Articles

Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma

Janina Fisher, PhD

What is the living legacy of trauma?
The living legacy of trauma describes the way in which past traumatic events do not just leave scars upon victims that clearly have been inflicted in the past. Trauma leaves behind a living legacy of emotions (fear, shame, anger) and physical responses (startling, impulses to run or hide or fight, even against one’s own body) that continue to be stimulated by the subtlest of cues in people’s day to day lives. Trauma doesn’t feel like a past event when its effects are constantly stimulated by normal everyday things.

Traumatic experiences leave a “living legacy” of effects that often persist for years and decades after the events are over. Historically, it has always been assumed that re-telling the story of what happened would resolve these effects. However, survivors report a different experience: Telling and re-telling the story of what happened to them often reactivates their trauma responses, overwhelming them rather than resolving the trauma. To transform traumatic experiences, survivors need to understand their symptoms and reactions as normal responses to abnormal events. They need ways to work with the symptoms that intrude on their daily activities, preventing a life beyond trauma.

How does trauma affect the brain and body?
When we perceive threat or danger, the brain and body mobilize to defend. A rush of adrenaline increases heart rate and respiration to speed oxygen to muscle tissue to give our bodies the energy to flee or fight. Very importantly, the prefrontal cortex, the thinking and verbal brain, is inhibited to enable instinctive responding without overthinking. Then, once we have survived, our parasympathetic nervous systems are activated to help us recover—or, if it’s not safe to defend ourselves, to initiate total submission responses that drain our energy and stop our ability to take action.

That cycle does not stop once we’ve recovered, however. It continues to be stimulated by threat cues, including such cues as the time of day, day of the week, season, weather conditions, as well as common experiences such as other people frowning or not responding, failing to understand, making us wait, disappointing or hurting our feelings. Each time we encounter a trauma-related trigger, the emergency stress response system reacts with the same cycle of fight, flight, or submission responses.

How does trauma negatively affect people’s lives?
Traumatized individuals then live at the mercy of triggers and triggering. Since their trauma responses continue to be activated on a daily basis, they don’t feel safe. If their minds and bodies are still fighting the threat, they suffer from problems with anger (at themselves as well as others), aggression, or self-inflicted violence in the form of self-harm and suicide attempts.

If their flight responses continue to be triggered, they experience impulses to distance even from those they love, struggle with commitment, or they engage in addictive or eating disordered behavior that numbs and quiets the fight and flight responses or stimulates energy so they feel more powerful. Depression, anxiety, chronic pain, OCD, borderline personality disorder, and even schizophrenia are all highly associated with a history of trauma.

How does the legacy of trauma influence people's lives?
Very few people are aware of the connection between their symptoms and difficulties to the traumatic events of their past. In fact, they usually expect themselves to be over it by this point in their lives. Worst of all, many survivors believe that the symptoms are signs that they are crazy. Not knowing that they are still being impacted by the living legacy of the events, they tend to blame themselves or to blame those around them—or a combination of both. So often, they believe, “It was all my fault,” “There is something wrong with me,” or “I don’t deserve to be treated well.” Others believe, “People just want to use me,” “My spouse doesn’t care about me,” “No one respects me.”

What does recovering from trauma entail?
Recovery from trauma is much more than remembering what happened and disclosing it to a witness, as so many therapists were taught to believe in the 90s. We now know that recovery includes waking up the prefrontal cortex with psychoeducational and mindfulness techniques so that the body and nervous system become calmer. It includes learning to recognize the implicit nonverbal feeling and body memories as memory, rather than as signs of alarm, to work with the bodily and nervous system effects of the trauma, and to understand impulsive or self-destructive behavior as driven by trauma responses. Recovery must include acceptance of what has happened and acceptance of one’s self—letting go of the shame and beliefs in unworthiness and welcoming the child we all once were as young and innocent, hurt rather than damaged.

If we don’t get lost in the horrific details of the events or their gravity and instead celebrate how ingeniously our clients survived, it is a very hopeful field. I am always inspired by my clients, by how they adapted even as tiny children to the maladaptive world into which they born, and by how they learn to be here now and even blossom in a life beyond trauma.

Every symptom of trauma is a badge of courage that tells part of the story of how that individual survived. Depression and hopelessness make us smaller, slower, and less visible. Anxiety keeps us alarmed and on guard. Shame robs us of speech, and self-blame keeps us quiet and compliant. Drugs and alcohol, self-harm, restricting food, or binging all offer relief from overwhelming and incapacitating symptoms—until they become severe and life-threatening issues in their own right. To understand one’s symptoms as an act of courage and ingenuity reduces shame and increases the hope that if they were ingenious enough to survive, there is hope for the future..... Traumatic Childhood Experience Leave Lasting Legacies