Without a doubt, the most helpful thing I have learned in therapy is to pay attention – to notice what comes up in my body and emotions during the normal course of a day. The smallest shifts can be indicators that something isn’t right, symptoms of a deeper issue lying just beneath the surface.    

Judith Herman, a CPTSD expert and pioneer, theorized that complex trauma takes place in captivity, where one is a prisoner of sorts, unable to flee the control of a perpetrator. She argues that people are held captive without bars, windows, or guns through psychological tactics or economic forces designed to disempower and disconnect individuals from themselves and others.

In my early years, captivity took place within a family marked by lack, neglect, substance abuse, and mental illness as well as a strict religious system that encouraged suffering. To protect myself, I developed a set of coping skills that served me well for many years, including the ability to push down and ignore the signs of pain and harm. If I didn’t acknowledge the symptoms, then maybe things weren’t so bad after all. By the time I was a young adult, I had mastered the facade of positivity to such a degree that I couldn’t recognize when a symptom was pointing to something serious, and I had lost virtually all connection with my body.

I am keenly interested in our culture’s propensity to shortcut symptoms. We are so ready to adopt models that rely on quick fixes and pain-avoidance techniques instead of substantive solutions to complex problems. We see this all around us in our medical models, religious and education systems, and in the ways we communicate and run organizations. And certainly, this is how we are socialized to deal with trauma. 

We avoid, we deny, we detour, and we numb.

Psychotherapists Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman suggest that symptoms serve as a bridge between struggle and meaning and help us orient ourselves. If that is true, then what happens when we don’t face them head-on, and how does our avoidance disorient us to reality?

We shrink, we stagnate, we deform, and we repeat violence.

I fear we don’t look deep enough to find out the nuggets that the symptom is trying to teach us, both personally and also in our institutions. One solution from Watkins and Shulman is to “wait patiently with a symptom.”  As we wait, we enter into a relationship with struggle in order to mine what is there. This is not the same as how my religion lauded suffering; instead, it is a way to appreciate the brilliance of our body’s systems and what they are trying to tell us. This is a way of relating to symptoms that can, more accurately, be seen as a gift.

We often don’t do well waiting, sitting with our wounds or the wounds of others. It’s in direct opposition to our desire to flee. We want to rush to feel better, to put it all behind us, and move on. Yet, what happens when we pay careful attention to what our bodies are telling us and to what symptoms we are glossing over because it’s just more comfortable?

We heal, we expand, we evolve, and we love.

My vigilant attention to my inner self has been crucial to my freedom from the captivity of complex trauma, and I believe this practice holds a key to bringing health to every system where trauma is perpetuated.

By ripping up the carpet and facing the elephants hiding in plain sight, we can affect the transformation that so many of our relationships, emotions, systems, and organizations need.

I long for the day when we demolish the survival-of-the-fittest mindset and pay attention to the symptoms of our distress. Where we normalize an openness that lets us stop living in fear that our symptoms will expose us as frauds and mark us as inferior. When our organizations engage in a different kind of management style that includes collaboration and creativity over crushing speed and protecting the organization over the people. When families can become incubators of growth, instead of allowing children to remain immature well into adulthood. When leaders can work through personal struggles without the fear that causes them to hide their symptoms and mistreat others until they have become a “testimony,”

——

References

Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.
Watkins, Mary, and Helene Shulman. 2008. Toward Psychologies of Liberation. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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Beth Alford

Beth Alford is a communication strategist, writer and independent scholar. Her writing combines her personal experiences of complex trauma with academic work in theology, religious trauma, culture and gender studies. You can find more of Beth’s work at thebethalford.com.