layered trauma

Most of us (all of us actually) have experienced some kind of trauma. It may be anything from losing people we love, accidents, abuse or abandonment to name a few. These traumas leave scars in our emotional and mental (and sometimes physical) bodies. We might develop trust issues, anxiety, self harm patterns and all kinds of coping mechanisms to try and deal with these unresolved wounds. So far I’m sure everyone is following. What we sometimes might not be aware of is the trauma of not being allowed to express our emotions.

Any trauma will naturally cause and stir up a lot of emotions. Emotions such as anger, fear, grief. They are a natural byproduct of experiencing difficult events. However for many of us this is usually not the entire trauma, rather it’s only the first layer of it. The process of socialization has made it so that feeling is in many cases not okay, and this is what creates this second layer of trauma. The most devastating part about trauma is in my opinion not necessarily the traumatic event itself, but the inability to process it by expressing our emotions. Many of us were taught from a very young age that feeling is not okay. Feeling certain specific emotions is not okay, or feeling all together is not okay. Needing certain things - such as support, validation, comfort - is not okay. What happens then is that when we experience a traumatic event, any event that causes us to feel negative emotions, we then suppress those emotions, because we have been taught that those emotions will get us rejected should we express them.

This leaves us in a double bind. People who have experienced difficult times in their lives and who have had no support system, are left with these layered traumas. One the one hand, we carry deep emotional wounding from our past, but on the other, we are taught to actively suppress and deny those wounds. This means we are constantly fighting ourselves from the inside. Second guessing ourselves, minimising our own emotions, trying to control our emotions, and we are not always even aware that we are doing this. It becomes an automated response to having a negative emotion - fighting it. And this is the devastating result of trauma and emotional neglect. It is guaranteed that if you struggle with this, somewhere along the line, you were taught that negative emotions would get you in trouble. They would jeopardise your connection with other people, and so, you try to shut them down. Connection is the single biggest need that we have and so naturally, we do anything we can to keep our connections intact, especially if we are children because our survival literally depends on it. The problem is of course that you can’t shut down emotions, at least not forever, because they are always there until you feel them fully.

So, healing trauma is not as simple as healing and processing the actual event. Many times to even get to the original feelings caused by the original trauma, we have to work with our secondary trauma - the one of being punished for feeling. And this may be an arduous process. Because we have so many programs installed in our brains to get us away from feeling, this is what we have to work with first. And we have to do it gently and slowly, taking into consideration that deep down, we are terrified of emotions. This means, on some level, that we are terrified of our very selves. Bulldozing yourself to feel when you are terrified of it is not going to help. Getting support and help from the outside is so important because we have to relearn how to feel, and that can only be done in a safe environment. We have to realize that as a collective we are not very skilled at feeling at all, we are learning. There is no shame in learning how to be with our emotions. If we were never taught how then how the hell would we know how to do it? Learning to be with our emotions may not be easy and it might not go as fast as we want it to, but it is the only way to actually resolve our traumas from the past. But in order to get to a point where we are open to feeling again, we have to face and caretake the part of us that was never allowed to feel in the first place.