Recovering from the ACoA Trauma Syndrome:
Reclaiming the Disowned Self
Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine
had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It
interrupts the plot. You can’t process it because it doesn’t fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of “lights, camera, action” when big events are imminent. But trauma isn’t like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.
—Jessica Stern, Denial: A Moment of Terror
Change is not only intellectual. When it comes to trauma, we need to create a new body to live in. We need to learn to take good care of it so that it stays healthy and emotionally fit. We need to resolve the kind of hidden pain that locks us into triggered, knee-jerk reactions that, once set into motion, have a life of their own. Change comes when we have sat in the pain long enough and fully enough so that we can feel it, can open our mouths and talk about it, see it for what it is, reorder and understand it, and then walk out of it. This does not mean that we won’t feel bad, hurt, angry, or triggered about our past again. It just means that if and when we are triggered, we won’t catapult into an unconscious place from which we can only act out, shut down, or dive straight into self-medicating behaviors.
Eventually, our “triggered place” will feel somehow less compelling, less like “all” of us, less like we want to give it so much (or so suspiciously little) of our attention. Change occurs when we have a choice about whether or not we care to direct our attention toward or away from what is being triggered, when our triggers no longer run us, and when we’re able to manage the feelings that they bring up with our own skills, when our spontaneous reaction to a situation that used to baffle us changes (Moreno 1953). Change also comes when we learn to do something different, to make choices in our thinking and daily routines that interrupt a downward spiral and create an upward one.
We heal one feeling at a time, one thought at a time. As each feeling arises, we unpack it and look at the thinking, meaning-making, and behavior it gives rise to; we give the feelings air, voice, and freedom of expression. We make new, mature sense of them with our adult mind. We learn from them, and we grow up on the inside. Emotional maturity rather than an act of will is, in this sense, a natural outgrowth of deep work—an awakening into another point of view and a letting go of the past in order to live more fully in the present (T. Dayton 2007).
The ACoA trauma syndrome is baked into the psyche of the CoA during crucial periods of child development, which is why healing takes time. It’s a peeling back the layers of the onion one at a time, stage by stage, examining the thinking, feeling, and behavior that were learned and became engrained at each stage of development. Physical sobriety is fairly straightforward, and abstention or regulation are its mainstays, but emotional sobriety can be more elusive.
Why Experiential Forms of Therapy
Are Necessary for Healing Trauma
Talk alone does not reach the parts of the brain that process trauma (van der Kolk 1994). Healing trauma requires a combination of therapy and lifestyle changes. Because emotional and sensory memory are processed by and stored in the body, the most successful forms of therapy for trauma are experiential. Experiential forms of therapy and therapy “supports” like journaling, exercise, guided imagery, walking, yoga, and breathing have been finding their way into treatment programs for decades because they work. Psychodrama—a role playing/experiential method of therapy—has become a therapy of choice in addressing the mind/body issues of trauma. Experiential therapy and psychodrama can allow us to bring emotions that may be in some way numb or hard to access toward a conscious level where we can hopefully feel, unfreeze, and talk about them.
One of the problems with shutting down feeling is that we begin to live in our heads. We tell ourselves a story about what we think we’re feeling or what we think we should be feeling rather than feeling our genuine emotions and allowing words to grow out of them so we can accurately describe our inner experience. When we can feel our feelings and then translate them into language, we can use our reasoning ability to play a role in regulating our emotional experience.
Trauma can leave us feeling shattered inside. Valuable pieces of ourselves are frozen, hidden from view, or split off from our conscious awareness and have not been adequately integrated into our working model of our “selves.” Dealing with, giving voice and movement to those shards of self that hold valuable feeling and sensory memories, so that they can be reseen, reinterpreted, and reintegrated into the adult self with mature understanding and reasoning attached to them, allows us to feel whole again and to better understand ourselves.
Creative arts approaches to healing, like writing, psychodrama, sociometry, music, and guided imagery, allow the traumatized mind to find a voice in a nonthreatening way. They include right-brain processes. The right brain envisions the whole; it synthesizes the big picture so that the trauma story can emerge in a different kind of voice. I have incorporated all of these approaches in my model Relationship Trauma Repair (relationshiptraumarepair.com), which is in use in treatment centers, clinics, and private practices around the country. The model’s group exercises offer hundreds of tiny moments in which clients can warm up to their own story, translate feelings into words, share them, and then reach out and connect with others in the same emotional boat. It uses journaling and guided imagery to teach skills of emotional processing, emotional literacy, and self-regulation. I have also designed a creative arts self-help website (visit www.emotionexplorer.com) that offers users may of these approaches online.
Therapy for ACoAs needs to involve processes that allow us to warm up to frozen feelings in relative safety and then talk about them. ACoAs need to feel, then speak. When we say “tell me about your trauma,” we may be putting someone who has been traumatized in the humiliating and embarrassing position of feeling emotionally stupid. Some may be able to talk with feeling and fluidity, having not blocked their own feelings, others, who have less concious awareness of what might be stored within them, might either give it their best guess, sign on to the therapist’s version of what happened, read as if from a script of symptoms, or stare at their therapist and say, “Well,” and (unfortunately all too often), “Let me think about it.”
Healing from Sexual Abuse
When Kathy came to our group, you might say she “lived in her head.” The kinds of body/mind memories and flashbacks of childhood abuse that haunted her were so disturbing that she just didn’t want have to feel and remember them. But they plagued her nonetheless. Their constant, gnawing presence within her made her feel different and not a part of the group. She worried that group members would find her story sickening. She always looked a bit startled and on guard. She struggled with feeling like an underachiever, with organizing herself, with poor self-care and overeating. About a year into our group, Kathy began to feel comfortable enough to let her story come out.
The following psychodrama is of severe sexual abuse. I include it because it clearly illustrates how much can be repaired through role-play. The story is in Kathy’s own voice; she now wants to tell her story because she has had enough of hiding it.
The only time he allowed me to open my mouth was when he wanted to put his gigantic penis in it. Gigantic because I was three and my father was a grown man, six feet, four inches tall. I’m not sure what the smile on his face was about: having an orgasm or suffocating me as close to death as he could. When he wasn’t doing that, he was screaming at me that I had ruined his life and he would kill me . . . he said when I was sleeping he would come and kill me. Those things made him feel so much better; that’s how it looked to me, anyway. They made me freeze and disappear and be afraid to let people know that I was alive.
I think it is important to understand that for at least a year, all Kathy did was comment on other people’s psychodramas, often giving well-thought-through commentary and congratulations that often sounded somewhat removed from the emotion of the moment. It took her a long time to trust the group and herself. Initially, she gave us the facts but without much feeling. For some time, Kathy said it was enough “work” just to sit in group and tolerate being around the intense emotion sometimes expressed and the feelings, or lack of feeling, that she became aware of in herself. She bonded and trusted a little more each week, hesitant but very sincere. She had a long pattern of dissociation from her abuse, so just coming back into her body and mind was a challenge. She could remain physically present, but her consciousness was somewhere else.
When sharing, she might say something like, “I just feel so . . . I just . . . he . . . and I couldn’t.” Small tears and withheld sobs would work their way toward the surface and then disappear. Kathy would bring her hand to her chest and throat as she tried to breathe and speak. I would ask questions like, “If your throat could talk, what would it want to say? What would your hand like to do?”
“I don’t know. Go away? Get away? Get off me? Push?” Then muffled sobs, then quiet, then nothing.
This sort of narrating happened many times. For a while, I just made use of opportunities to draw out another sentence or two. As Kathy began to speak more about her abuse, she had some sensations of choking and not being able to breathe, along with a combination of helplessness and burning rage. These feelings remained unexpressed, though she became increasingly aware of how they felt inside of her (she later described them as tingly, shaky, queasy, blocked, and shivers). Kathy became more able to allow herself to experience and articulate her feelings rather than shut them down. She regularly experienced feelings of being trapped beneath her father’s weight and having her breathing choked off. Her body was recalling the experience it had recorded, and in doing so, the sensations that accompanied the scenes of abuse emerged as well. The words were at first tentative, few, and far between. But she got a tremendous amount from other people’s work; it felt safer to watch and learn rather than to enter into her own role-play. This is the beauty of psychodrama: you can heal in and from every role whether that of “group member,” auxiliary role player (playing a role in another person’s drama) or protagonist (the person whose story is being role played).
Kathy talked about what she learned from someone whose story provided a link into her own:
Sally has been in group longer than I have and also has “father issues.” She taught me how to scream. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard. She could scream so loud at her father . . . with hate and rage. I loved coming to group and hearing Sally scream at the top of her lungs, and now I can do it, too . . . even while beating the crap out of him with a bataka (foam bat). I always feel lighter and freer after one of those sessions. Recently, wanting more freedom from my “death sentence” so that I can live life more fully, I got to beat the crap out of him again, while yelling NO! What a gift. Another glorious feeling.
Kathy literally felt that she would die of her father’s abuse, for obvious reasons; she could barely breath when it was occurring. Simply shouting “no” over and over again allowed Kathy to move away from her collapsed, helpless position toward the emancipation of outrage, which was the appropriate and natural response to being subjugated by her father. Because psychodrama is experiential, we can bring the body into the work. In the case of sexual or physical abuse, it can help to allow the protagonist to feel they are fighting back, successfully defending themselves or really expressing their stored rage and helplessness, to take the reempowering actions that they never got a chance to take, to stand up straight and fight back. Experiential expression of rage is always done in safety, using only a bataka and a tackle dummy. This kind of rage, if not expressed in therapy, can easily leak out in other ways; therapy allows us to become conscious of how much of it we may be carrying. But rage is by no means the whole story; beneath it is often helplessness, collapse, sadness, confusion, distorted bonding, yearning, and so forth. The rage needs to be experienced in a context and the full flush of feelings, mentations, and actions explored.
In a traumatic moment, children may not have had the opportunity to discharge the adrenaline of the flight response if they were outpowered by a drunk or abusive parent. Their freeze response is stored in their bodies. As feelings and memories return, so does their urge to shake, move, run, or take defensive action. Kathy wanted to shake off the “energy, prickles, and tensions” inside of her, and she did—over and over again. We did a combination of talking about what happened, participating in the work of others, empty chair work, and psychodrama role-plays to work with Kathy’s abuse. Her work spanned about three years before this next drama occurred.
After talking to her father in a role-play and raging at him (which she had already done a few times), I asked her what she would like to do next. “Today he would be sent to jail for what he did to me. I want him to be sent to jail,” was Kathy’s firm response. The beauty of psychodrama is that a scene like this, so appropriate as a part of retribution, can actually be structured and played out. Kathy chose group members who arrested her father and “took him to court” for his crimes against her.
I was in charge of the sentencing. At first, I thought I’d sentence him to death. But then, as a big smile came on me, I realized what would give him the most pain. Torture even. So I sentenced him to silence. He could never utter another word. My father, the narcissist, who demanded that everyone listen to him, could never say another word. I was in heaven. And then the jailor took my father to prison. I stood there, drinking in the picture; heaven doesn’t begin to describe my feeling at that moment.
This is the kind of retribution for being hurt that people seek in life that can get them into trouble. Psychodrama allows them to seek it therapeutically. One way trauma becomes intergenerational when we reverse roles with our abusers and pass pain down unconsciously—when we, in a sense, become them. Psychodrama allows the abused person to gain conscious retribution so that both their pain and their need to act out their pain is done consciously and in service of healing rather than unconsciously.
Kathy walked around freely repeating variations of “you are never to speak again, the court has sentenced you.” Her ability to put her father away from her and to actually “see” him locked up and punished was deeply relieving to her. She could see and record a picture of her father behind bars and feel safe from her memories, safe from the nightmares that he could still find her and come into her bedroom. It also reduced the intensity and frequency of her intrusive memories, significantly lessened her hypervigilance, and allowed her to feel supported, protected, and
cared about by other group members. Kathy was unable to get away when she was a child, but now she could get away and take back her authority; she could empower herself.
Kathy continued:
When it was over and it was time for people to “de-role” and process, I looked out onto the group of people who were sitting in the room. In that moment I heard person after person tell me what a horrible thing my father had done to me. Many were angry, upset, and a few wanted to kill him on my behalf. It was glorious.
I am blessed to be surrounded by people who I trust and who “have my back.” And, for the first time, I felt like I was out of jail. The experience of my secret horror being witnessed and validated gave me a sense of freedom I had never felt before. It also gave me another first: the ability to recognize and feel the courage and bravery that I had heard so many people speak about after I would work. I could now give myself the “standing ovation” that I deserved by surviving and, thanks, to psychodrama, I could now use that courage to go beyond surviving to the living part.
Kathy speaks here both to the power of letting the body not only “tell” but “show” or express its story. And her story speaks to the value of compassionate witnessing. It is remarkable what giving someone the “stage” on which to show his or her story can do for someone.
As a child, Kathy had been completely disempowered. She felt she had no one to go to for comfort or protection. She experienced her father as having the authority to subjugate her to his needs and she could not “tell.” She felt also that she had no part in deciding what was going to happen to her, let alone any influence over her father’s feelings. We reversed this pattern in psychodrama. We allowed Kathy to “lead the way.” She was the person structuring scene after scene, deciding who she wished to talk to and when that would happen. She was able to mobilize the resources available to her in the room by showing her story, choosing people to help her by playing roles, allow others to witness her story, and take in their support. And finally, she was the one handing out punishment to her father with the help of her “community.” The child within her, who naturally wished for some form of revenge or retribution, had her day in court. If she could not completely replace the old experience, her new one could slide in beside it. She could finally separate past from present by psychodramatically redressing a wrong that had been done to her.
Dealing with Dissociation and Frozenness
Our frozen fragments of self can hold much information about what drives us—they whisper to our inner ear about who we are or who we aren’t. While Kathy’s experience is extreme, sexual abuse is not uncommon when alcohol and drugs reduce inhibitions and drive behavior. Sexual abuse, in its many forms, can contribute to dissociation and lack of physical and/or emotional expression. By processing these fragments of self, we make significant moves toward integration. Pieces of the puzzle begin to fall together and we feel more empowered, whole, and self-
aware. Because Kathy has frightening “sense memories” and relationship moments or dynamics woven into her memories of her father, she can get thrown back into a frozen and dissociated state when she feels triggered by intimacy, sex, or even closeness. What triggers each of us is uniquely individual. But for ACoAs, it is often something that returns us to that childhood state of feeling trapped, vulnerable, helpless, humiliated, scared, minimized, or less than. “If you do not discharge the freeze response, you loose resiliency and the ability to face further threat” (Scaer 2007). While Kathy’s example is extreme, being repeatedly raged at or at the whim of a drunk parent and told we are the problem, or being unprotected by the sober parent, can also be traumatizing over time.
Dissociation remains the bête noire of psychiatric diagnoses. Its features include . . . a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, or perception of the environment (dsm-iv 477), but a unitary diagnosis continues to evade us. We refer to states of depersonalization, derealization, distorted time and sensory perception, fugue states, amnesia and dissociative identity disorder. . . . But psychotherapy practitioners in the field know full well what dissociation is. It’s that confused, distracted state in your patient that prevents you from breaking through the fog into any semblance of meaningful contact. It’s the patient “leaving the room,” losing contact with you when you’ve barely touched on the meaningful traumatic material, or when an obtuse reference to some supposedly benign topic causes a short circuit to a traumatic cue in their memory. . . . It’s that state of detachment . . . regardless of technique or therapist (Scaer 2012).
When Kathy entered group, she had just been fired for the third consecutive time. Though she is very talented in her work, she went blank when confronted with paperwork, and she felt too intimidated by her various employers, too disempowered and frozen within herself, to ask for help. After all, asking for help when she was young was not possible; that got her nowhere at best and abused at worst. Those core beliefs, that opening her mouth and speaking up would lead to trouble and that no one could help her, had lasted through adulthood. When Kathy could not manage an important part of her job, it triggered her back into the helplessness, choicelessness, and immobility she felt as a child. And she could not take action to improve her situation. She dissociated and disappeared into what felt like nowhere, but was not nowhere at all: it was somewhere, and that somewhere was associated with her traumatic experiences with her father, an authority figure in her life. When she bumped up against the authority of a boss, a system, and a workplace, her past become triggered. When she could not manage the task in front of her, she froze; she became unable to take action on her own behalf, just as when she was young. Instead, she went into a place of feeling totally overwhelmed. Gradually working through her “frozen feelings”, reestablishing a sense of autonomy, freedom of movement, and choice allowed her to literally “create new memories,” ones in which she was a functioning, empowered adult able to both enjoy her life in the present and muster the resilience to meet continued life challenges. Kathy has now been at her current job for three years and is very happy, effective, and valued.