Trauma Pathways: Personal & Biographical Trauma
In the article, What Is Trauma?, I share about the devastating trauma of my brother’s death when I was thirteen years old. Like many, I experienced violence, loss, pain and betrayal early in my life. I lived with a shaky sense of ground and trust in life or a higher power. The early traumatic experiences left my developing brain and psyche with, what I later understood to be, post-traumatic stress disorder. In this article we’re going to explore one of three types of trauma called personal and biographical trauma.
What is trauma?
Trauma is anything that disconnects or fragments us from our authentic selves and sense of wholeness. It’s typically the result of a shocking event (or a series of repeated disempowering events) that overwhelm the central nervous system, and change how we react to feelings of threat, anxiety, and overwhelm. It can fracture our sense of safety and well-being, and imprint us with vigilant states of tracking for danger, even when we’re not aware of doing so.
You can learn more about the nature of trauma in What Is Trauma? and how it affects us in 8 Common Impacts of Trauma.
Three common trauma pathways
There is a growing acknowledgment of our need as a society to help one another heal from personal trauma, since we are each a part of the whole. I believe that with each person’s personal healing, we become a step closer to increased harmony and integration for the whole collective of humanity.
The three pathways of trauma are:
Personal & biographical trauma
Ancestral & inherited trauma
Collective & cultural trauma
In this article, we’ll explore the first pathway, personal trauma.
Trauma pathways: Personal trauma
To investigate the heart of personal trauma is to gaze through three influencing factors:
physical and psychological trauma;
attachment and developmental trauma;
expanded cosmologies of trauma
Let’s explore them one-by-one.
1. Physical and psychological trauma
The most obvious physical traumas are the kinds that are treated in the emergency room of a hospital. Meanwhile, psychological trauma often remains hidden in plain sight.
Psychological trauma is most frequently a result of shock, a violation of boundaries and trust, the loss of a dream or someone important, feeling rejected, abandoned, exiled, or victimized by an abuse of power used against us.
Victims of violence, such as war crimes, rape, or domestic abuse suffer devastating physical and psychological traumas that often cause consequential disruption in their ability to cope and engage with life.
I wonder how often psychological trauma is diminished in our culture through the doctrine of be strong, get busy, and move on, like it was for me when my brother died?
Previously, the majority of our nation’s soldiers returned home and were swiftly plunged back into society, with a nervous system loaded up with unresolved trauma, hyper-vigilance, and dissociation. I’m so grateful to see non-profit organizations and financial resources directed towards evolutionary healing protocols that support traumatized soldiers who have returned from unspeakable violence.
Trauma hidden in plain sight
What do I mean by trauma ‘hidden in plain sight’? If we continually override our needs and boundaries to please another (or maintain connection by avoiding conflict), we’ll likely eventually grow resentful towards the other person. Or we may spiral into shame, fear of being selfish, or helpless when we need something that isn’t seen, honored, or understood by the one we wish to bond and connect with.
Unknowingly, we diminish our authentic needs and truth in order to avoid disconnection from others, while we simultaneously exile parts of ourselves. This is one of the many paradoxes of being human. The result is lingering high states of anxiety that often go unresolved without properly shaking it off, by instead suppressing our feelings and engaging with addictive behaviors that either push the feelings aside or numb us such as excessive busyness.
Here is another example of trauma hidden in plain sight. I’ve witnessed a dear friend whose dream since childhood was to become a mother. After multiple miscarriages and various unsuccessful medical treatments, she collapsed into the grief that physically becoming a mother was not her path. It shattered her to her core like trauma does sometimes.
No one could fully understand the pain of her lost dream and broken heart, compounding the despair, feelings of isolation, and aloneness.
Dreams that die can shock us into a new life or leave us frozen in time. Trauma moves in mysterious ways, as does each one of us in how we meet our life and the inevitable challenges it will bring.
2. Attachment and developmental trauma
Psychological and developmental traumas are often the drivers of anxiety, depression, suicide, violence, and war escalating at warp speed in our world. It’s important that we normalize and recognize trauma as one of the root causes of our suffering in relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world.
Attachment and developmental trauma occur early in life and disrupt normal sequencing of brain development, including our emotional, physical, cognitive, and social development. Unlike single-event traumas, core wounds resulting from attachment and developmental trauma are subtly seeded over time.
attachment and regulation
The developing psyche of a child seeks basic nourishments, such as safety, connection, power, freedom, and value. These primal needs are as valid as our body craving food, water, and warmth to survive. As children, we look to caregivers, friends, teachers, camp counselors, sports coaches, church clergy, and neighbors to show us the world and how it operates. Being judged, neglected, or violated by those we rely upon for safety, belonging, and survival is devastating.
Each of us has a built-in superpower called self-regulation. Our nervous system is built to experience threats, seek safety, and move towards resolution.
How we were attuned to during the first 24 months of seeking safety, connection, bonding, and attachment is a significant influencing factor for whether we learn to self-regulate. Our attachment blueprint will determine how much we trust ourselves from the inside-out, which is directly connected to our ability to regulate stress and anxiety. Do we openly ask for and take in consistent loving attention, nurturing, and support from others? Or do we feel missed, lost, and on our own to cope with high states of anxiety and fear?
When a child learns how to regulate their stress, they develop a confidence that runs deep, and grounds them into the root of who they are. They become empowered with resilience, inner strength, and emotional intelligence. Self-regulation is a key factor to what I spoke to earlier about how trauma is subjective based on how we respond and regulate the experiences.
Our attachment and developmental experiences become the template that influences our relationship to ourselves, others and all of life.
Learn more in my article, How Is Our Attachment Template Formed?
The primal need to belong
Research has shown that, as mammals, we thrive and unfurl into our most expanded and authentic selves when we feel our place of belonging and value. Learn more on this topic in We’re Wired to Connect and Protect.
When children don’t feel seen accurately and are taught to repress their emotions and body sensations, they lose contact with their primal intelligence and their open-hearted ways of seeing, relating, collaborating, and playing in the world.
Developmental trauma can become a perpetual feeling of being unloved and unwelcome for who we are. As adults, we might compensate for fears of unworthiness through various forms of achievement-seeking and attempts to prove our worth and value. Developmental trauma can also include not feeling valued for our presence, but instead for our ability to perform, entertain, or countless other ideations of who we think, or are told, we need to be in order to belong and feel worthy.
As adults, our relationship patterns reveal our beliefs about what we expect from love, who we think we need to become to receive love, how we strategize to maintain a sense of belonging, and the behaviors and choices we make to affirm our worth and place in the order of life.
Patterns that play out in our adult relationships are an important signpost of lingering developmental trauma. You can map your relationship patterns in my complimentary ebook, How to Rewire Limiting Relationship Patterns To Deepen Trust and Safety.
3. EXPANDED COSMOLOGIES OF TRAUMA
While attachment and developmental trauma is a huge key in our personal story, there are additional, unseen factors at play. Many more than I can even imagine!
For example, some cosmologies and schools of thought believe that trauma imprints are also attributed to past life material that we’ve (intentionally or unintentionally) reincarnated to heal. Some refer to this as karma. Others interpret this as an evolutionary path to embody the fullness of the human experience, life after life, charted by our soul’s unique destiny.
Some believe that we come into this life with the intentional purpose to engage in a specific life curriculum. For example, if someone wishes to learn how to heal themes of violence and betrayal, then they may be born into a time of civil unrest and war, or into a family environment that plays out these themes.
The transformation and healing occur as a result of, and in spite of the trauma. In this scenario, our inner hero or heroine eventually rises from the ashes of feeling victimized and instead finds access to their power and integration. You can read more about the 12 phases of the hero/heroine’s journey in this blog article.
We each have the freedom to create our own meaning-making about where trauma comes from, and how we want to integrate and heal the parts of us that feel fragmented, dissociated, or isolated at a fundamental level.
Self-inquiry: Personal trauma
Here is a list of questions to kickstart or deepen your investigation of personal trauma.
What patterns in your adult relationships may be pointing to attachment and developmental trauma?
As a child, were you taught how to self-regulate? Were your emotions welcomed, ignored, or shamed by your conditioning environment? As a result, how do you manage stress and overwhelming emotions as an adult?
Are you aware of patterns of dissociation and freezing when you feel threatened? This can range from feeling paralyzed by decision-making, numb, or immobilized in the presence of certain authority figures or predatory characters, to finding yourself lost in thought for hours and disconnected from what’s occurring in the present moment.
What is your relationship to accessing your body for guidance and wisdom? Is it safe and accessible to lean into your body wisdom?
What are your beliefs about the origins of trauma? Do you believe there is a soulful intention behind your life’s unique unfolding?
WHERE TO GO FROM HERE?
If you’d like to continue to explore the journey of addressing and healing trauma, I’ve written a series of articles on the topic:
Trauma Pathways: Personal Trauma