When Trauma Causes Chaos
I wrote about trauma earlier: trauma response is an old survival technology that glitches the modern brain. It works as a metaphor. However, it might not account for the exquisite chaos that trauma can use to reinforce itself in us. So, here, I want to give space to how intense our lives can become.
There’s simple trauma and then there’s complex trauma. Simple does not mean less severe. Simple means the trauma had a distinct before, during, and after. Think of a car crash: there was life up until the moments right before the crash, there is the crash itself, and then there is life after the crash ends. A car crash could redefine someone’s life, but it’s simple because it was a distinct event in time. This kind of trauma is easier to shift from a traumatic re-experience that pops up like a Viking raiding party into a digested memory that only comes when called.
Complex traumas develop from negative events that keep repeating or become normal life. The traumas start to connect into a single emotional matrix. They become the new normal and our personality starts to include them. They’re no longer like a sliver stuck in your finger, a foreign thing you want to dig out; they try to become part of us, we seem to turn into them, like we’re being forcibly turned into malignant cyborgs.
Our vulnerability, here, is our very human need for attachment. Much of attachment is formed before we can remember, when we are babies and toddlers. At first it’s about our experience of the world as something we can ultimately trust or not trust particularly through a primary care-giver. Attachment allows us to bond with people, experience empathy and connection; it’s indispensable to being a complete human being. And, attachment is now more fully thought of as something that can be re-informed by experience throughout our lives. Good experiences will support our ability to bond and sustain positive relationships; extremely negative ones may have the power to injure our ability to attach healthfully.
Traumas, particularly traumas that come through human relationships, whether family members or people in our community, and especially ones that repeat or are sustained, may have deep impact on our sense of safety and security. They can reassign our attachments from positive to negative types of people or lead us to give up on Hope. It’s like Stockholm Syndrome. That’s a phenomenon where hostages can start to identify, sympathize with, and even join their captors. It’s an unconscious survival mechanism, a type of fawning response on the same level as fight, flight, or freeze.
When the experience of traumatic recall is inescapable enough, particularly when the traumas keep repeating or don’t end, it can seem more emotionally efficient to just go with the hijacker. The “captor” here is not the abusers responsible for the original or on-going trauma (though that can happen in part or in whole); the captor is the traumatic re-experience inside us, echoing in our brain and body. Living in the intensity of new danger and chaos feels less frightening than being left with what's inside. Intensity on the outside feels like a break from what’s happening on the inside, but now we’re feeding the monster, now we’re deepening the trauma. This is where the symptoms of self-sabotage, chaos, wildness, high-risk behavior, self-harm, suicidality, destruction, or violence come from.
And so the traumatized 9 year old becomes a gang member at 13. And so the sexual assault survivor tears their house apart in a blind rage because someone took away their drugs. It feels safer to be dangerous than to be vulnerable. It feels smarter to join the chaos than risk being flattened by it again. So, the symptoms of the trauma start to run us. We start to believe that we are the symptoms. Now, even self-generated crises feed the trauma matrix, distort our sense of who we are, alienate us socially, and strengthen a vicious cycle. And smaller issues, that wouldn’t have been upsetting before, now convert into huge emotional events. When we’ve got a bunch of trauma already, trauma response becomes more likely; trauma becomes the way we experience the world.
So, if simple trauma glitches the modern brain, complex trauma GLITCHES it. But we have choice. We can override impulse. We are not cyborgs controlled by alien implants. We have the ability to understand ourselves thanks to our modern brains. We come to experience the feelings of shame as actually belonging to perpetrators instead of ourselves. We come to experience ourselves as survivors in the company of others who are able to hold our story. After all, we were born to be free. Whether you have or haven’t read my other essay, entitled Trauma, read it now. This and that one are two sides of the same coin. It’s important to realize that no matter how intense life has become, understanding how trauma works is not.
If what I’m saying here sounds like you, know this: there is a place for you without fear and chaos, where you will be fully alive and peaceful. The depth of the pain you have known points to the greatness of your healing to come. The world needs you. Don’t believe the lie that it doesn’t. And many who have beaten this monster have become instrumental in others doing the same.
