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As a general rule, people are quite aware of the sources of their pain.
Losses, injuries and abuse are rarely invisible to the sufferer. What people often do not understand however, are the strategies that they use to handle the experience of being hurt and how these strategies cause continuing problems for them in daily living.
What kinds of strategies?
Someone who insists on avoiding thinking about a traumatic past must avoid any mental pathway that leads in that direction.
This avoidance may require turning to drugs, alcohol, sexual addiction, internet addiction, workaholism, excessive exercise etc.. .all forms of self distraction
There may be a preference for talking about physical ailments which can be safely discussed and attract the care the individual needs without touching on the traumatic past.
Sometimes it is accomplished by keeping the mind firmly focused on the lives, troubles and needs of others... making them too important or stifling them with over-concern.
In social life it may lead to inventing excuses to avoid conversations or situations of intimacy such as private parties and casual social gatherings such as office lunches, where the subject of the personal past may arise.
It may lead the individual to insist on emotional distance from others, or to unconsciously break off friendships or romantic relationships before they deepen sufficiently ...or at the point where the other begins to express interest in their past.
In some cases it may prevent people from starting families of their own for fear of awakening their own memories or because they believe themselves to be too damaged to be a good parent.
Traumatic emotions are often denied to avoid re-experiencing the feelings of fear and powerlessness that accompanied the original trauma. Numbness replaces them so that the individual often feels distant from their own feelings and alienated from others. Often the avoidance strategies have been so successful and so pervasive that the traumatic experience has barely even been put into words.
Chronic depression is often the result
The result of all this avoidance of the feared past is that social life becomes constricted and relationships remain shallow and life begins to feel superficial and meaningless... the classic signs of depression
Change often only becomes possible when an individual allows and accepts the pain rather than relying on self-protective strategies to hold it off. Facing the pain and fear changes internal beliefs and expectations that assume that the pain will be utterly crushing and destroy the self. This belief is not true. There is no pain that an individual has suffered that has not been suffered and survived by other human beings in other times and other places throughout the span of human history.
Hurt by those who should have helped
It is poignant to realize that many traumatic experiences would have been infinitely less harmful if the child or individual who experienced them had been surrounded by family or caring others who could have comforted and reassured the individual after the incident. In fact, in situations where this has happened appropriately, people can pass through horrific and frightening experiences largely unscathed. It is saddening to realize that the comfort and support of other human beings was not only not available...but that all too often the trauma, as in cases of abuse, neglect or incest, was created by exactly those individuals who should have been a source of protection, comfort and support.
When traumatic memories are re-experienced momentarily in therapy, time has usually done it's healing work of reducing some of their power... and the necessary human comfort, encouragement and support is offered in the moment of the re-experiencing by the therapist.
Sometimes this will be the first time that these experiences have been spoken about to another person. Putting feelings into precise words also permits us to access and control them. This is often very steadying.
Facing pain and fear challenges internal beliefs and expectations that assume that the pain will be utterly crushing and destroy the self. This belief is not true. There is no pain that an individual has suffered that has not been suffered and survived by other human beings in other times and other places throughout the span of human history. There is comfort to be found in the realization that our pain is a human pain that is known and shared by others.
Psychologist Carl Jung put it poetically:
"The sorrow must become depersonalized -- not as my sorrow, but as the sorrow of the world, not a personal isolating pain, but a pain without bitterness that unites all humanity"
Jung is correct in describing the secret pain of traumatic memories as "isolating." Far too often the need for silence and avoidance of pain creates a high wall between the sufferer and the rest of the world.
Is some pain a a price worth paying to heal?
It would not be realistic to say that the re-experiencing of painful emotions in therapy is not distressing... but the experience is usually brief, contained and supported and the relief is powerful and lasting. When pain does not have to be avoided at all costs then the strategies that hold it off by limiting feelings and relationships do not need to be employed.
Willingly facing and courageously accepting painful memories-- in small doses, in a protective atmosphere--creates a sense of agency to replace the feeling of victimization. When agency begins to take the place of victimhood, an individual begins to have access to other resources of the healthy self...exploratory curiosity, the desire for mastery, and desire for relationship. Interest in life returns, depression lifts and self-protective social anxieties fade away.
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