The Trauma Bond/Abusive Relationships

By Gary Reece, Ph.D.

Over my long career as a therapist, one of the most frequently encountered problems is the perplexing and vexing case of a client who is stuck in an abusive relationship.  Its most common feature is found in their own description of the problem.  “My friends all tell me I am crazy and that I should just dump him.  I know they are right, it makes no sense, he hurts and humiliates me and I keep coming back for more.  I know this is going to end badly.” And it frequently does, either violently and sometimes even death.

Much of human behavior is that way, we find ourselves in the grip of powerful emotional vortexes we don’t understand and feel powerless to change.   We act in ways we know are contrary to our best interests.  It seems on the surface to be a conflict between emotion and reason.  Romantics describe it as driven mad by love.  It has nothing to do with love.  But it is madness.

The key to this repetitive self-destructive behavior does not reside in our conscious minds because we often find ourselves doing things we know are really against our nature.  It is really dumb, but we feel driven to do it anyway.  Some compulsive behavior is harmless and even very functional.  I want my brain surgeon and pilot to be very compulsive.  And being compulsive got me through graduate school.  Not all compulsive behavior is destructive.  My children tease me because I have a drawer full of rubber bands,  a behavior learned from my mother who grew up in an age of scarcity, and I drive them crazy by always showing up 15 minutes early for appointments with them.  I know it makes no sense, but the whole point of this essay is to examine this form of compulsive behavior.  Behavior that makes no sense: the mystery of self destructive behavior.   The first thing I have learned in my career is that in order to understand behavior we musy understand its origins, it is always found in a person’s history.  I have found that once I know their history their behavior makes sense:  psychological sense.

The key to understanding behavior found in abusive relationships is to look at the very early years of childhood.  Relational trauma is at the root.  In order to comprehend the dynamics of abuse we must understand Attachment:  The bond established at birth and the critical first two years of the parent child relationship.  In these important activities of mutual interaction between parent and child the child is very dependent and vulnerable, needing the parent for safety and survival:  dependency on the parent is every child’s predicament.  This is the child’s dilemma,  secure attachment is successful if the parent is loving and attentive and interacts in ways to soothe and meet the child’s needs.  However, if the parent is threatening, instills fear, or is neglectful and abusive the outcome will be quite different, and will affect the child's developmental trajectory for years to come.  In this case the child is trapped, is in effect held hostage by a terrorist.  The dilemma is caused by the child’s needs for safety and security which are found in proximity-closeness with the parent who is dangerous; what is the child to do?  Closeness represents danger, withdrawal represents fear, abandonment--psychological death; the alternative is a problem without solution.  Beverly James calls this problem the Trauma Bond:

“The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with a formidable task of adaptation.  She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, and power in a situation of helplessness.  Unable to care for or parent herself, she must compensate for the failure of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal; an immature system of defenses.  The abused child’s safety strategy is her focus on the wants, and emotional state of the abusive adult.  It is her best shot at maintaining safety for herself.”  (Handbook for Treatment of Attachment Trauma, pg. 35)

I had a client, a brilliant young, talented musician who came to see me because she was “going crazy because she was involved in a relationship with a man who was talented, charming, brilliant, and charismatic.  The only problem was that he enjoyed having relationships with multiple partners all at the same time.  Even more diabolically, he let them all know about each other.  The problem for Jane was that she wanted “to be the one.”  Here is the irrational component.  She knew this about him because he was notorious for his wild life style and “crazy womanizing.”  Yet she continued in spite of the pain, my advise, and the advise of friends.”  “What are you, nuts?”  The would all say.  “Dump him, you don’t deserve to be treated this way.”

She continued in the relationship, seeking various ways of coping with the roller coaster ride from euphoria to despair, depending upon the day.  She felt entirely out of control.  She was reeling from rage to panic attacks, and despair.  Her self-esteem was taking a terrific pounding. One very important  marker of  the Trauma Bond, is who regulates the emotions, and who is in control of the interactions.

In her own words, “It feels really bad, everything hurts, I’m riding these waves, I want to burn everything down.  Still, my instincts just want to take an axe to everything.  I know, of course, I have control over these things, and am not going to destroy anything.  But I am going to try to figure out where these things are coming from inside me  and embrace them, I feel nauseated, I don’t know what to do.  It is quite a roller coaster from high to low.  It feels like the whole world is stale and rancid.  Forgive my poetics here, but it feels as though it is old spilled blood, crusted around a dead body.  I know how dark that sounds.”

This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it.  This kind of drama was portrayed well in the movie, “Fatal Attraction.”  And we have seen it acted out and covered in the 6 o’clock news as the domestic violence of murder-suicide.

There are several features these kinds of relationships have in common.   The first is, they are deeply ambivalent, reflective of the Trauma Bond:  fear, dependency, need, fear of abandonment, despair, the realization of helplessness, and rage.  This is an amalgam of very powerful emotions which drive and make the relationship so unstable.  The ambivalence vacillates in the polarity between intimacy and separation. The emotional cost of being stuck in this dance of ambivalence is shame and humiliation. One eventually ends up hating both oneself and the partner.

The second feature of this kind of relationship is that it is a compulsive reenactment.  Most individuals have a long history of failed, abusive relationships that have the same painful outcome.  It is a kind of “Ground Hog’s Day“, a continuous loop of repeating the act over and over again.

Allan Schore, an attachment expert put it this way.  “A further complication of unresolved trauma is narrative reenactment of the trauma wherein the victim unconsciously recreates the original traumatic event over and over.”  The original trauma in Jane’s case occurred when she was two years old.  She vividly recalls hiding from her father in a closet  while he raged about tearing up the house and terrorizing the entire family; her mother and older brother.  Another memory, just as vivid was of her hiding under the piano behind the Christmas tree, alone and cowering in fear.

These memories are an accurate depiction of the formation of the Trauma Bond and in actuality is what makes these kinds of relationships so hard to terminate.  In fact I told Jane that she would never heal as long as she was in that relationship.  She terminated therapy rather than lose him.  That’s how powerful the Trauma Bond can be.  She chose the admittedly destructive relationship rather than the path of liberation and health.  Because she feared she could not survive being alone.  Again Beverly James accurately describes the power of the bond and what sustains it.

“There are two powerful sources of reinforcement of an abusive relationship:  The arousal jag or excitement before the violence and the peace of surrender afterwards.  Both of these responses placed at appropriate intervals, reinforce the Traumatic bond between victim and abuser.  In effect attachment is intensified in the face of danger.”

In this way, abusive relationships are as addictive as Cocaine.  And it has the same dynamics, if the user stops, she immediately begins to go into withdrawal, which leads to craving or longing and then fixing again---euphoria, then the rebound crash.  Abusive relationships are cyclical and very predictable.  Discovery, euphoria, build up of intimacy, then tension and ambivalence, angry break up, reunion and honeymoon.

Interestingly enough, the ambivalence fueling this destructive cycle is fear.  Fear of intimacy, and fear of aabandonment,  How odd and paradoxical.

The solution is just like recovery from any addiction.  The person must stop using.  In this case drop the relationship and then  withstand the fear, loneliness, and sense of abandonment and then do the work of therapy.  Which is to uncover the original trauma, feel the pain, recover the memories consciously,  integrate the conscious and unconscious aspects and grieve both the current loss and the loss of what never was: a loving relationship with her father.

As one is doing this kind of very deep work in therapy there is the reward of self-discovery, regained self-esteem, and control, and the empowerment of being self-determining.  The antidote to helplessness is empowerment and the growing reward of growing trust in our emerging strength.  And finally, one must learn what our parents did not teach us; how to lovingly heal ourselves, set boundaries, and be self-reliant.  This leads to respect for ourselves and the capability of having relationships based on love, respect and trust, not fear.  It takes courage to choose ourselves when it may mean losing a relationship we think we cannot live without.  In a very liberating and powerful act we are participating in our own psychological rebirth:  the creation of a new self.

Violence/A meditation, by Gary Reece, Ph.D.

Violence:  A Meditation
           by
 Gary Reece, Ph.D.

Last Saturday I did what I have often done throughout my childhood and adult years.  I went to a Saturday Matinee to see a film for a few hours of escapism and relaxation.  It  is a tradition I find very soothing and enjoyable; to sit in the dark and enjoy a story well told.

Today’s experience was very different from the bucolic times of childhood of a cartoon followed by a newsreel and a double feature of  Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger: super heroes of another age.  A bag of popcorn and a few moments sitting in the dark viewing images of fantasy and heroism; an afternoon well spent.

That was not to be today! For 15 minutes of previews of coming attractions I was bombarded by “Surround Sound.”  Explosions, guns in rapid fire, car wrecks, visually intense images terror, of people being machine gunned. The sounds andd flashes of computer generated effects.  After 15 minutes of this very overwhelming sensory implosion the movie began:  0 Dark Thirty.  And for the next 30 minutes I was flooded with images of “Enhanced Interrogation” an Euphemism for Torture.  I said to myself after this experience, “No wonder America is saturated with violence!  We tortured the enemy, they killed some of our guys in retaliation, we killed some of theirs, we finally get Ben Laden.  But the violence continues.

This experience led to a blog: meditation on Violence.  I was disturbed and distressed by this unexpected reaction to the whole experience. After much reflection I decided that there is much to be learned here.  It is instructive to look at what I saw and experienced that afternoon.

When I got home the instruction continued,  I watched the evening news.  I saw in the following order:  Another school shooting in Houston Texas, a child killed by a drive by gang shooting in Compton, a 12 year old boy massacred his entire family, and to cap it all off there was a kidnapping and a murder- suicide in a domestic dispute.  And there were also other stories as well, a child molester arrested after a 40 year career as a teacher with numerous victims, and  a mother charged with starving, beating, and imprisoning her two children.

What‘s the cause of all this violence, I wonder?  So many different kinds: Child abuse, gang violence, domestic violence, terrorism in Algeria, Libya, Mali, Syria, and violence between nations.  Hundreds of thousands living in refugee camps. Are there threads which are common to this litany of inhumanity?

For the past 10 years I have been working with abused and traumatized children.  My book, soon to be published, looks at the effects of abuse on their development.  In my work I see many parallels between the dynamics of child abuse and the torture I witnessed in the movie.  I would like to share these similarities.

I will begin by setting the stage by sharing one of my favorite quotes from Alfred Adler:  “Self esteem?  The supreme law of life is this:  The sense of worth of the individual self shall not be allowed to be diminished.”

In torture and child abuse we see several common elements.  First the individual is dehumanized and rendered helpless.  The interrogator in the movie taking total control, said, “I want him to know he is absolutely helpless.”  He is dehumanized as the enemy, and then the second event happens, the victim is shamed and humiliated: subjected to demeaning physical acts, bound and gaggged and then water boarded.  Secondly the interrogator said, “I am going to hurt you and I can do anything I want to you.” He lets the victim know there is nothing he can do, he is helpless, and without hope.  He wants to get very deep inside his head.  There is no respect, he is an object to be used and manipulated for his own personal purposes.  The agenda of war.

Again I am reminded of a quote from another favorite,  Erik Erikson who writes:  “Shame supposes that one is small, completely exposed and conscious of being looked at--in a word, self-conscious.  One is visible and not ready to be visible…shaming exploit’s the increased sense of being small.

Children as well as others held hostage who experience the loss of control and their inability to find any “coherent survival strategy’ become terrified and then enraged.  In the mirror image of the self, they either turn the rage against the other, or themselves.  Allan Schore writes of this experience as a condition called “Shame-Rage.”  He writes:  Exposure to shame-humiliation is an all too frequent accompaniment of early child abuse, and it  may serve as an interpersonal matrix for dissociated rage (shame-rage).  He points out that there are certain kinds of mothers who are giving their children  early training to become violent when they grow up.  How do they do that?  In much the same way as an interrogator.  “They tease the boy until he loses control and strikes out…they ignore or ridicule his signals of anxiety and vulnerability…and they are consistently rough and bossy with him.  Paradoxically when the boy does strike out… the mother is at a loss to put an effective stop to his behavior.”

Ernest Becker once wrote:  “Unlike the baboon who gluts himself on food.  Man nourishes himself mostly on self-esteem.”

I believe parents in a sane society are equally responsible to provide opportunities for our children, and the rest of us to feel good about ourselves, to feel competent, creative, powerful and free in the enterprise of self-hood.  When those opportunities are denied and we experience humiliation, shame, and failure, in our vulnerability and inability to have control over our lives the consequences are dire for both the individual and the society in which it occurs.   I believe authentic community must preserve, sustain, and encourage individuals in their quest for meaning purpose and fulfillment of their self esteem project.

In the past few years I have had opportunities to work with whole communities in their attempts to recover from tragedy.  These opportunities had several qualities that led to healing.  It is a well known fact that recovery from trauma requires a certain kind of environment.  And it is the quality of the environment which determines the outcome of  recovery from trauma.  These qualities are found in all healing and healthy relationships. They are the same kind of environment which fosters and supports the pathway from childhood to mature selfhood and self-esteem.

I once had the opportunity to visit an exhibition that was on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  It had Artifacts from King Tut’s Tomb on display.  This appears to be a somewhat bizarre segue from Terror and Torture, but bear with me. I left the exhibit with a singular thought.  “How similar that sacred burial site was to the human psyche.”  When we are born, hopefully we are greeted with a sense of “hallowed presence”  and in that moment we begin with the help of skilled parents to construct the inner sanctum of the self.  This is the second womb. In that inner sanctum we fill it with sacred objects, and things of great value to ourselves.  We through trust allow others to enter and appreciate our collection of sacred objects, the most sacred of course is our very self which is vulnerable and exposed inside the sacred place.  When we allow others into our sacred space and they appreciate our uniqueness and the things we value most; cherished objects, dreams, and visions of the self we want to be we feel confirmed and valued.  There is even an unspoken covenant, “If I let you in, you will do so with reverence.”  This is a covenant born of trust and intimacy.  Parents must provide a stable, safe,  consistent, and respectful haven for this venture of the self: a secure base.  It is a sacred duty.  Society also bears a share of this responsibility to provide opportunities for the self to flourish and be validated.

Jules Henry a social psychologist once talked about betrayal as Black Sham.  This occurs when we allow others to see us as we really are and then are subjected to ridicule.  In other words they desecrate the shrine.  This is the experience of humiliation and shame which leads to rage and I believe, sows the seeds of violence.  A humiliated child is a vengeful child.

As in Columbine, Littleton, Newtown, Aurora, Oklahoma City, Waco, and Jonestown, we are shocked and ravaged by these  episodes of mass violence, but on a daily basis there are acts of violence being carried out on a smaller and unnoticed scale.  Small acts of humiliation, ridicule, shaming, and failure to appreciate and cherish each other.  We soon learn it is not safe to be vulnerable and  guard our innocence, inside we harabor our accumulated wounds.

Violence is a symptom of a failure of community:  a failure to cherish, safeguard, and empower the young, to provide opportunities and support the voyage of the young and vulnerable through the rough waters of a complex, impersonal and often insensitive and violent voyage to adulthood.  We bombard our children with images of violence, put guns in their hands, subject them to humiliation and render them powerless to achieve their dreams of being a person of worth who has the power of self-determination.  And then we witness the fruit of the seeds we have sown and wonder why they strike out, killing themselves along with others who became a target for their despair and rage.  It does not take much interpretation when a child shoots his mother in the face.

What we need to stem this insane epidemic is a certain kind of community.  A community which has several necessary qualities:  it must be intentional, inclusive, safe, secure, empowering, authentic, respectful, affirming, congruent, just, and trustworthy. I have participated in communities like these which helped their wounded to heal.  They provide the means to understand, educate, support, care for, and share stories of their woundedness and grief, their confusion, shock, terror, and rage.  And yes through this sharing and commitment they found a commonality and a way to find meaning, purpose and a way of reviving hope.  Bearing each other’s burdens, we are not alone in our healing.

The antidote for violence is community, the antidote for fear is community, the antidote for shame and rage is community.  The antidote for helplessness and despair is empowerment through community.  Acceptance is the antidote for humiliation.  Grace is the antidote for hatred, not guns.

Newtown/Everlasting Arms

Newtown/Everlasting Arms

By  Gary Reece, Ph.D

It has been a week since a lighting bolt struck with unprecedented, unimaginable, catastrophic violence in a small town in Connecticut.  It was an act of terror committed by a young man who lived amongst us, not some foreign Jihadist.  His wanton act hit Newtown with shattering, traumatic force.  It shattered the security, serenity, safety, beliefs, hopes, and dreams which form the secure base that is the foundations of all communal life.

These attachments form the very essence of what it is to be human and are the vital force which make life together possible.  It is through attachment that infants are made to feel valued, safe, secure, and trusting.  It is through attachment that infants develop a working view of the world.  It is through attachment that we learn love, empathy, compassion, and the ability to intimately connect with an other.  It is our attachments which give us a sense of meaning, purpose and significance.  It is through attachment that we learn to be self reliant, regulate our emotions, and govern our impulses. And it is attachment that binds us to our family friends, community and our country.

Last Friday’s travesty followed an all too familiar macabre tableau.  A gunman enters a public building, armed to the teeth with multiple weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammuntion: ready to make war.  He begins randomly shooting, an alarm goes out, first responders appear on the scene and begin to deal with the bedlam and chaos of multiple gunshot victims.  Shortly there after the media arrive in droves.  Reporters frantically search for a story begin  thrusting  their microphones and cameras into the faces of shocked children and parents:  searching for the “epic” shot that will capture the essence of horror in the faces of the victims.  They want to display the moment on national TV.  The story goes viral. The parade of interviews of victims; talking heads telling us how horrible, shocking, and unprecedented this unfolding story will be.  “Breaking News, more at 11.”  As the memorials pile up, the President addresses a shocked nation.  He expresses sorrow and indignation:  “this is enough, this can not happen again, we must do something!”  And then the funerals begin.  The coverage continues and the media look for “Heroes.”  There is nothing like hero stories to capture an audience.  And then in all probability the media moves on to the next tragedy of the day.

Also predictably families, and the community respond with normal reactions of shock, terror, and horror to an extremely abnormal situation.  Because of the terror unleashed by such a random, horrific act of violence we all feel vulnerable and helpless.  There is a terrible fear of recurrence.  We are made to feel vulnerable and helpless, so fragile and terribly mortal.  Everyone becomes hyper vigilant and rushes about frantically trying to find a way to reestablish some vestige of control.  This is very understandable, we have experienced the worst kind of trauma:  a sudden, random, act of overwhelming violence by a member of our community.  This is the worst kind of betrayal.  It is a terrorist act perpetrated on the innocent, the undeserving, our children, neighbors and friends without apparent motive. We are defenseless.  People asking the unanswerable:  Why? Why?  Why?  It is senseless!  There is no logic; there is no answer, even so we struggle to find a coherent survival strategy in order to make sense of it all.

As a result we get responses that are driven by fear and panic.  One artifact of these attempts to regain control is very concerning to me:  gun sales went off the charts and established one day sales records.  Another proposal got publicity.  “We need to arm our teachers,” gun proponents advocated, if more people had guns these things would be prevented.”  From the NRA, “we should put armed personnel at every school.”  Not recognizing that we are having to lay teachers off because of lack of funding. It is too ignorant and frightening to seriously consider turning our schools and public places into fortresses.  Another proposal came in the true spirit of American Capitalism:  body armor for children.  For only $150 you can protect your child.  All of these are responses to the terror,  and the fear of losing more children to violence.

As a parent I know what it is to lose a child, and as a psychologist I have spent my entire career working with victims of trauma.  As part of the concentric circle of victimization this event opens wounds of all who have experienced similar wowrld changing events.  Parents, teachers, pastors, first responders, no one is exempt from such shock, terror, horror and grief.

I remember standing  with my wife and  our two children by the grave site of my daughter and looking into the grave, it was like looking into the abyss.  The little white coffin was so small.  We were surrouded by friends while a friend delivered a few words of support and comfort.  All I remember from that moment was the feeling of utter numbness and unreality.  My friend said, “you feel like you have fallen off a cliff and there is no bottom, but you must trust that you will fall into the “everlasting arms.”  It took me a long time to understand the import of his words.

In Newtown, one parent said it well as she spoke to a reporter:  “What we need is for all of you to leave so we can start to heal.”  Scott Peck once wrote, “It is only through Community that the world will be saved.”  I believe he had it right.  Newtown and its citizens will hopefully discover the power of covenantal community.  I have found that we do not heal alone.  Grief is best born by the everlasting arms of people who love and support each other.  Yes the night is dark, life feels devoid of meaning, the grief is fierce, the losses seem unbearable and the road to recovery seems only a distant possibility.

Recovery will come slowly as we do the work of community, binding up each other’s wounds with acts of kindness and sharing each other’s burdens. We discover ourselves in each other as we share our stories and create a common narrative. The nation is reaching out with cups of coffee, Penguins sent to comfort the children, and memorials spring up spontaneously.  Rituals are performed, funerals attended, and condolences offered, all are important first steps. Arms reach out from around the world to touch with acts of Kindness.

Gradually the shock will wear off and be replaced by the acute,  aching pain of grief, sadness and endless tears, only to progress on to the deep valley of despair and suffering as the moments are relived, rooms are found empty, and school lunches no longer need to be packed. And then a deep anger at the senselessness of our loss sets in. Somewhere in this bereavement process we must find faith and hope that we can rebuild as we search for meaning and purpose.  We must rebuild our shattered lives through community and a commitment to find loving ways to build a new safe base, and create secure and firm new attachments which will keep our children safe and restore our wounded souls.  Guns will not heal.

A line from an author I have been reading frames it this way:  “A fundamental and permeating strength of humankind is the capacity to form and maintain relationships-the capacity to belong.  It is in the context of our clan, community and culture that we are born and raised. . . .We each feel a need to be connected to the people of our past, and without being able to draw on this connection-the narrative-it is almost impossible to envision hopes and dreams for a connected safe future.”  Richard Rose

We must also learn from this tragedy:  it is the children who do not feel this inclusion, who have been marginalized and have become fragmented and damaged and do not feel this affirmation of community who grow up full of rage and strike back because of their wounds.  It is the failure to love them that is the source of such terrible, rageful violence.  And it is a careless, neglectful nation that allows  weapons of war to be so easily acquired by these wayward, wounded children.

Tragedy and loss is a universal human experience and in that way Newtown is every town.

Trauma and Addiction

Trauma and Addiction
By Gary W. Reece, Ph.D.


There are many consequences that follow an experience of trauma.  One of the more common reactions often goes unrecognized because it takes a while to develop and as a result people fail to make the connection.  Following a traumatic experience there is a relatively high probability that a person will develop one or more addictions.

It has particularly been noticed in certain high risk professions such as first responders, police, fire fighters and soldiers.  In one study done after the Oklahoma City bombing, they noted a higher than usual number of  individuals who developed addiction, there were also a high number of suicides, divorces and related symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.  There were other high risk behaviors also noted such as thrill seeking, gambling, and other self-destructive behaviors.

There are many reasons for the development of an addiction.  Some individuals  are more risk prone because of such factors as a family history of addiction, hence you would be at greater risk.  Or being in a high risk profession where individuals are exposed daily to danger. There are also personality types who are more vulnerable, particularly those that are considered Macho so that a person is thought to be weak if he exhibits any kind of weakness such as an open display of emotion.  Men are more prone to this because we are expected to be strong, and that means we do not show weakness, feelings,  neediness, or vulnerability.

The dynamics of trauma make us particularly vulnerable to addiction because the experience itself subjects us to “an overwhelming event which exposes us to violence, harm, or death and renders us helpless in response to it."  Furthermore, during that experience we are hit with a shock, a surge of emotions which are too great to handle.  It is this shock wave of overwhelming terror, fear, or horror which immobilizes our psychological defenses so that in the initial stage we experience a state of numbness, shock and helplessness.  This is a natural psychological reaction to shut down when too many painful feelings come all at once.

What most people do not realize is that we are at the highest risk psychologically right after the traumatic event.  What we do to cope is critical.  The people most vulnerable are those who are isolated:  do not have a good social support group and have difficulty experiencing painful feelings.   This is particularly true in single event traumas.  In the case of the military or law enforcement, these individuals experience a different kind of stress.  They are exposed daily to a variety of stressful experiences, many of them do not rise to the level of trauma but fall into the category of multiple, chronic stressors.  High stress over a long period can lead to addiction as the individual begins to gradually use substances to help deal with the tension, fear, frustration or helplessness attendant to the profession.

The dynamics of addiction are relatively simple to understand.  It is a simple law of learning.  If a person experiences a high level of  emotional or physical discomfort and then by chance does something to cope and experiences immediate relief, this associative connection gets linked.  Pain=relief=positive reinforcement=reliance on whatever “worked”.

In my particular case, for example, I was in a prolonged state of shock and emotional deadness after the sudden death of my daughter and discovered that by going back to work and working long hours I felt better.  I felt the reward of being in control, I could work, be successful and be rewarded by making money.  Hence I became addicted to work.  This helped me feel back in control, powerful, and socially validated.  So, in essence, whatever we do immediately following a traumatic event can potentially be addictive.  If we have poor coping skills then we are more vulnerable.

My poor coping skills were an inability to feel or express strong emotion, difficulty trusting others by exposing my felt fear, vulnerability, weakness, neediness , and helplessness.  I felt so much rage and disillusionment and did not know what to do with it.  So I found great relief in avoiding it all together.

Instead, I found great relief and real magic in buying new Jaguars and Porsches.  About one a year.  The sales men were so glad to see me, I felt so powerful driving off the showroom floor with my new Red XKE roadster.  It felt so good to show off and feel the excitement of driving it.  But the high lasted only about a year and then I had to get a new fix.

There are all kinds of addictions: shopping, sex, alcohol, drugs, affairs, the list is potentially endless.  It is whatever helps us feel better.  Trauma shatters self-esteem, our sense of control, our beliefs, and overwhelms us with painful feelings.  Whatever helps us cope has the power to be potentially addicting.  If it helps us to feel like somebody again, restores our damaged self-esteem, helps us feel less isolated, lonely, afraid, and empty:  in short a shattered lonely nobody, then we have found indeed the magic elixir.  As they say in the addiction community, it is a short term solution which becomes a long term problem.

Addiction, then is a failed attempt to restore the shattered harmony of our lives.  It is a symptom of failed mourning.  I have told many who came to me for therapy that you cannot grieve and practice your addiction.  Overcoming addiction is doubly painful.  First, there is the problem of abstinence-withdrawal, very painful and uncomfortable, requiring a great deal of courage to give it up.  And then there may also be repairing whatever damage we have done to our lives by the addiction.  It took me years to overcome the financial disaster of buying new cars every year.

There was also the matter of a divorce as the cost of my self-indulgences. That was also emotionally and financially catastrophic.  Secondly, in giving up the addiction we then open ourselves up to feeling the grief we have been avoiding.

But the good news is that once I began facing my demons, I was able to begin cring again,  feel the feelings, feel more alive, and that led to being more authentic which enabled me  to genuinely respect myself.  In healing I had to give up my addictions, feel my pain, restore my shattered life, and find authentic ways to feel good about myself.  This route may initially be the harder path, but the rewards are infinitely greater because of the joy and peace that is found in facing the darkest moments of one’s life.  I also found that healing cannot be done alone.  And I might add, it took many years to create a life of meaning and significance with family and friends at the center.

Mourning and Attachment

Mourning And Attachment
The injured self
by Gary Reece, Ph.D.

For the past many years I have been working on a book focusing on the effects of trauma on children.  In the course of my research I have learned a lot about the concept of attachment.  This is the reason for this blog.  Human development from its very beginning is transactional and dialectical. What does that mean?  That from the very beginning of our lives we are developing in an environment of relationships.  Attachment is the process by which we develop into human beings.  Even the structure and workings of our brain is influenced by the quality of our original attachment bond with whoever is the primary caretaker.  It is a biologically based survival mechanism.  All species survive because of the skill, care and nurture of  adults.

Through attachment we develop our essential sense of self.  Our identity is the sum total of all of our attachments.  Through attachment we learn a “working model of the world.”  We form a template of how to relate to others.  Through attachment we learn to regulate our feelings as well as how to soothe and comfort ourselves.  We also learn how to deal with separation and failures of attunement or relationship breaches through the dialectic dance of intimacy and separation.  Hopefully we also learned how to repair disruptions of attachment and separation.

If we had loving, consistent, stable, secure attachments as children, then it is said we will have a secure attachment style and have probably created an adult world where we feel at home and have a “secure base.”  If we had difficult or traumatic attachments in infancy, then we may as adults have attachment problems:  be insecurely attached or ambivalent in our attachments.  In severe cases we may not be able to sustain relationships and intimacy will be difficult for us.  In extreme cases of abuse, disrupted attachment, or trauma we see the origination of violent, abusive, character disordered individuals with no capacity for empathy.

We carry all of this, in fact we embody all of those very early attachment experiences into adulthood.  The child is the parent of the adult.  So how does all of this relate to grief and mourning?  Very simply.  Any loss is an injury to our sense of self.  The greater the loss, then the greater will be the injury. This is why we react with pain, anxiety, depression, and anger when we  have a blow to our attachments.  If we learned how to deal with early separation, abandonment, and frustration due to loss then we will be better prepared to grieve our loss, heal our wounds and regain our equilibrium.

Through mourning we go through the very process of sustaining the original blow and losses to our attachments.  Those which are the foundation of our personhood and the world we have created for ourselves.  In my experience loss opens old wounds, and we find ourselves grieving every loss.  Losses in life all tend to be connected in our emotional memory banks:  they plunge us back into the experience of feeling alone, vulnerable, fragile and helpless:  like an abandoned child.

The severity and type of loss and our attachment history determines how long it will take us to heal.  By the active process of mourning we must to deal with powerful emotions, deep wounds, lost attachments, and the disorganization which comes when our world gets shaken at its very base.

Mourning is a dynamic process of healing in which we are dealing with the emotions of loss, working through whatever issues are raised by the loss, trying to make sense of it, dealing with the practical aspects of keeping  life going while all this is happening, and finally being able to create new attachments that will give us meaning, purpose, joy and hope.  Attachment is the ability to care, to experience intimacy, to trust, and engage with others: it is what makes us human and is the defining experience of life.  The reason I say it is transactional and dialectical is because  life is a struggle: it is a test of our ability to sustain love and faith in spite of what happens. We are always existing in a state of trying to maintain our equilibrium and dealing with things which threaten our identity. Mourning is an essential skill for the well lived life.

Good Grief!

Good Grief!

By Gary Reece, Ph.D.

To live is to experience loss.  Yet so few people understand the grief and loss process, in particular the process of mourning.  There are  many myths and so much misunderstanding about how to deal with loss.  It is very understandable that none of us likes to experience pain and so therefore avoid it at all cost.  In fact most people view pain as something that indicates that something is wrong.  In the case of grief and mourning it is an indication that something is right.  It is normal to experience pain over a loss.  Yet most people tend to want to “put it behind them, to move on” because they see grief as a pathological state. And because of this attitude  people in mourning are often stigmatized and avoided.

So in this blog I would like to explore some of our attitudes toward grief and mourning and put forth the position that Grief IS Good:  that it is a normal reaction to loss and when done properly leads to healing, and when it is avoided it can lead to a condition called Complicated Mourning which I have written about previously:  Unhealed Wounds.

There are many reasons why grief is seen as something to be avoided.  First, because it is painful, but more importantly because it is seen as a sign of weakness and finally, because others are very uncomfortable around people who have experienced a loss.  These attitudes and ignorance about the very necessity of grief and mourning add to the probability that a person will not complete the mourning process.   In fact, I believe that  ignorance and common myths may contribute to increasing the pain of the whole loss experience.  This is important to understand because there are over two million deaths a year in which 8-10 family members are affected.  And this only relates to death, and death is only one kind of loss experience.  There are many other kinds of losses which affect us and also require us to deal with them.  Such as divorce, losing a job, foreclosure of a home, and dealing with normal life passages.

I would like to explore some of the myths about grief and mourning.  But first let me define some terms so we will be on the same page, so to speak.  Bereavement is the actual state of having suffered a loss.  It implies that something has been taken from us, in this definition is an implication that someone who is bereaved has become a victim, an unwilling participant.  Something has been taken unjustly and it has injured us.  Grief refers to the process of experiencing the loss:  the actual psychological, social, behavioral and physical reactions to whatever was lost.  Grief is a natural, expected reaction to loss, all kinds of loss, not just death.  What determines the amount of grief we experience depends upon what was lost, and it is our perception of what was lost that determines our reaction.  Others may not see the loss as significant.  For example, I spoke at a convention held for families who had experienced the loss of a child through miscarriage.  What stood out at that convention is that many have the attitude that a miscarriage is not a significant loss. The common response these families reported was that people told them, “you can always have another child.”  In other words, the loss was not seen as significant.  These kinds of losses are called “disenfranchised bereavement.”  Where what was lost was not seen as significant, or that the experience itself was not viewed as worthy of a grief reaction.  “What’s the matter with you, you have to put that behind you.”  “Haven’t you gotten over that yet?”

Mourning is the actual experience and the active working through process.  The ultimate goal is to react to the loss and then experience the pain of the loss, and then actively work through the feelings, reconcile and make sense of the loss and then to rebuild your life around new and healthy attachments.  Mourning is a very active process, it requires work to come to grips with what was lost, to make adaptations to the reality of the new life imposed by grief, and then achieve a state of acceptance--resolution.  Grief is only the first step in mourning.  Grief helps the individual recognize the loss and prepare for mourning.  Mourning is the active process of coming to terms with the loss.

Here are some of the most common myths about grief and mourning.  1)  Grief steadily declines with time:  time heals all wounds.  2)  Mourning should be over in one year.  3)  Mourning merely involves catharsis, you just need a good cry.  4)  The intensity of your reaction testifies to your love of the individual.  5)  Mourning only has to do with death.  5)  Recovery means putting the experience behind you as quickly as you can.  6)  Loss is the same whether it is anticipated or not.

These myths about mourning often make them worse and more difficult for the mourner.  Being around individuals who care, understand and are comfortable with feelings is very important to healing. And secondly, misguided attempts to help by offering clichés often send messages that hinder grief:  "Don’t feel, your feelings make me uncomfortable and I don’t know what to say.  Get on with your life.   Stop being a victim."  All of these reactions may create secondary reactions and make it difficult for us to grieve.  Remember, grief is good.  It is normal, there are many losses in life, and they are all linked like a chain.  That is why grief can be so difficult because if we have unresolved losses from the past they are frequently triggered  by and compound the present loss.

Therese Rando wrote in her classic work on bereavement:  “In other words, the destabilization occasioned by major loss often puts one in touch with past pain and previous times of chaos, stress and transition, and can summon unfinished business from the past all of which can add to current distress.”  Good Grief, no wonder we don’t like to grieve.

I will write more about the process of mourning in my next blog.  My goal is to create understanding and appreciation for one of life’s most common but most misunderstood experience.  To live is to mourn.  Yet few know how to go about it.

Heroics

Heroics
By Gary Reece

Watching the 2012 Olympics from London inundated all of us with the epic drama
of individuals performing amazing fetes of  athleticism, and countries celebrating the achievement of their athletes represented by their number of medals.  It is easy to get caught up and  identify with the “ecstasy of victory and the agony of defeat.” To strive for something with a single mindedness all of your life and then put it on the line with the whole world watching:is truly engaging.  It all comes together, supreme focus of heart, mind, body, and spirit in one performance.  We saw a plethora of gold medals, and heard national anthems; for a two week period we vicariously participated in the pageantry and theater of heroics.  It was all  heightened by the slickness of the telecasts and the production of events to fit into prime time.  There was a compelling narrative telling the stories of athletes like Oscar the double amputee competing with able bodied runners, or a lone woman from a Muslim country competing for the first time.  Or barefoot Kenyans running in the Marathon.  It appealed to our emotions and kept us tuned in to the next impossible scene.  And then it was over.  Television became kind of flat and ordinary agaln, back to real life.

This contrast got me thinking about the whole idea of heroics and how we worship the spectacular, and celebrate extraordinary individuals doing amazing, unusual things.  Things we can never do.  We raise them to levels of adulation and heap huge amounts of money upon them. The term Hero is used  so casually and we are quick to anoint someone as the hero de jur.

This is  the point  I wish to make, there is a level of heroism that is seldom seen or  acknowledged  of individuals doing things not on camera.  Oh we see a story occasionally about another soldier coming home with devastating injuries and we on the anniversary of 911 parade our heroes.  But, I wondered if perhaps we have been seduced by the glitz and glamour of high production values and TV ratings.

Is it possible, I wondered that there is a theater of heroics all around us, but we just are not aware of it, that heroism can be found in the way ordinary people face extraordinary circumstances?   That in fact, perhaps our central calling, is to raise our own  lives a level of heroism, where we make decisions, find something worth living for and elevate our lives to a level of significance which brings occasional joy.  I wondered how many of us are doing things to earn the feeling of heroism?  The kind of heroism, I envision takes place on the boundary, on the edge of life where there are no gold medals but instead what is at stake is our mortality.  The way we face up to challenges and trauma certainly calls for courage.  This, for me, has a greater resonance and ring of authenticity.  For example.

One of the most common but overlooked traumatic events which affects literally thousands of Americans everyday takes place behind closed doors and is given in muted tones.  What?  A trauma that literally affects thousands of families every day and the perpetrators are getting away with it?  And it’s legal?  What is this scourge?  Call Eye Witness News, breaking news!   It is the conversation that begins in soft and measured tones.  It happens daily, a family is told their child has Leukemia, or your child has a rare, unpronounceable heart disorder.  In my case it was a conversation I had with my doctor, “Gary, we found something, its going to have to come out.”  The pronouncement had the impact of a sledge hammer.  Stunned, too overwhelmed to even think rationally, to formulate a question, I let him talk as the whirlwind spun my mind into dark, catastrophic scenarios.  I hear words like surgery, tests, x rays, CT scans, blood tests, all the indignities of being dehumanized and processed through encounters with cool, professional medical technicians who have seen it all before.

When I got home, my mind cleared and a quote came to me, from Ernest Becker, “The prospect of death wonderfully concentrates the mind.  The fear of death haunts the human  animal.”  It certainly does!  It changes everything in a moment, we are not always aware of our having to die,  in fact most of us see it as a theoretical possibility, an abstraction, but when the realization breaks through in the boundary experiences we are thrust into, “we see the world differently.”

The psychological impact of these sorts of encounters leave people feeling stripped of their humanity, vulnerable, shocked, terrified, confused, lost and so very alone: singled out from the herd.  First protest, “its not fair! Why me?“ Then denial, then terror and feelings of helplessness  followed by despair. The dawning dread often blooms into shock  when we are given an unfavorable diagnosis by our physician.

When it sinks in, it is the realization of our not being able to preserve our lives, a sense of our helplessness and futility of our fate which exposes us to naked anxiety and despair. Alone, feeling unsafe and betrayed by my body, I stoically accepted what must be done and submitted to the procedures.

When my doctor told me I had to have surgery because I had stage one  Colon Cancer, I felt like I had been jerked out of the safety of my little boat that I had been paddling around in so sublimely unaware of the dangers lurking within, taking for granted so many of life’s pleasant offerings,  like we all do.  

These existential moments of crisis which threaten our very lives, make us acutely aware of our fragility, our mortality, vulnerability, and dependency.  Seeking to regain control and manage my terror, I engaged in a flurry of activity, got things done, got my Will in order, talked with my children, and did what the doctor ordered.  This was 5 years ago, and I  to my amazement, survived and got on with my life.

I was lucky, the surgery was successful, and I am now cancer free, but in the meantime I had another conversation two years later. This time it was about a bone infection in  my foot due to diabetes.  This conversation was a “to be or not to be talk.”  I could have my left foot amputated or die of slow blood poisoning. I put the decision off for two days.  Three years later, after months in a wheel chair, walker, and being fitted for a prosthesis, I am back to normal.  (Well, some would argue that I have never been normal.)

What have I learned?  Life is precious, I am fragile, I have good friends, and my family is there for me.  I decided I was working myself to death, and so I retired.  I made many lifestyle changes.  I exercise daily, lost 50 pounds eat well and started doing some things I’ve always wanted to do, like writing.  I stopped working myself to death and retired.  I spend my days going to the gym and last year traveled with my son to Yellowstone and took lots of pictures.  I have also gone to Sedona, and camped with my grandkids at Big Sur.  I take great joy in my hobby of Bonsai and created a Japanese meditation garden for myself.

I now see the theater of heroics differently.  I don’t give much thought to the spectacular, celebrity driven, entertainment created heroes.  I see these as contrived  and view them as failed heroics.  My hero theater is everyday life.  This is where I see the human spirit ennobled by small acts of love and nameless acts of transcendence.  There is a man at the gym who every day brings his son in a wheel chair--he has cerebral palsy.  He patiently helps him get on an exercise machine, helps him move the weights, and then goes on to the next machine.  There is a man who comes everyday in a walker and gets on and off the machines by himself.  He has ALS.  Look around, every person is a story, some may be walking right by their opportunity for heroism, they are just not aware, their lives pass before their very eyes without  them ever seeing the significance of their hero drama.

This, for me is the heroics of everyday life.  It is people saying yes to life, to their circumstances and confronting their mortality, facing it and finding a way to live in spite of it.  These people redefined heroics for me.  I would not have gotten through my ordeal without my good friend Jack carrying my wheel chair up and down the stairs, loading me into his  car, having me over for dinner on Christmas Eve and taking me to the movies.  Or my son and daughter stopping their lives to come and be with me.

And now the next conversation has already taken place.  My daughter Michele has been talking with her doctors and will be having surgery in September. She is already discovering the miracle of friends lining up to help.   This blog is for her.

Life on the edge is terrifying, we are so very mortal.  It can happen so suddenly and capriciously, to get jerked out of our comfortable boat, oblivious to the dangers all about us.  This is the theater of heroics.  Its not about gold or celebrity, these are distractions, they seek to entertain, distract and keep our eyes diverted from what is going on all around us just below the level of our consciousness.  The skull is always present at the banquet, so says William James, and I say all we can do is look it in the eye and smile.