April 2021
“Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.” Gabor Mate.
We all react differently to things that happen to us and what can feel catastrophic to one person may not be felt that way by another. Some people just seem to ride the waves without being too much affect by what they experience. That said, we can misjudge a person’s reaction when all we see is how they are behaving. A person showing outwards signs of distress may not be in the same degree of shock as the person who is simply sitting staring ahead in silence. The silent one may continue to feel distress many decades after the event, but still not show it. They might be experiencing sleeplessness, nightmares, panic attacks; they might resort to excessive alcohol consumption and taking drugs, or none of these things, but still give the appearance of coping perfectly well.
I’m reminded of one of my first clients many years ago who came to me because he was feeling suicidal. He’d taken early retirement as an aircraft mechanic and a week after giving up work was suddenly inundated with memories from his time in the air force where his job was flying helicopters picking up bodies during the Vietnam war. He’d kept it ‘together’ throughout his working life after Vietnam, not showing any emotion, just pressing on, doing his job. He maintained a holding position, until he couldn’t anymore.
The person yelling and sobbing after traumatic events may be coping better than the silent one. Yet we, in our society, judge the former as being more traumatized than the latter. Thinking here of the quick condemnation of Lindy Chamberlain on the tragedy of losing her baby to a dingo at Uluru in 1980. She showed no emotion at all and was judged as being a cold, calculating child killer, when in fact she was frozen in utter shock.
The Perth psychologist and trauma counselling specialist Michael Tunnicliffe who taught trauma counselling in my Master of Counselling degree explained that the crying person was already adjusting and adapting to the reality of what they have just experienced. The silent person might be numb, not feeling anything, as if the event did not happen. The silent person has got stuck, as it were, along the path to adjusting and adapting to their new reality.
Stuckness in shock is felt bodily. Freezing in fear is what animals do (called ‘tonic immobility’), and it is a survival response, but unlike other animals, people can get stuck there. We do this by repeating our fears in a sort of emotional loop and thus continue the frozen response. If you watch a cat encountering something frightening, they freeze, but then shake it off. Too often we humans recapitulate our fear response by overthinking it. This is where counselling comes to its own. If such a person can talk their experience through, with plenty of emotional and somatic support, then the fear response doesn’t tend to get stuck.
Peter Levine, a pioneer in trauma therapy, (cf Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma) notes that certain things can effectively loosen the frozen response. He might ask the client to put one hand on their forehead and the other on their chest, or put one hand under their armpit and the other on their upper arm in a kind of self hug. Tapping your whole body or tapping just their hand also works for some people. Such movements contain feelings of panic and lessens the sense of having a hole in a person’s boundaries.
When the sense of frozenness is old, dance, massage, gentle breathing exercises or vocalizations are good ways of releasing seized up emotion. For immediate help, just sitting listening with the person speak whatever it is they want to say really helps. The key is, gently does it. What doesn’t help is more exposure to the same sort of traumatic event.
Just being with a person helps give a sense of safety and containment, which is a beginning to healing.
