The Way We Engage Our Stories

Part 1: The Re-traumatization Cycle and How I Stopped It

In keeping with my last post, I have been wanting to write on some of the ways that I was able to heal from my PTSD/C-PTSD diagnosis after trauma. I am writing from my own observations and experiences, and this is not meant to be specific advice, but more like “big sister energy.” I think that it matters the way we view our stories and the resulting struggles after trauma, and I have learned over the last couple of years that I need to be careful with how I engage with both my and others’ stories.

The next several posts in this particular series will be unfolding that topic, by telling my story, and relating the lessons I learned through my time in trauma therapy. I also realize that not everyone is in a safe place yet where abuse has stopped, or yet in a place to face and begin to heal their trauma, which is why I am trying to leave a little breadcrumb trail for when you’re ready and able. If you are not ready, please do not feel any shame. Healing takes as long as it takes, it is not linear, and God is with you where you are. Trauma and the resulting struggles are not your fault, so please read this as one speaking from a place of gentleness and compassion.

Last spring, I broke my right elbow and tore my MCL and PCL in my left knee, interrupting and redirecting most of our year. I spent around 9 months in difficult and painful physical therapy for my elbow and knee, and God used this experience to help me understand what He was also healing within me regarding my own story of trauma.

One afternoon, I cried driving home from physical therapy, and it wasn’t because it had been that painful! It was because my physical therapist said something that went way past my broken elbow and right into the difficulty of working through all the internal healing I was simultaneously doing in EMDR therapy. He explained the swelling and stiffening of my muscles and ligaments around my elbow kept further damage from being done to the bones. It helped my elbow survive the traumatic event. However, it no longer served me to have my elbow stuck in nearly a 45 degree angle, even though it felt safe, and was what I had grown accustomed to, not using my arm, and protecting it. It hurt to try to extend it, and that felt scary, similar to the pain that caused the damage in the first place. But, my arm was literally stuck and weak, and it was time to remove the (obnoxious) brace, to engage in the productive discomfort of stretching and strengthening, and to bring my elbow out of survival mode. Just like me. I cried because I realized that the ways I had been engaging with my story and my trauma felt safe, but survival mode no longer was serving me.

Author and licensed therapist, Aundi Kolber, talks about different types of strengths in her book, Strong Like Water, and describes the survival kind of strength it takes to make it through traumatic events and times as situational strength. It keeps us alive. It makes us survivors, and that is something to celebrate! It has an important role to play in our lives and stories, but we were never meant to stay in that kind of strength. It’s easy and almost inevitable that without outside help and a lot of hard work, that we survivors will just live in that kind of survival mode, but that mode, like my stuck elbow, is not where you or I were mean to stay after our abuse and trauma. Aundi conceptualizes strength as a flow, like water changing from gas, to solid, to a rushing river or a gently flowing stream. So, we too, can move from situational strength, the essential kind of strength God equipped our bodies with to survive our circumstances without completely losing our minds, to transitional strength, as we begin the healing process, to integrated strength, the place we were meant to live and flourish.

One of the ways that I think we can unhelpfully engage our stories is by activating our trauma responses in an unnecessary way and creating a cycle that keeps us in fight or flight mode, keeping us in the kind of situational strength we must move out of so we are able to heal. I see this happening in multiple ways, and it’s mostly what I’ve observed in the online world, in spaces where we are all recounting our stories to one another over and over. We survivors are craving someone to validate and understand what happened to us, so we find people who understand, and I think that validation and being believed is very important, even crucial, to finding healing, and at the very least, establishing safe and healthy relationships with people as we are working through healing. But, I do think we can overdo even a good thing. Let me explain. (As the youths say, “Let her cook!”)

Early on, my therapist pointed out to me that I kept wanting to tell her my story, and she challenged me on that, and she explained why. I honestly was pretty angry at her and thought she was wrong at first, but I do credit her now with teaching me how to get myself into a calm enough place long enough that I could get out of fight or flight. For me recounting my story re-traumatized me because I still had PTSD and was reliving the experience in real time, so my body was feeling like the past events were still happening in the present. This means that I had many symptoms that would manifest themselves in things like hypervigilance, panic, and even lashing out at times. I hated it, but it was a cycle I didn’t know I was in until it was too late.

I also was immersing myself in listening to other people’s stories of abuse, and that was also re-traumatizing me. I was in survivor groups online and the venting and sharing was also triggering me. All of this had me in a constant state of fight or flight, and I was not functioning well. I was hypervigilant in safe {enough} places with safe and loving people. If I am being totally honest, feeling panic was sort of a comfort to me because if I let my guard down, something bad could happen again, and all the survivor groups I was in and all the news I was consuming were confirming that. Abuse was happening everywhere, and nowhere was safe, and if I were to just live the normal life that I longed for, then maybe all the bad things would sneak back in.

It was scary for me to step away from constantly ingesting information about abuse, current and past news, and to let my body calm down. It was also scary to stop trying to process my story on my own, like perhaps, I would lose my story somehow, or that I would suddenly be overtaken by abuse if I wasn’t always watching out. But I began to panic less, and that meant that more of my rational part of my brain was on, and I could hear and process truth better. I could also notice my symptoms before I was overcome by them, and this helped me deescalate more often, and stay grounded in the moment.

In addition to removing myself from online spaces and being inundated with abuse stories, or retelling or talking about my own as much (like I said, there is a place for it), I learned to practice several things during this time, and I want to share two of them with you now:

1. Containment

2. Self compassion

Containment, simply put, was me learning how to be able to have a place to keep everything (my trauma stories) until I could come back to therapy to work on them. There are lots of ways to visualize this, but the only thing that worked for me was to place them into God’s hands each week after a session. (I know He was already in total control of my life, but I felt like I could just tell God that I was leaving these things for now, and actively doing this practice helped me step away from constant, unnecessary processing. I say unnecessary because things will naturally come up all the time, but it was best, at least it was for me, to not actively engage all the time.) I was not squishing down my emotions or memories, but I was acknowledging them, and learning that not everything was as urgent as it felt, and I could put them away most of the time until I was ready to deal with them again.

Self-compassion sounds a little “woo-woo” to people who grew up the way I did, being told that liking yourself was not a good idea and it was Christian to basically hate yourself. But what I learned was that I was trying to use the same tactics my abuser did on myself when I began to feel an emotion I didn’t want to feel or “shouldn’t feel.” Like, for example when I would start panicking at church for no apparent reason, I used to try to force myself out of that emotion, rather than being curious about it, looking at it objectively and then addressing it. Then, once I was able to locate which emotion it was and the likely why, I would speak truth to myself with compassion. Often, I would put my hand on my heart (This worked for me, and actually you can calm your nervous system down with hands on your heart exercises. Here’s a link to a podcast that discusses this and other helpful things.) The reason I was able to become so mindful ( I know this also can be a woo woo word, but it’s a real thing!) was because I had withdrawn from the constant trauma cycle, and began to notice and name my emotions. Then, I could speak to them. One Sunday, early on as I was learning this, I was beginning to panic at church, and I remember putting my hand on my heart and calming down, rather than internally yelling at myself, “Why are you feeling anxious! You’re safe! Stop it!” I acknowledged the emotion, and I gently reminded myself of the safety of the place I was in, of God’s work in my life, His love for me, and the rising panic broke into soft, and open tearful release. My body understood it was safe. I was leaving situational strength. I could be in the moment at church, and I could participate in the service with a clear mind, and it was a lot easier to receive God’s Word and to feel safe in church in this state.

I think these practices, or something similar to them, are crucial to healing from our trauma and rebuilding our faith because something else trauma does is alter our core beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. An element of spiritual abuse or abuse within a faith environment is that these events can alter our core beliefs about God, and if we are constantly in fight or flight, it makes it so much more difficult to access the Truth and internalize it, as a replacement for lies. I have said before that I believe it was both the EMDR therapy and the “ordinary means” that helped me heal from my post trauma diagnosis. I’ll discuss more of this in my next installment on how to address our trauma and inform our trauma of truth, rather than letting the false core beliefs learned to keep us stuck next week!