It was a beautiful evening in early summer, and I was taking a much-needed walk in the Hampshire Downs in Southeast England. A few
months earlier, the COVID-19 pandemic had begun and, faced with being confined to our London home with three energetic young girls, my wife and I had made a dash for the countryside. We found a house for rent on Airbnb and arrived there with a van full of our possessions the following day.
In our new location, life was an odd seesaw, our blissful family time contrasting with the difficult challenges of home schooling two children with neurodivergent learning needs and entertaining a toddler who was desperate to play with other children.
My working life was an exciting but intense combination of seeing patients online, teaching our Therapeutic Coaching® practitioner training, overseeing my various businesses, and writing a book about my work with fatigue-related illnesses. I also found myself producing an online conference on trauma.
I’d already hosted an online event on fatigue for more than 40,000 participants, and with trauma being a key part of my clinical work, as well as an area that connects mind–body healing with functional medicine, it had seemed the obvious next step. And so, the Trauma Super Conference was born.
In preparation, I spent a few months recording interviews with many of the world’s leading experts on trauma, including Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Peter Levine, and Professor Stephen Porges. The process was fascinating as I always enjoy the opportunity to dive deep into others’ work and expand my own knowledge.
However, in more recent weeks, I’d also been experiencing a growing sense of shock, and that evening as I climbed higher in the hills, the sun setting in the sky, the enormity of what was happening around the world started to hit me.
The inaugural Trauma Super Conference had attracted more than 185,000 attendees. In fact, so many people had tried to access it on the first day, our website had gone down for 10 hours. As I continued my walk, I began to question why it had been one of the biggest online conferences in internet history.
It could partly be explained by the enormous suffering caused by COVID-19 lockdowns, and by the huge numbers of people who’d been affected by and/or had lost loved ones to the virus, as well as the collective trauma of living through a pandemic; another factor was the dialogue on trauma and race inequality catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd.
But to me, it also felt as if a wave that had been building for many years had finally peaked and in my position at the helm of the Trauma Super Conference, I just happened to be at the heart of it. After the event, there were thousands of comments on Facebook and our email program crashed several times, responding as though the many legitimate emails we received each day were a spam attack.
That afternoon, I’d read just a few of those emails, and each one contained a story that moved me deeply. There was Rachel from Texas who’d lost her daughter in a car crash caused by a drink driver the previous year and was battling unimaginable grief that manifested as intense anxiety and depression. There was Tony in Melbourne who’d been sexually abused as a child and had only recently come to terms with the fact it was blocking intimacy with his wife some 30 years later. Then there was Kiara in Mumbai who’d been orphaned at birth and was trying to understand why she constantly felt the need to self-medicate her emotional pain.
The first Trauma Super Conference had been attended by people in 169 countries, and it revealed one overwhelming truth – trauma affects people in every nation, regardless of their sex, age, privilege, or background. And, as you’ll soon see, trauma comes in many forms, and it can affect us in numerous different ways.
In the simplest terms, trauma is an injury that doesn’t heal. In this book, we’ll primarily be talking about emotional trauma from early childhood, although the impacts of this trauma can be felt at any time in life. And, as we’ll explore, what we learned in childhood is a key factor in determining how we respond to life’s blows as an adult.
When the emotional injuries of our lives don’t heal, the feelings and emotions that are triggered must go somewhere. One way of understanding this is to imagine that we’re all walking around with a big black sack stuffed with unprocessed and undigested life experiences. Sometimes the sack is sealed tight, while at other times its top comes off with predictable frequency.
Here’s a classic example of the latter. We’re driving along a road in a seemingly neutral and relaxed frame of mind, lost in our thoughts and half listening to a podcast, when another driver cuts us off on the inside, forcing us to brake suddenly to avoid hitting them. In that moment, we have an explosion of anger, and must restrain ourselves from catching up with the driver and instigating a fight to the death.
What just happened? How did we go from chilled pussycat to full-blown Conor McGregor in the space of a few moments? Well, it’s likely that an unprocessed emotional injury inside us just got rubbed with some salt. Perhaps, during our childhood, we experienced the trauma of not being seen, or of always being told that we didn’t deserve to take our place. Whatever it was, the proverbial top on that black sack of emotions was lifted, and the unprocessed trauma exploded out.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself, Yes Alex, that’s all well and good, but that lunatic did just cut me off. To which I’d respond, it’s true that they were driving badly, but perhaps they had a good reason to do so, such as rushing to help a loved one in distress. But the point here isn’t their behavior, but why something so explosive just happened in you.
So, trauma is unprocessed emotion in our body caused by an unprocessed emotional experience… and it’s also a little more complex than that. For some people this unhealed, unprocessed injury is an obvious one – for example, they once experienced a traumatic event such as being physically attacked and having to fight, and now whenever they’re out alone their nervous system goes into panic. For others it might be a more subtle event, such as being laughed at in the classroom for saying the wrong thing, which resulted in a fear of public speaking.
However, by itself, the emotional event isn’t enough to determine whether we experience trauma. Indeed, using the previous example, for some people fighting is their greatest thrill and they dedicate their lives to mastering the mixed martial arts or boxing; and there are those who have found great joy in being able to make others laugh.
So, although trauma requires a trigger event, that alone isn’t enough to determine whether trauma happens. The context within which the event takes place is also critical. How those around us, and we ourselves, respond to the event has a huge impact.
We have three core emotional needs – boundaries, safety, and love. If these emotional needs are met by our caregivers during our early development, and in time, we’re taught how to meet them for ourselves, they help us to develop a kind of resilience that will significantly reduce our likelihood of being traumatized as we journey through life.
For example, if we’re taught how to have (and are allowed) healthy boundaries, we develop an ‘emotional immune system’ that protects us from the world around us. If we’re taught how to self-regulate our nervous system to feel safe, we’re able to process the shocks that happen to us in life. And a deep sense of love and feeling lovable acts like a healing antidote to the events which might hit us.
Conversely, if our three core emotional needs are not met by our caregivers and we don’t therefore have the emotional resilience they provide, when we find ourselves experiencing potentially traumatic events, over time, it leads to a shift in the homeostatic balances in our body. The impact of these homeostatic shifts on our physical and emotional well-being is enormous. By living on edge in anticipation of future trauma events which may never occur, we create our own vicious cycle of suffering.
These outcomes of our trauma can themselves further perpetuate the cycle of suffering. Perhaps we learn that to be lovable, we need to be the best at everything we do, or maybe our sense of self-worth comes from constantly giving to and being there for others, even to our detriment.
As I explained in the last chapter when I talked about my journey, often, the true suffering of the trauma is not the events themselves but the shifts in our nervous system and the outcomes in terms of the way we respond and live. After all, my long run of disastrous relationships wasn’t caused by the actual events of my childhood, but by the coping strategies I’d created to try to escape them.
As you can see, trauma is so much more than just an event. Trauma is a series of stages that we go through. In my own reflections, one helpful discovery I made is that there are in fact four stages of trauma, and we’ve just touched on them:
To help unpack this ECHO way of thinking about trauma, let’s look briefly at these stages through the lens of my trauma.
Traumatic events can be single or repetitive events; they can be routine experiences; and they can be one-off moments. For some people the traumas of their life are obvious, while for others they’re much less so. Ultimately, though, for trauma to happen, there must be a trigger event that in some way creates an overload in the nervous system.
In my case, there were two major trigger events. The first was being abandoned as a baby by my father, and the second was a series of experiences with my sister and her severe mental health issues. These were intense and overwhelming experiences that presented a significant challenge for my emotional body to process (we’ll talk about the emotional body soon.)
Two people can experience the same event, but one is traumatized by it and the other isn’t. This is because two people can experience the same event and respond to it completely differently due to the internal and external context within which it happens. How we, and the people around us, respond to an event ultimately determines whether there’s trauma or not.
The way that we respond to an event is determined by our emotional resilience and our capacity to work through and process the shocks of life. And our emotional resilience is driven by whether our three core emotional needs were met early in our life (we’ll talk more about emotional resilience in Chapter 4.)
As children we’re dependent on those around us to meet these emotional needs for us; and as adults we can learn to meet them for ourselves. A key factor in determining how well we learn to meet our needs is how well they were (or weren’t) met for us as children.
We’ll dive into this in more detail later, but here’s a brief overview of our three core emotional needs:
In my case, with my father leaving and my mother’s boundaries being heavily violated by the nature of their divorce, there was no caregiver able to hold boundaries for me. The trauma in my mother’s nervous system – a result of all that was going on in her life – meant that her ability to co-regulate and to soothe me was impaired. And although I knew I was loved by my mother, my father didn’t love me enough to hang around.
And in terms of the trauma of my sister’s mental health issues, her behavior was so extreme it smashed any boundaries and created a constant sense that there were no safe places; the nervous systems of everyone around me were constantly on edge, and again, although there was love, it was polluted by the chaos that surrounded me.
Trauma causes changes in our body. When our nervous system becomes overloaded, our body’s stress response, which is designed to keep us safe when we’re under immediate threat, becomes stuck in the ‘on’ mode. I call this a maladaptive stress response and we pay a heavy price in our physical and emotional well-being in maintaining this mode.
Over time, a maladaptive stress response leads to shifts in the various homeostatic balances in our body (we’ll talk about this in detail in Chapter 5.) This means that a state of anxiety, which might at one time in our evolution have been necessary for our survival, becomes our normalized way of being.
In my case, the overwhelm caused by my father leaving and the subsequent chain of events, along with my sister’s constant emotional outbursts, meant that my nervous system was conditioned toward living in a maladaptive stress response. The crippling anxiety I experienced later in my life, which I described earlier, was a big part of this. However, the constant stress overload was also my body’s attempt to escape my feelings, which I was terrified of experiencing.
Having experienced the events of trauma, along with the resulting homeostatic shifts in our nervous system due to our core emotional needs of boundaries, safety, and love not being met, there are, inevitably, outcomes. Our life becomes heavily influenced by our attempts to find ways to meet our three core emotional needs – not only to heal our past but also to unlock our future and live more easily in the present.
For example, if we learned that the only way to get our emotional need of love met is by constantly achieving and being the best at everything we do, that will become our modus operandi. Or perhaps we learned that the best way to feel safe is to continually try to control ourselves and the world around us.
My experience was that my sense of self-worth and my ability to meet my core emotional needs of safety and love were tied not only to what I achieved but also to being the rescuer and helper for other people. Constantly being there for others was more important than being there for myself, and my feelings were my greatest fear.
What I believe is so important about the ECHO way of thinking about our trauma is that it clearly highlights that our real suffering isn’t the event or events that have already happened in the past, but what happens in our nervous system in response, and the outcomes in our lives as we manage this. Indeed, although the origin of our trauma may lie decades earlier, the ECHOs are very much reverberating now.
The good news is that this is a huge message of hope. After all, we can’t change what happened in the past, but we can certainly transform how it’s impacting our experiences and choices in life now. And that’s the work we’ll do together in this book.
Now, as vital as it is that you understand your personal journey with trauma and how you’ve responded to it, what really matters is how we unlock your capacity to heal. Indeed, at the heart of this book is the premise that our emotional body has a natural capacity to heal; in fact, it’s wired to do so.
Along with our physical body, we have an emotional body, which is home to our emotions and feelings. When we feel angry or sad, joyful or excited, the seat of these emotions is our emotional body.
If you get a wound in your physical body, provided you keep it clean (and if necessary, have your skin stitched together), your body will heal it. The same is true if you break a bone – as long as you avoid aggravating it, the bone will heal itself. Your doctor might prescribe painkillers to help you manage the pain, and they might put the bone in a cast to keep it still, but the healing comes from within the miracle of your being.
The same is true of emotional wounds, or trauma. Our emotional body has a natural capacity for healing, provided we create the conditions for the healing mechanism to do its work. To put it bluntly: Whatever you’ve experienced, however horrific it might have been at the time, and despite the ECHOs in your life feeling like a deafening wall of sound that you can’t ignore, even for a second, healing is possible. You. Can. Heal.
However, for the natural capacity of our emotional healing to kick in, certain conditions must be met. In a sense you need to learn to become the loving, skillful, and well-resourced caregiver you perhaps never had. It might take time, and it most likely won’t be a straight line, but you can do it.
So, now that we’ve taken a brief walk through the four stages, or ECHOs, of trauma let’s take a closer look at the first stage: the events of your trauma.