First Aid for the Soul

Recently, I read a quote on the website of Attachment & Trauma Network Inc. that hit me on a very personal level. Here’s what it said, in part,

“Others had been diagnosed with a laundry list of unrelated disorders…Yet these children’s problems have developed in the context of trauma and developmental disruptions. Because no other diagnostic options are available, the symptoms professionals see often lead them to diagnosing unrelated disorders such as bipolar disorder, ADHD, conduct disorder, RAD, autism, and a host of anxiety disorders.”

Having had a few of these diagnoses pinned on me through the years, I was struck by the variety of labels professionals have given to what is now sometimes being called “developmental trauma”. Still, I do not want to add this to all the other diagnoses without first considering a question:

Is developmental trauma a diagnosis for the symptoms or the cause of all the symptoms?

Let me just provide here the laundry list of symptoms all these diagnoses have in common: Hyper vigilance, anxiety, displaced anger, emotional dysregulation, executive functioning issues, emotional instability, sensory sensitivity, social and interpersonal challenges as with difficulty with relationships, trust, communication, and social cues, comorbidity, neurobiological dysregulation, and stigma and misunderstanding.

I think you can see why a mis-diagnosis is not only possible but very highly likely to occur. Often, the diagnosis is colored by the background and experience of the professional.

I like to think of developmental trauma using a metaphor, which I believe illustrates how it is a cause of the symptoms rather than a diagnosis (read “label” for the one afflicted).

If you throw a rock at a window, it creates a hole and many cracks.

If you think of the original trauma as the rock, the hole is the injury, and the cracks are the symptoms and behaviors that radiate from that injury (the hole).

The cracks get named, ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, RAD, Autism, Anxiety Disorder, and on and on.

Specialists become expert at diagnosing these cracks…but so many diagnoses have so many of these symptoms in common, how do we know which diagnosis is correct for which person? Let me speak for those of us who exhibit the symptoms:

We who exhibit symptoms and behaviors that have been identified as one or more of these labels are then put into boxes and treated accordingly by the experts…yet too few experts are focusing on where the rock hit!

Except for the experts on developmental trauma.

Let’s look at that hole for a minute. What happened to us that created this tear in our very soul? So much so that we do not grow into adults with healthy ways of being in the world! Instead, we develop symptoms and behaviors that we use to protect our Self from the pain emanating from that injury.

An even more important question to consider is this:

When did that wound (the word Gabor Maté uses to describe trauma) happen?

Maté, in his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, really zeros in on that word “developmental” in the expression “developmental trauma” and describes much of what is implied by the “when” of it:

“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past…”

Maté’s book really validated my experience and beliefs about trauma. It explained so vividly why I had developed these defensive and aggressive survival behaviors. When I read his words, I felt seen, rather than judged and labeled.

Because nobody knows how we feel. And we don’t know how we are supposed to feel.

It’s a guessing game…for us and the experts. And all the labels are just interpretations of how we project our pain into the world.

How about you? Have you had an experience like mine of being diagnosed in multiple different ways and, yet have not found in these diagnoses a proper fit for how you feel?

After all, the information that was used to diagnose you was taken from how you behave, reports from your family members about your behaviors, and the experts’ subjective evaluation of your behaviors.

But, had anyone ever asked how you feel and when you started to feel this way? Because, in all my 35 years of diagnosis and treatment,

nobody asked me.

I came to my understanding of the trauma I experienced in my early life mostly through my somatic experiencing training. It was in the classes I took and the books I devoured, that I first discovered the term “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”, aka PTSD. In fact, in a Somatic Experiencing course, I heard it being called “Post Traumatic Stress Injury”, so I began replacing the “D” with an “I”, as in PTSI.

The soldiers from our wars do not have a dis-order, they have been injured.

Dis-orders feel like a life-sentence with no hope, and with a future of having to be medicated…forever.

Injuries, on the other hand, are temporary and can be healed.

I personally prefer thinking I have been injured and can heal. An injury from developmental trauma does not have to be a life sentence. Even though the trauma happened when we were at such a vulnerable place in our lives, we can grow and learn to live in a healthy way due to neuroplasticity.

So, what do we do? I have learned that to focus on the cracks has been confusing and non-productive. It wasn’t helpful for me to hear I have a spectrum disorder without any solution. Each crack is diagnosed and connected with a medication you can take.

But, what about the hole?

With consistent practice of somatic awareness, we have a chance to heal most of the wound because

the focus is on where the rock hit.

We don’t name behaviors and defense mechanisms.

We resolve them.

Meaning, we spend time in the hole, in the void, in the discomfort, and give it attention, nurture the void, give it love.

And slowly but surely the wound is healing. It’s like playing a mini video of the rock hitting the window and then playing it backwards. See how the cracks are disappearing!

Some conditions can be healed or partially healed, and that’s the good news to focus on.

In my case, I have healed from daily panic attacks and no longer suffer from alternating periods of mania and depression, all because of my consistent practice of mindful meditation and somatic awareness. Again, let’s refer to Gabor Maté to understand why this is important when it comes to healing from developmental trauma:

“Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present…Until you reach that point, you are unconscious…In present awareness we are liberated from the past.”

So, what am I saying?

There is a way to re-connect with your Self – who you were before the rock hit.

Here you will find your authentic Self, the one you can feel good about, the one you know to be your best Self.

If you are interested in learning more about how to heal from past trauma, or my BEAM LIFE program, contact me on my website at www.evaangvert.com or email me at [email protected]