Childhood Trauma and Family of Origin
One of the friends I made via the Priory, I’ll call him John (not his real name), suffers from a bizarre affliction which, although it may sound strange, is a perfect example of how childhood trauma can still affect us as adults.
John can be sitting on the sofa feeling relaxed and happy – perhaps reading a book or watching TV – but the moment he hears the sound of his wife cleaning the dishes in the kitchen he experiences strong feelings of anger. It’s not that she’s overtly noisy, it’s just that the sound of the dishes clattering as she loads them into the dishwasher always has an immediate effect on him.
He’s overcome by feelings of severe discomfort and unease, which are quickly followed by fury and anger. It seems like a very unusual reaction, but it’s very real. His typical response in this scenario is to scream at his wife: ‘Shut the fuck up!’
Understandably, John’s wife considers his outbursts to be an overreaction, and they often end up having a blazing confrontation. Aside from these regular bust-ups, their marriage is in a healthy state. Other loud noises, like someone using a vacuum cleaner or a food mixer, don’t seem to bother John in the same way. So what is it about the sound of clanking crockery that makes him react so strangely?
John told me about his aversion as an aside one day, during a conversation about something else. He explained that as soon as he hears dishes clattering it triggers an automatic response within him.
He feels a rush of strong emotions, which he described as a mixture of fear, dread and extreme anger. It’s something over which he has no control, and it was obvious to me that it’s his limbic system that’s driving his reaction.
For John, it’s like ducking from a baseball: something that he does without thinking, and can’t stop himself from doing. He’s learned to live with it and takes it for granted that any banging and clanking in the kitchen will get on his nerves. It had never occurred to him that the cause of his affliction could be rooted deep in his childhood, and that it was directly related to the fact that, for most of his adult life, he’d been an alcoholic.
John is in his late forties now and hasn’t had a drink since he went into the Priory several years ago. When he went into recovery we discovered that a lot of his problems were caused by traumatic events that had occurred during his childhood.
John’s parents went through a very acrimonious divorce when he was around eight years old, and prior to his father leaving home, the household had become increasingly violent as his parents engaged in a number of rows. During these confrontations his father would regularly throw plates and other crockery, which would smash into pieces – a terrifying thing for a young child to witness.
John had learned to associate the sound of clanking and crashing crockery with domestic violence – and he’d been deeply traumatized by the experience. On a number of occasions John had watched powerless as his father verbally and physically attacked his mother and then stamped around the house, shouting and smashing plates. The fear that this triggered within him was stored away by his limbic system, and from that point onwards, he had a subconscious association between the sound of clanking crockery and feelings of fear, terror and fury. It created in him a sensation of being helpless, and of being ‘Less Than’, which, in turn, led him to be angry and aggressive as a defence mechanism.
Forty years later, these associations are still with him – even though he has no conscious awareness of them. The whole process operates at a limbic level, and he has very little influence over it. He doesn’t hear a dish clank and think: That reminds me of when dad used to smash up the house. Instead, he just instinctively becomes angry, and shouts at his long-suffering wife.
John has very few conscious memories of the domestic violence he witnessed – other than a few fleeting pictures in his mind – and he rarely thinks about them. However, his limbic system can remember the feelings in great detail – and they are triggered every time he hears crashing from the kitchen, although he doesn’t know why.
We tend to think of our memories as pictures that are played out in our head like a movie, but in fact many of them are much more deeply rooted and they affect us on a subconscious level.
The feelings we carry with us from childhood continue to have an enormous impact on our emotional state as adults – and addicts often remain affected by them throughout their lives. If somebody is born with a genetic predisposition to be super-sensitive to emotional distress – in other words, if they carry the ‘Watcher Gene’ – any childhood trauma will affect them far more adversely than would otherwise be the case.
As well as deeply traumatizing him, John’s experiences also made him feel deeply ashamed. They added an enormous amount of baggage to his Shame Core within his mental Shame Sack.
Of course, it wasn’t John’s fault that his parents had blazing rows in front of him: he’d been an innocent child who’d played no part in their confrontations. But children are amazingly instinctive. They can sense when something is fundamentally wrong, and as a result they can inherit shame from their parents.
John’s father’s rages were something that the family never mentioned outside of the home: they were a dirty little secret that John was unwittingly privy to. He therefore instinctively felt ashamed about the situation (i.e., he was carrying his parents’ shame).
There was a history of alcoholism in John’s family, so in my opinion he’s a prime example of somebody who is likely to have inherited the Watcher Gene. The trauma that he suffered during childhood was a double whammy: not only did it contribute to his feelings of shame and low self-worth, but it also meant his sensitivity to any further emotional distress was off the scale.
As an adult, John got a well-paid job in a respected profession, but his way of coping with the ups and downs of life was to become a chronic alcoholic. He was a heavy drinker for 25 years and it almost cost him his sanity.
The impact of childhood experiences on addictive behaviour is so great that most private treatment centres spend a large amount of time reviewing a patient’s early life, and in particular, their relationship with their ‘primary caregivers’. By this we mean not only their parents and siblings, but also anybody else who may have played a significant part in their upbringing, such as grandparents or aunts and uncles. We refer to this circle of individuals as a patient’s Family of Origin.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact that our parents and other caregivers have on our emotional make-up. Children are like sponges, soaking up what’s around them. If our parents speak with a certain accent, it’s no surprise that when we grow up we speak in a similar manner. Even our choice of newspaper is often inherited from our parents.
What happens within the family unit has a huge influence over us in later life, and the coping mechanisms we develop as kids stay with us long into adulthood. (If you wish to explore this subject more fully, I strongly recommend that you read Pia Mellody’s books, which are listed in Appendix 1.)
Whenever I work with a patient in order to get to the root of their addiction, in almost every case I discover issues from their Family of Origin that they’ve carried into adult life. There’s no such thing as a perfect parent, and it’s very important for me to state that the work I do with a patient isn’t about trying to blame their mum or dad. Instead, it’s a process of understanding what happened through adult eyes, in order to reduce any feelings of carried shame, and to reduce the impact of the trauma itself.
The walls that we build around our childhood can be very hard to break down. Interestingly, to begin with, John described his childhood as a very happy one. He hadn’t been physically or verbally abused, and on the whole he felt that he’d had a reasonable upbringing. Although the impact of the trauma he’d suffered was clearly very damaging, he was very unwilling at first to acknowledge that his parents’ actions may have had a negative impact on him.
The shame that we carry can be inherited from others during childhood, even when we have played no part in it. When we are young, our parents are like gods to us. We’re totally reliant on them for all our love and care, and any criticism of them naturally strikes us as offensive and counterintuitive. In fact, it feels shameful.
Many households instinctively operate a policy of ‘Don’t tell anybody outside these walls what happens in this house.’ So any trauma we suffer during childhood becomes furtive and shrouded in shame – even though we may have done nothing for which we should be ashamed.
Imagine for a moment that you are two years old and living with your parents. Let’s suppose that every time your mum and dad enter and exit a room in the house they pause before touching the doorknob and then head-butt the door. Bang!
This behaviour might look very strange to an adult, but a very young child won’t necessarily know any better. If, day in, day out, you observe your parents head-butting the door, after a while you might start to think that it’s normal. The chances are that as soon as you’re old enough to move from room to room on your own, you’ll start head-butting the doors too. Within the confines of your house, your behaviour becomes accepted. But as soon as you go outside the home, it’s a very different story.
Imagine now that it’s your first day at school and as you enter the classroom you head-butt the door. All the other kids fall about laughing, and mock you. You’ll probably feel very ashamed. But whose shame is it?
The answer is that it belongs to your parents: they’re the ones who created it. Of course, this is a surrealistic example, but the point it makes is a very real one. Going back into our past in order to objectively review what happened to us can help to explain why we carry hidden feelings of shame. The effect of this is very cathartic.
When we empty our Shame Sack we tackle the very thing that fuels our addiction. Understanding that we’re not responsible for things that happened in our childhood helps to lessen the power that the shame continues to have over us.
When a patient is in recovery, we usually invite them to fill in a document that charts their Family of Origin. The format varies from centre to centre, but generally the document lists the patient’s primary caregivers and asks them to describe each person – such as their mother and father – with a series of nouns and adjectives. These are broken down into positive and negative words. For example, a patient may describe their father as ‘strong’ and ‘dependable’, but they might also describe him as ‘cold’ or ‘distant’.
The words vary hugely from patient to patient, but the descriptions allow a therapist to look for areas of sensitivity. A dialogue then takes place between the therapist and the patient that explores more fully what happened during the latter’s childhood.
This is often a very emotional experience for the patient. They can become very defensive of their parents’ actions, so I reassure them that the process is one of understanding – it’s not about apportioning blame. Very often people burst into tears as they’re overcome by the intensity of the feelings that the process stirs up.
The patient might be asked to write down their views on the things they would’ve liked to have experienced during their childhood, but which they missed out on for whatever reason. For example, they might respond by saying that they wished they’d been able to go on more trips with their father, and this would trigger a conversation along these lines:
Patient: ‘I’d have liked my dad to take me to the fair.’
Therapist: ‘Are you saying that you were never taken by your father to the fairground? How often did your father take you out in general?’
Patient: ‘Oh, my dad didn’t take me out – he was always at work. We were sent to stay with my grandparents at the weekends.’
This revelation might be the first signal to me that the patient suffered a sense of abandonment as a child, which is a very common phenomenon. It may well have been that the parent in question was acting with good intentions by packing the child off to its grandparents, but if it was something that was done at every opportunity then the child may have misread these signals. Through their eyes, the parent may have been dumping them at a time when they were hoping for love and attention.
This is a very common reaction for children to have, even if no harm is actually intended by the parent. In this respect, it’s not just what happened that we’re seeking to explore, but the effect that it had on the child’s feelings.
The important thing we’re trying to achieve during these sessions is to allow the patient to view what happened through the eyes of an adult (which is inevitably very different to the version they may previously have recalled only through their own eyes as a child). Seeing things from an adult perspective for the first time helps the patient to let go of the trauma they’ve suffered.
In many cases, addicts find it helpful to take part in a ‘Trauma Reduction session’ (as pioneered by Pia Mellody), during which they’re asked to imagine that they are a child again. The therapist asks the addict to relive what happened, with a view to ‘giving back’ the shame that they feel. This is achieved by the patient imagining that their parents/other caregivers are in the room with them while they shout: ‘I Give You Back Your Shame!’
As you can imagine, these sessions are often extremely emotional, but they’re also enormously therapeutic. The procedure seems to allow the patient to access their limbic system and ease some of the distress they’ve been carrying around with them. I’ve taken part in well over 200 of these sessions, and have seen that the majority of addicts find the process beneficial to their recovery.
Only when we revisit our childhood trauma, and look objectively at what happened to us, can we understand how it affected us and then learn to move on.
This shows how important it is for someone to come to terms with their history, in order to smooth the path for what lies ahead. I believe that the process has the effect of de-traumatizing the limbic system, which is key to a successful recovery.
Only by coming to terms with the demons of our past, can we learn to live with the challenges we’ll face in the future. And one of the ways we can do this is through something called the 12 Steps.