Tian Dayton Quotes

Change also comes when we learn to do something different, to make choices in our thinking and daily routines that interrupt a downward spiral and create an upward one.

One of the problems with shutting down feeling is that we begin to live in our heads. We tell ourselves a story about what we think we’re feeling or what we think we should be feeling rather than feeling our genuine emotions and allowing words to grow out of them so we can accurately describe our inner experience. When we can feel our feelings and then translate them into language, we can use our reasoning ability to play a role in regulating our emotional experience.

Nothing is better, no reward greater than our true connection with ourselves, and through that we can reach out and really touch another. Working through trauma pulls us from the surface of life into the wellspring from which we learn who we really are.

December 28, Today I am aware that I have some basic issues like abandonment. My fear of being left is so powerful and pervasive that I hardly identify it as fear. It takes so little to activate my feelings of rejection disinterest omega someone I love, a turned away head, those I care about having their own lives and relationships; these things are all frightening to me and have the capacity to mobilize deep feelings of anger, resentment and hurt. I read all sorts of deeper motives into this kind of behavior from other people and create scenarios in my mind where I am ultimately left, I realize today that I cannot have people in my life in a healthy, comfortable way if I am daily haunted by the fear that they will leave me. I can live a comfortable life. The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases. James Russell Loweell

I can live a comfortable life. The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

When we grieve, we naturally allow ourselves to feel the anger, hurt, disorientation, and sadness that are a part of processing pain. As we grieve, we let go of some of our hypervigilance. When we understand that feeling these feelings are part of the healing process, and that by feeling them we can allow them to dissipate, we begin to see light at the end of the tunnel.

The more I worked with clients’ grief issues, the better they were getting. Additionally, trauma was not being talked about as a relational issue; it was talked about as if it happened just within a person. It was during this period that it also became clear to me that the trauma I was seeing in clients was the direct result of relationship pain, and that if it remained unresolved, it would continue to drive dysfunctional relationship patterns.

Change comes when we have sat in the pain long enough and fully enough so that we can feel it, can open our mouths and talk about it, see it for what it is, reorder and understand it, and then walk out of it. This does not mean that we won’t feel bad, hurt, angry, or triggered about our past again. It just means that if and when we are triggered, we won’t catapult into an unconscious place from which we can only act out, shut down, or dive straight into self-medicating behaviors.

It’s a peeling back the layers of the onion one at a time, stage by stage, examining the thinking, feeling, and behavior that were learned and became engrained at each stage of development. Physical sobriety is fairly straightforward, and abstention or regulation are its mainstays, but emotional sobriety can be more elusive.

Science can now illuminate why approaches like psychodrama, 12-step programs, group therapy, journaling, bodywork, yoga, exercise, and massage work; why one-to-one therapy can help us learn a new style of attachment; why changing the way we live and the nature of our relationships can change the way we think and feel, and vice versa; and why quick fixes don’t work but why a new design for living does.

Too much time spent in a deeply dissociated state can contribute to PTSD. Additionally, lesser forms of dissociation can become an unconscious solution that can impair our ability to be “present” and to connect in other situations. For example, a child dissociating in a classroom where he’s scared may be a child who has trouble paying attention. Or an adult who dissociates in an intimate relationship may not be present enough to truly live in the relationship and understand it.

even though the false self is meant to protect the more vulnerable self, it actually has the effect of weakening it. When people who have become dependent on false-self functioning go into therapy or enter a 12-step program, they can go through a period of feeling very vulnerable and shaky because they are removing their coping strategy and exposing the pain underneath it. But over time, new healthy emotional habits get created, and new ways of healthy coping get practiced and adopted.

They may adopt elaborate defenses designed to look good or seem normal, withdraw into their own private world, or compete for the little love and attention that is available. In the absence of reliable adults, siblings may become parentified and try to provide the care and comfort that is missing for each other, or they may become co-opted by one parent as a surrogate partner, filling in the gaping holes and massaging the sore spots of a family in a constant low level of crisis. This is on-the-job training for codependency.

The same taboos against genuine feeling that were in place in his childhood will clamp down around him all over again and he’ll become what we might call emotionally illiterate. He won’t put words to his feelings, much less talk them over. So the more frustrated his wife becomes, the more he’ll withdraw or blow up or freeze. In this vicious circle, a past issue comes to life in the present.

Our bodies don’t really distinguish between physical danger and emotional stress. The natural fear response associated with our fight/flight apparatus causes the body to react to physical or emotional crisis by pumping out sufficient quantities of stress chemicals, like adrenaline, to get our hearts pumping, muscles tightening, and breath shortening, in preparation for a fast exit or a fight.

Even cleaning up branches and debris after a hurricane can allow those affected to restore a sense that they can do something to improve their situation, which counters the PTSD symptom of learned helplessness. Children can counter their own sense of helplessness by doing positive things for themselves, whether writing in a personal journal, helping to restore order in the house, engaging in fun or meaningful school activities that build their sense of having their own life, or getting a job to earn their own spending money.

One does not need to create some powerful therapeutic intervention in the life of a CoA in order to make a big difference. An open door, a couch to curl up on, an after-school snack, or a place to play can make the essential difference for CoAs: they just need a place to go that isn’t in a state of chaos, somewhere where they feel they can relax.

Healing trauma is healing codependency. As historical pain is processed rather than projected and the self becomes more distinct and present oriented, codependent behaviors begin to clear up naturally.

Children are naturally needy. When they feel that there is no room for their needs because the parents’ needs are sucking up all of the relationship oxygen, they develop circuitous ways of meeting their needs through others—codependency in the making. These kids often experience their parents’ needs as more immediate and important than their own. Children tend to feel that they are disappearing around their narcissistic parents. The message is strong that their parents are the center of the universe.

they assume another person will not want to meet their needs. So they attempt to meet their needs privately, within themselves and by themselves. Eventually they may feel uncomfortable even having needs, and so they try to hide them, even from themselves; they shut down that feeling within them. Their own inner worlds can feel hazy and confusing to them while the worlds of others seem clear and distinct.

Learned helplessness can be part of the ACoA trauma syndrome. In disaster situations, the smallest form of involvement can allow victims to be less symptomatic.

Distorted reasoning—which may take the form of rationalizing and justifying bizarre or unusual forms of behavior and relations—can be immature and can also produce core beliefs about life upon which even more distorted reasoning is based. For example, “he is only hitting me because he loves me.

Along with mistrust, hyperreactivity, hyperarousal, depression, and aggression, the numbing response and emotional constriction that are part of the trauma response may lead to the loss of ability to accept caring and support from others. As mistrust grows, so does the ability to accept love and support (van der Kolk 1987).

A person who escapes from an unhealthy family system while others remain mired within it may experience what is referred to as “survivor’s guilt.” The guilt one feels of being the one who “got away” while others may not have been able to.

People who have experienced trauma may have a tendency to isolate or to withdraw for safety into a lonely world of their own in order to avoid pain. Reaching out may make them feel too vulnerable or rejection sensitive, or they may be out of touch with their need for connection and support or not know how to bring it into their experience.

Reenactment patterns. It is a natural phenomenon of unresolved and unconscious pain that gets recreated over and over again in what psychologists call an attempt to “master pain.” Memory is state dependent, so we tend to re-create familiar patterns when confronted with like circumstances.

There are essentially three forms of memory, implicit or unconscious memory, explicit or conscious memory, and sensory or body/kinesthetic memory. Much of our childhood experience becomes part of our implicit (unconscious) memory and our sensory (body) memory.

Our experiences combine together forming a brain/body template, from which we operate throughout our lives. This may be one of the most important understandings we can have. Our early experiences literally weave themselves into our neural systems, becoming a neural basis for self-regulation and emotional sobriety.

Stay away from “victim thinking.” We need to understand that we may not have been to blame for being children in painful homes. However, we need to guard against getting too comfortable in the victim role. Change doesn’t happen by accident. Victim thinking can become entitled thinking and can interfere with our motivation toward change. Find other family models. Resilient children seek out other types of families as models. They often spend time with and marry into strong family networks.

They may become what family systems theorists call the “symptom bearer,” symptomatic on behalf of the whole family. Children who act out, for example, can have the effect of getting warring parents to pull together in order to address what’s going on for the child; thus, the family buys some more time, the focus is diverted from the parent’s or the family’s underlying problems, and homeostasis, albeit a costly one, is again achieved.

Those in the system who have the clarity or courage to act as whistle blowers, who attempt to reveal the truth of the family pathology, may be perceived by the family, which is steeped in denial, as in some way problematic. Naming the dysfunctional behavior becomes the sin, not the dysfunctional behavior itself. These members may be cut off, humiliated, or even hated if they get too close to the truth, though much of this may be unconscious.

Trauma affects the internal world of each person, their relationships, and their ability to communicate and be together in a balanced, relaxed, and trusting manner. It affects their emotional sobriety or ability to self-regulate. Due to the trauma-related defenses of dissociation and numbing, and the active avoidance and denial that characterize addicted or dysfunctional family systems, family members may not attach words to the powerful emotions they’re experiencing. Consequently they often have trouble talking about, processing, and working through the pain that they are in. In this way they lose one of their most available routes to processing pain and developing emotional balance and sobriety. Individuals in addictive or abusive systems may behave in ways consistent with the behaviors of victims of other psychological traumas; in other words, they are traumatized by the experience.

Simply bringing up the family’s problems causes other family members, who cannot and will not see their own pathology, to want to kill the messenger. Again, the message—the truth—threatens their survival as a system. WHEN

If ACoAs do not treat their own PTSD issues, they are at high risk for re-creating many of the types of dynamics that they grew up with in their own partnering and parenting, in one form of another. They likely do this without awareness, truly convinced that they are delivering the kind of care and attention that they never got. The problem is that their caring and loyalty may be fueled by some of their own unconscious and unmet needs and their children sense this and feel guilty and even resentful—but they don’t know why. If they felt underparented, for example, they may overparent; if they felt underprotected, they may overprotect; if they felt kept at a distance, they may even glue themselves to their children, suffocating them with more attention of a certain kind than is healthy.

We can take a daily inventory of how much exercise we get, how much sleep we get, our network of relationships, the meaning and sense of purpose that drives us, and the amount of stress we have. This inventory allows us to see if our lifestyles are supporting or undermining our ability to actualize positive change.

Otherwise, we may not understand how yesterday’s experiences are driving our behavior today. One-to-one therapy, 12-step programs, and group therapy are all places where this repair can occur. I have found the role-play techniques of psychodrama particularly useful here. Being able to momentarily inhabit the role of the confused, wounded, or even elated child, for example, allows the child within us to have a voice while the adult in us looks on.

We have understood and recognized how emotional trauma changes not only the mind and heart of a person, but the body as well; how living with chronic emotional pain affects what we now know to be our limbic system; how when the limbic system is impacted, our ability to regulate our emotions is undermined; and why we can’t “just get over it” when we have been impacted by the repeated mobilization of our own fear/stress response.

They may not even know they are angry; that anger may be quite unconscious and unprocessed. Another manifestation of unprocessed anger is depression. ACoAs may turn their anger against themselves and become listless, isolated, and sullen. Or they may act it out; they become the screw-up and blow up their own lives. They drink, drug, cut, or fall apart, engaging full-out in self-destructive behaviors that undermine their happiness and success. All of these are ways of not feeling the anger they carry.

The effects of being traumatized in childhood don’t tend to disappear on their own; they tend to reemerge later in some form of overreaction, compulsive behavior, learning difficulty, intimacy issues, addictions, or process addictions

Today there is help all around—articles abound on these subjects, 12-step rooms are around the corner, and help is down the hall in many schools and workplaces. But we have to reach out and take hold of the help. And we have to stick with it until we can create meaningful change in our lives.

The lack of sharing genuine feeling in the addicted home can also lead to isolation, a common feature of depression.

The more we isolate, the more out of practice we become at making connections with people, which can further isolate us. Support groups like 12-step programs are a godsend for those who fear direct connection as they do not require a formal “joining” and do not insist that people play a particular role.

It is also underscores why having a spiritual belief system, such as that in 12-step programs or faith-based affiliations, can be so helpful in personal healing and in restoring a sense of belonging to a community where one can easily access support and friendship. Having a spiritual belief system can play an important role in personal healing by providing both hope and a sense of security despite any ongoing familial and intrapsychic chaos. It can also help the person in pain to reframe suffering and give it positive meaning, which develops resilience.

Distorted reasoning can become intergenerational as children absorb, model, and live out their parent’s way of thinking about and handling distressing situations, and it can affect the health of relationships. Denial of someone’s behavior—for example, a distortion of the truth—is excessive minimization or rationalization. When we attempt to make distorted behavior seem somehow normal, we have to twist our own thinking to do so. Also, as children we make sense of situations with the developmental equipment we have at any given age; when we’re young, we either borrow the reasoning of the adults around us or make our own childlike meaning.

In other words, they are doing the necessary therapy to understand their trauma-related issues, but they are ignoring the needs of their bodies and not balancing their daily stressors with support and stress relief.

Emotional literacy is the ability to translate our emotions into words so that our feelings and thoughts can be held out in the intellectual space between two people, shared and reflected on, so that we can think about what we’re feeling. It is a natural outgrowth of sound emotional development. To attain and maintain emotional sobriety, we need to learn to tolerate our strong feelings and translate those feelings into words.

If we cannot tolerate our strong emotions and the physical sensations that accompany them, we will want to somehow get rid of them, to make them go away. When we can tolerate our powerful emotions and sensations without blowing up, withdrawing, or self-medicating, we can use the information that we gain from them to inform our thinking. Simply stated, if we don’t know what we feel, it’s hard to make sense of ourselves and make sense of another person. And it’s hard to communicate what we feel and tolerate listening to another person communicate what they feel.

When we can use our thinking mind to make sense and meaning of our limbic mind, we develop a feeling of mastery and self-confidence, knowing that we can find a way to deal with what life throws in our direction. We feel we have the skills necessary to cope with our lives, and at those moments when we can’t, we know how to ask for help.

Giving words to trauma begins to heal it. Hiding it or pretending it isn’t there creates a cauldron of pain that eventually boils over. That’s where addiction comes in: In the absence of sharing and receiving support, pain feels overwhelming. The person in pain reaches not toward people, whom he or she has learned to distrust, but toward a substance that he or she has learned can be counted on to kill the pain, to numb the hurt. Such actions are attempts to self-medicate, to manage emotional pain, but the relief is temporary and had at a huge price. Addicts may initially feel they have found a solution, but the solution becomes a primary problem: addiction. The longer traumatized people rely on external substances to regulate their internal worlds, the weaker those inner worlds become and, consequently, the fewer their available personal resources. Addicts become out of practice for living. Emotional muscles atrophy from lack of healthy exercise.

A trigger that is part of the healing process is recovery itself. During recovery, we “remember” what we have “forgotten.” For a moment it hurts all over again. But if we can get through that reexperiencing of the pain with the help of a solid recovery support network, there is freedom on the other side. Actually the fear of the pain is often worse than the pain itself.

This ability makes us more available to all of life. It builds self-confidence and inner strength.

When our anger sits within us and never gets worked through, or when we don’t have constructive ways of processing or dealing with it, we may try to get rid of it by projecting it at someone else, or we may try to drown out our frustration, resentment, and pain with alcohol, drugs, food, or compulsive behaviors.

we’re expressing in our adult lives the anger we had to hold in as children. Our anger might also be acting as a defense against deeper feelings of pain and helplessness. We need to get to the root so that we can change the pattern.

The thing about long-term or unresolved anger is we’ve seen it reset the internal thermostat. When you get used to a low level of anger all the time, you don’t recognize what’s normal. It creates a kind of adrenaline rush that people get used to. It burns out the body and makes it difficult to think clearly—making the situation worse…. When the body releases certain enzymes during anger and stress, cholesterol and blood pressure levels go up—not a good long-term disposition to maintain the body in.

If I forgive, I’ll no longer feel angry at the person for what happened. In my experience, anger can still come up, but when it does, we remind ourselves that we’ve decided it isn’t worth it to hold on to it any longer.

Naming and talking about the problem is crucial. While the problem sits unspoken in the emotional underbelly of the family, it affects everyone, but no one is really sure what they are feeling or why they’re feeling it. Nor do they necessarily understand why they have an impulse to act out, withdraw, or self-medicate. Family members feel crazy inside. They see one reality being shown on the surface, but they sense and pick up on a very different one that is denied. “No talk” rules and the family’s need to look good and present a “normal” face to the world may make pain denied and off-limits.

The cumulative effect of childhood toxic stress is part of what gives the ACoA trauma syndrome teeth. And though toxic stressors are common throughout society, some are more devastating than others. When CoAs move into adulthood with a history of childhood trauma, they are more vulnerable to being traumatized as adults (Krystal 1968).

The sad outcome, however, is that the false self becomes so well-constructed and adaptable—or garners so much acceptance, approval, or even power within the family that spawned it—that eventually the true self becomes lost to us (Horney 1950). We hide our true self so effectively that even we can’t find it. The false self is meant to absorb or take the pain that the child finds too overwhelming. The false self is largely unconscious. This false self is also sometimes seen as the “idealized self” (Horney 1950).

In working through the pain of a traumatic past, it is important to help clients to identify not only what hurt them, but what sustained them.

Because emotional and sensory memory are processed by and stored in the body, the most successful forms of therapy for trauma are experiential.

Though she is very talented in her work, she went blank when confronted with paperwork, and she felt too intimidated by her various employers, too disempowered and frozen within herself, to ask for help. After all, asking for help when she was young was not possible; that got her nowhere at best and abused at worst. Those core beliefs, that opening her mouth and speaking up would lead to trouble and that no one could help her, had lasted through adulthood. When Kathy could not manage an important part of her job, it triggered her back into the helplessness, choicelessness, and immobility she felt as a child.

Confrontation reduces the effects of inhibition,” reversing the detrimental physiological problems that result from inhibition. When we make a lifestyle of openly confronting painful feelings and we “resolve the trauma, there will be a lowering of the overall stress on the body.” Confrontation “forces a rethinking of events. Confronting a trauma helps people understand and, ultimately, assimilate the event.

A person who is abused or traumatized may develop dysfunctional defensive strategies or behaviors designed to ward off emotional and psychological pain. These might include self-medicating with chemicals (drugs or alcohol), as well as behavioral addictions that affect their brain chemistry (bingeing, purging or withholding food), or engaging in high-risk or high-intensity activities such as excessive work behaviors, risky sex or gambling). These behaviors affect the pleasure centers of the brain, enhancing “feel-good” chemicals, thus minimizing pain. This means of handling trauma can lead to the disease of addiction.

But even blessed and intelligent families lose it when their emotional problems overwhelm them. For our families it appeared to be alcoholism that led to relationship trauma … or was unhealed relationship trauma the prequel that led to using alcohol to self-medicate emotional pain?

The limbic system plays an important role in guiding the emotions that stimulate the behavior necessary for self-preservation and survival of the species. It is responsible for such complex behaviors as feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction, and it also assigns free-floating feeling of significance, truth, and meaning to experience” (MacLean, 1985). “Destruction of parts of the limbic system abolishes social behavior, including play, cooperation, mating, and care of the young” (van der Kolk 2005).

It gets stored as a frozen sense memory (body memory) with little reason or understanding attached to it. These painful memories may not get processed, understood, and placed into the overall context of one’s life. They may become banished from consciousness by one of our psychological defenses of dissociation or numbing. They may get “forgotten.” But unfortunately, what we don’t know can hurt us. What we can’t consciously feel or remember can still have great power over us. As children from families that contain trauma, we may find ourselves moving into adult roles carrying unconscious or only partly conscious burdens that we aren’t fully aware of, that interfere with our happiness. In other words, unresolved pain from yesterday gets transferred onto the relationships and circumstances of today without our knowing how or why. Part of what gets us into trouble is that our honest and genuine reactions to previous painful events may be unavailable to us, hidden even from ourselves. Consequently, we may be unable to trace back to their origins our strong reactions to the circumstances in the present. In other words, we don’t know that we don’t know.

In fact, it is precisely those early experiences that lay down the neural template from which we operate for the rest of our lives.

Intimacy, with its accompanying feelings of vulnerability and dependence, brought up every insecurity, unresolved wound, and frantic hope I had stored in me. All chickens came home to roost.

After reading it, I knew I had a serious problem. I don’t drink, so that wasn’t it. But everything else that characterized addiction—”stinkin’ thinking”; the kind of thinking that is loaded down with circular rationalizations, distortions, and denial of reality that made you feel either you’re crazy or everyone else is; repeating the same dysfunctional relationship patterns over and over and over again—I had it all.

But all of the rest was in me, absorbed a day at a time through living in a world where people were denying the reality that was all around us, denying it with the best of intentions, because that was what people in the 1950s were supposed to do with problems. Put on a happy face. Buck up. In our family, we didn’t have an emotional language in place for handling the losses and the incumbent pain and confusion we were experiencing. So we did what anyone does who visits a country where they can’t communicate. We scanned each other’s faces for information and a sense of what was going on. We spoke in short phrases. We used sign language. We developed antennae for reading people without words, and when the frustration built and we had no words to give civilized voice to what was going on inside of us, we burst open like hot water pipes or we turned off the water at its source. We disappeared.