Trauma is happening all the time, and not all of it is bad. If getting your hand slapped prevents you from ever trying to stick a spoon into an electrical outlet again, then the trauma of that moment is highly beneficial.
Sometimes our uncomfortable memories keep us out of situations that ultimately cause us harm. The trauma of remembering our drunken selves can be enough to prevent us from drinking again, and the trauma of a road accident can prevent us from ever driving like the reckless teenager we once were.
The focus of trauma therapy is major trauma; the transformational kind that can make belief in a happy life impossible. It can take many forms and is rarely easy to talk about. The most visceral trauma is prevalent in action movies, where murder, killing, rape, disaster, war, and reputation destruction are common themes.
But there is subtler trauma as well, like the kind that creeps up on you after 30 years of protecting yourself with volatile relationships and realizing you haven’t been happy in decades.
Trauma can be the result of the accumulative effects of recurring rejection from work applications, romantic interests, and attachment figures. It can also be happening without your knowledge, like living in denial about a cheating spouse after you caught them in bed with someone else.
Abandonment is a very quiet trauma, but one of the most severe kinds. It can happen at any age.
Here are a few real-life examples: You help your wife through medical school, then she gets pregnant by another man and leaves you to marry him. You spend years dedicated to a company that you love, giving up children’s birthdays, baseball games, and homecoming dance, and they fire you a year before retirement. You got the courage to ask your “best friend” dad why he didn’t protect you from his abusive new wife when you were a kid, and he never speaks to you again. You join your best friends in the lunch hall the first day after summer break, and the instant you sit down, they all stand up, call you a “faggot,” and walk away. At six years old, you give your mom an extra special Christmas gift, and she opens it in front of everyone, laughs, then gives it back and tells you to try harder next year.
The feelings that accompany real or perceived abandonment are something most codependents are familiar with. It is intolerable. When cortisol runs that high, when your stress becomes truly existential, it can feel like your whole body has gone radioactive.
Your molecules lose their gravity, your blood turns to bile, and your bones disintegrate within you. It is the kind of experience that can make your hair fall out, disrupt your heart, digestive system, and brain, for the rest of your life.
The person you were was destroyed because someone you built your life around, someone who you loved, and trusted, and who you believed loved you, simply disappeared. In some cases, the person is still there, but their love is not, and it is not unusual to do everything possible, sometimes for the rest of our lives, to get it back.
When someone you love dies, or withdraws their support, or affection, or betrays you, you react to feelings of abandonment. You will likely be returned to that long-forgotten primal state of having no real sense of time.
There is no sense of before now or after now. It is total submersion into eternity. Bombs are going off. Machine guns are shredding the concrete wall behind you. He is on top of you. Your child is being hit by a truck. The police are taking your father away. Your husband is threatening to kill you again. Your mom is in the emergency room because of an overdose.
When these moments are happening now, now is everything that ever was or could be. The world is fundamentally altered. The life you knew is gone. The person you used to be is gone.
You are at the emotional zero point, rock bottom, and most people work reactively to reconstruct their emotional universe as quickly as possible. It is no surprise that Stockholm Syndrome can manifest in a matter of hours, and can last a lifetime.
Nobody wants to be helpless, and most people can’t stand it. Every vice, addiction, and dependency you have ever heard of is directed at soothing precisely this feeling.
What is certain about trauma is that everyone has experienced it. I think part of the purpose of infant amnesia, the scientific term for why people don’t normally remember much before the age of two, is because of the intense and ongoing trauma that comes with being alive.
Nine months of warmth and the hum of your mother’s voice, then you are out in the cold, slapped on the behind, possibly circumcised, and the only thing you know how to do is cry. There is no way out except to learn to speak and understand your feelings.
Trauma is the moment when insecurity is born. There are traumas that most people will eventually share, like the death of a loved one. There are also idiosyncratic traumas that exist for only one individual, and finding them is where most good therapists earn their money.
It is also here that many codependents unravel themes in their lives that are so old they became blind to them. I call the task of uncovering the source of your codependent behavior, “Finding your cake.”
Once upon a time, Jimmy was attending his big brother’s birthday party. They were close in age, but when Jimmy’s brother was with his friends, Jimmy felt small. On the day of the party, Jimmy puffed out his chest, used the biggest words he knew, and stood a little taller each time he could make one of his brother’s friends laugh.
Then Jimmy’s mother began cutting the cake and handing it out on small paper plates. Jimmy’s mouth watered for the taste of red goo oozing from the middle of each slice. But it was all gone.
“Oh, sorry, Jimmy!” his mother exclaimed. She could see the heartbroken look on her son’s face. It was her fault because she actually forgot about him when she handed the last piece to a passing stranger, and she couldn’t accept it.
“Listen! It’s your brother’s special day, so you are going to have to be a grown-up now. Okay? Can you be a big man for mommy today? Good boy. Now make sure the guests have what they need!”
Jimmy was crushed, but he didn’t feel it for very long. He walked around, filled cups with different colors of soda, and took empty plates to the trash. He refused an invitation to play soccer with the kids because his mom needed him to be an adult.
They were partners now. Friends. Equals in a way. The other adults were astonished and made great theater over Jimmy’s maturity, wishing their children could be more like him.
Jimmy was fundamentally altered. He became a person who never accepted help from anyone. He always did for others and felt guilty any time others helped him. He never indulged in pleasure.
He never ate cake at his own birthday party because doing so would mean he was weak, immature, or threatening his adult friendship with mommy. He hated his birthday because nobody ever let him clean up, and it made him feel like a child for whom everyone was play-acting.
If he ever accepted help, or pleasure, or let someone else do something for him, he was transported back to that unbearable moment when he was left out and made to suffer an injustice. Vulnerable and six years old. He rejected the child he was for the role of an adult helper—all to protect his mother from the consequences of her actions. He was the victim of emotional incest.
Children are innocent. They do not and could never understand that their parents are anything but perfect. Even if you told them, as children, teens, or adults, many would be reluctant or unable to actually, deeply believe that their parents were selfish, immature, abusive, or flat-out wrong.
Rather than seeing that they were physically or emotionally abandoned, they blame themselves and often repeat the same relationship patterns in their romantic life; sacrificing themselves for someone they see as perfect.
So when that perfect parent stops talking to their child, withdraws their affection, favors another child more, forgets them at school, or rages at them, the effect on the child’s psyche can be catastrophic. It is trauma.
The child completely believes that they are a failure, with or without their caretaker telling them so. They will feel the fear of abandonment and adopt a family role that is dedicated to repairing the rift that they feel responsible for. That need to repair, fix, help, and stabilize are the core of codependency, and will last for as long as the wound that created it goes unacknowledged.
When we abandon ourselves, we also abandon our needs, preferences, and the right to author our own lives. We have been confronted by a feeling that we cannot tolerate, and react by cutting ourselves off from access to it. We often build a compensatory personality entirely to avoid the pain—a real, observable psychic fortress, to prevent anyone from ever having access to that feeling again, including ourselves.
At the core of the pain is a devastating belief, like, “My mother is only nice to me when I’m sad,” or “I don’t deserve my father’s love yet,” or “He’ll stop hitting me when he realizes how much I love him.”
The brand-new codependent abandons the part of themselves that cannot deny what it knows—that their parents or partner are unreliable, abusive, and downright selfish—and replaces it with the fixer, the hero, the comedian, the overachiever, or the reliable one who is always available to help others feel better. They make sure everyone gets their cake while making a point of having none for themselves.
“Trauma” is not a condition. It is a cause. How that cause ends up affecting you is not always easy to predict. However, there is a chance that the overwhelming emotions you experience when your people-pleasing strategy fails is a flashback reminiscent of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
PTSD is a condition that revolves around learned fears. Viewed this way, it could be said that codependent behavior is a continuing reaction to trauma, much like aftershocks that follow a major earthquake and can resemble PTSD.
To improve PTSD symptoms in a codependent, clinical focus on the most prevalent cause of distress (flashbacks, dreams, irritability, fear) will take the main stage. One of the most effective treatments is called Cognitive Processing Therapy, which can dramatically reduce symptoms for over 80% of participants when compared to the control group. Some therapists specialize in this.
Other options include Eye-Movement and Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), shown to have remarkable efficacy in several case studies, and the coming wave of psychedelic-assisted mental health therapy.
There is a lot of hope for the psychedelic revolution in psychiatric medicine, but currently this remains unavailable to most of the world, and is absolutely not something you should do by yourself. If you wouldn’t attempt to perform brain surgery without a guide, then don’t go cracking your mind open with psychedelics until you have a professional at your side who has been down that road before.
For a more comprehensive book on PTSD that may be related to your situation, check out Complex PTSD by Pete Walker. It’s not an easy read, but knowing more can only help you. There is no more comprehensive and accessible book about trauma than Besel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.
No trauma is unmanageable. A lot of it can be permanently removed, and what remains can stop being disruptive to your happiness. What you need to do is find your cake and finally eat it.
If you are an American veteran and aren’t getting the help you need from the VA, see if there is a “Vet Center” in a city near you. They have counselors and community resources ready for you. The veteran’s crisis line (USA) and Veteran’s Gateway (UK) is also available to you, and you don’t need to be at the point of suicide to call: USA – 800-273-8255, UK – 0808 802 1212.
If you are a civilian and need local resources, call your local university library, or the university’s community or mental health center. The words, “community health resources” can point you in the right direction.
————Reality Check————
The emotion may be stronger than you, but you will last longer than it. It might help, the next time your emotions overwhelm you, to say exactly this out loud: “This feeling is strong, but it never lasts.”
You aren’t stuck in eternity. You have the benefit of time to help heal you. You can and will outlast your trauma. Do not give up.