That’s Your Trauma Talking
Last year I had the opportunity to hear Gabor Mate, MD speak over several days at a conference.
He is the epitome of the compassionate witness, the person you’d want sitting in a confessional. His professional experiences in addiction medicine, ADHD, and trauma as well as his own personal experience, lead him to look at illness from a mind-body perspective.
“What if the disease is actually a process, and expression of your life, representing something about your life. When we look at people we tend to look at their brokenness in the current medical model. When we look at these diseases, is it possible we just don’t understand them. What if the failure has to do with our lens?
Chronic illness arises from a disconnection from the self.
Healing, therefore, requires reconnection to the self, a transformation in the relationship with the self. This is why some people will say later that the disease is the best thing that ever happened to them. The day you forgive yourself, is the day you actually heal. In order to forgive yourself, you need understanding and compassion.
New studies are telling us what traditional medicine and spiritual teachers have always known.
That wholeness was there all along, we’ve just lost touch with it. There is a connection between beliefs and cell biology. Our beliefs are born of our experiences and at one time fulfilled a particular purpose. But some of those beliefs were meant to be context-specific for survival in young childhood, and we continue to hold them and believe them later in life.
Everything you don’t like about yourself at one point served a purpose. You can reconfigure your relationship to those things.”
Dr. Mate also pointed out how many of those who chose to speak about their situations, their pain, held themselves to a standard that they would not hold others to, repeatedly prosecuting themselves for transgressions without mercy.
At the end of the week, he asked, “Why didn’t everyone ask for help this week?”
There were many answers, my own among them:
I have trouble asking for help
I was afraid of being judged
I was afraid of taking up too much time
I was afraid of taking your time
I expect to handle it myself
I don’t want to bother other people
(Ok, those are all also my answers.)
Dr Mate then said “That’s your trauma talking. All these reasons are just trauma imprints.” They served you at the time that you felt traumatized, but now they are outdated coping mechanisms. They were learned, but they can be unlearned.
Dr Mate clarified that by trauma he didn’t necessarily mean just major, identifiable violence, accidents or neglect, but the little traumas of everyday life.
“Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of the incident The problem is not necessarily what happened, it’s the energy that you’re carrying around about it.
Trauma is when bad things happened but also when things that should have happened didn’t.
Trauma, in the physical sense, is a wound.
The healing of a wound involves the production of scar tissue. Scar tissue doesn’t have normal sensation, it’s numb. Scar tissue is hard, inflexible, and contracts to cause pain to the tissues caught in the scar.
Trauma in the psychological sense does the same. It interferes with your ability to feel or know what you are feeling.
It interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It induces fear, so you act out of fear. It causes pain, so you act out of pain. Without realizing it, your life is regulated by fear and pain. Trauma shapes your view of the world but disconnects you from actual experience.”
The physical analogy that he used makes so much sense to me, as I have a fair amount of experience with wound healing.
I can easily think of all the times I reacted with inappropriate anger directed outward or self-hatred directed inward. And I thought that was my only trauma reaction.
I don’t think of myself as someone who has experienced a lot of trauma. And yet, his definition broadens what I usually think of as trauma. And during this time of sheltering in place, I have discovered another one. A reaction that began under the guise of “self-care”.
In residency, when I wasn’t working. I would rest or relax. And maybe at one point it really was adaptive, so I could recover from the stressful days of taking care of patients and constantly striving to be enough. Even after I finished training, I still tended to approach my free time this way. Doing “something” felt like too much, I still felt like I needed to “protect my energy”.
We are all going through a stressful experience right now, collectively and individually. My natural inclination is to want to fix it but I feel helpless to make a difference and then do nothing.
That helplessness and inaction is not a response, it is my trauma reaction. And it’s keeping me from being present and able to engage in my life the way I want to.
But, if the trauma isn’t what happened to you but inside you, then you can change the meaning for you anytime. You can reconfigure your relationship to what happened to you and what you made it mean.
If you make the meaning, you’re the creator of the story, and you can create the ending that serves you.