Getting Discomfortable with Trauma

Trauma is something we have all experienced to some degree or another, and it’s something that we are all probably going through right now during this pandemic. So I wanted to try to explore what trauma is all about, as much for myself as for anyone else. Bear in mind that I’m no expert on trauma (or anything for that matter). I’m in the process of figuring trauma out because shame is often seen as a form of trauma. 

When I think of trauma, the metaphor that comes to mind is of being a kid stuck at the top of the high diving board at the local swimming pool. Your friend dares you to jump off the highest diving platform, and it looks easy enough from below. But when you climb all the way to the top, you look over the edge and freeze. It seems way too scary and dangerous! But you can’t turn around now either, just walking down seems scary and mortifying, what with the whole pool seemingly watching you. So you’re frozen and stuck. No way forward, no way back. It’s a seemingly impossible situation. So your system crashes, you dissociate from your body, or you collapse. Inevitably, some adult needs to help you down.

But because our system shut down before it could resolve that intense emotional experience, it’s like some part of our nervous system is trapped on top of that diving board forever. This single traumatic event becomes an instantaneous lesson about survival that our body will likely never forgot. Trauma has just taught us not to try to climb up or jump off of scary tall things ever again, a lesson it will enforce in future by shutting down whenever something remotely similar triggers that trauma. So you won’t be able to climb up a diving platform again even if you want to. 

But there are other forms of trauma, like shame, which condition us more gradually (especially when we are children) through bursts of unpleasant feeling whenever we perceive ourselves as being in danger of social rejection, scorn, neglect, or disrespect. This subtle but relentless conditioning is also a form of rapid, indelible learning, and it actually “helps” us construct our very sense of reality based on cultural pressure.