but it also entrenches itself in the soul.
I had a gyroscope constantly scanning for threat. I knew what kind of day it was going to be by the look on my mother’s face. I knew the moment I heard my father’s truck wheels crunch across the gravel it was time to hide.
I took these skills into adulthood, but instead of protecting me, they began to destroy me. The exhaustion of living in a world where I could never stand down, never be at peace and never feel safe caused the symptoms of “complex post traumatic stress disorder.”
Understanding then severing the system is not enough to heal the ANS or the amygdala. To do that, you have to go after the hard-wired system. And that means teaching the ANS safety through experience. It also means tolerating the terror alarm long enough for the ANS to calm. That my friends is a tall mountain to climb.
Safe relationships, calming somatic practices, restorative sleep and spiritual practices are the types of things that signal to the ANS it is no longer in danger.
I felt like I had a wild animal living inside me that operated apart from my will. This is the dilemma of developmental trauma. It operates outside of reason.
4)Sacred Stillness—The Power of Integration
It is easier to describe symptoms than it is to describe what happens when a person finally begins to come home to themselves. Integration is that process. It begins when the autonomic nervous system has experienced enough safety to quiet. As the constant state of survival slowly settles, you become emotionally safe enough to approach the deeper wounds that could not be felt while simply trying to survive.
One helpful way to understand this process is through the idea of parts. Many trauma therapists describe these as the different survival adaptations we develop during childhood.
You may identify with some of the following:
The Silent Core – The deepest, most authentic part of you that existed before the abuse defined your world. It carries your true identity and quietly waits until it is safe enough to emerge.
The Wounded Child – The part that carries the fear, grief, shame, and loneliness of childhood. It often believes the abuse was its fault.
The Competent Achiever (Manager) – The part that learned to function, achieve, organize, and succeed in order to survive and gain acceptance.
The Protector – The vigilant part that constantly scans for danger and quickly mobilizes fight, flight, freeze, or appeasement whenever it senses threat.
Some people recognize a people-pleaser, an inner critic, an angry defender, or a caretaker. These names are simply ways of describing the remarkable adaptations a human being develops to survive chronic threat.
The Goal of Healing
The goal is for these parts to no longer operate independently out of fear. As safety grows, they gradually lay down their survival roles and come into harmony under the guidance of your healthy, authentic self. The frightened child no longer has to carry the pain alone. The protector no longer has to stay awake all night. The achiever no longer has to earn love.
Instead of competing with one another, they become integrated into one whole person who is finally free to live from truth rather than survival. If I am honest, this stage of healing has been one of the most difficult. Has it been worth it? Yes, it is worth it because to defy trauma is to embrace life, no matter how difficult the path.