The term trauma-informed care has become somewhat of a buzzword among those of us in the caring professions. Advances in the field of trauma science have helped us understand that traumatic stress can have lasting effects on brain areas and even change the chemical composition of our brains. These changes impact the way we handle our daily lives and stress.
As a society we are tragically uninformed about how common and fundamental the effects of trauma are to many aspects of American life. Trauma is the unrecognized cause of our addiction epidemic and ever widening wave of suicides among young people.
Let’s first consider childhood. Given a list describing different childhood experiences, such as being a child of divorce, having a relative who was mentally ill, having to move a lot, being picked on at school and so on, over half our population report having at least one of the experiences on the list. Such experiences are called “Adverse Childhood Events” and there is growing evidence that the proportion of the population to have encountered them is actually much greater than 50%. The term “Adverse Childhood Events” grew out of a questionnaire that a doctor gave the female participants in a study he was doing on how to help them lose weight. That study was back in the 90s and it’s shocking findings were all but ignored for the next 20 years. The women being studied were all relatively well-off residents of San Diego and the study was run by Kaiser Permanente Health Insurance.
The correlation between experiencing adverse childhood events and becoming obese was just the start of uncovering the actual causes of health problems. The greater the number of events one had experienced on the list, the greater the respondents’ lives were shaped by them. For instance, if a person experienced four or more adverse childhood events than statistically, their life expectancy turned out to be 20 years less than someone who didn’t have four or more such events.
Diseases, addiction, mental illness, violence, incarceration and all manner of difficulties in life have now been proven to be linked to the number of adverse childhood events an individual has encountered. For illustrative purposes I am specifically referring to childhood, but imagine the impact on a life when the effects of adult experiences are taken into account.
The reason to consider your childhood first is because you may have zero memories of anything upsetting happening while you were growing up. Meanwhile, these forgotten events could be deeply influencing how you are in your business and your life. Without considering whether you experienced trauma and how much, you will never be able to successfully improve your behavior. Trauma is the source code, if you will, for behavior. This is because trauma actually changes the brain, especially when it is experienced in childhood. And even non-techies know that if the source code is altered, everything that follows is altered. Sorry to burst the bubble of thinking that if you’ve been reasonably happy and successful so far, surely you don’t need to consider if trauma has affected you. Research now shows that many people remain completely in the dark about their true inner workings until something unhappy happens in their adult life, as it always will, and a dormant inner volcano of pain suddenly erupts and swallows them up. Such events are called trauma triggers and any sort of life turn can be a trigger depending on your particular inner makeup. Any sort of break up, be it of a love relationship or a business partnership could be a trigger for some. For others, it can be a parent, or even a pet, passing away that unleashes unprocessed trauma from many decades old.
Previously, the need to have a coach to steady you when the pressure is on has been reiterated. Here I am touching on the topic of trauma and why it’s essential to have a coach who can recognize the difference between helping you counter discouragement and calm bouts of the kind of anxiety most business owners encounter, and when something much deeper and important is happening. Ironically it may only be when you’ve been triggered and therefore discover that you’ve been walking around unaware of your inner volcano all these years, that you can change your life to be many times more successful and pleasurable than before being triggered. Such a happy outcome rarely, if ever, comes without the guidance of a knowledgeable coach, like myself who recognized and dealt with several adverse childhood events in order to recover from my bottom.
Types of trauma to consider:
- Disasters
- Domestic Violence
- Economic or Societal Crisis
- Emotional Abuse
- Grief & Separation
- Human Rights Abuse
- Neglect
- Persecution
- Physical Abuse or Assault
- School Violence & Bullying
- Serious Accident or Illness
- Sexual Abuse
- Societal Trauma
- Violence
- War
Why would I say your life will be measurably improved by coming through such a storm? Because it’s been proven to you that “something happened back there” and as you unravel the who, what, when, where, you will automatically see the ways in which you have been replicating those events and repressing the pain all these years.
By its very nature it will appear preposterous to think that you could possibly not be aware of the feelings and motivations that have been the engine of your life. It’s too hokey to imagine you have suffered any kind of emotional amnesia, that’s the stuff of soap operas and B-grade melodrama, right? Once you learn a bit about your child’s brain and how being so new to life, you were vulnerable to misinterpreting or totally missing what was going on around you, you will see how very likely it was. The “you” back then is not you of today. That younger version of you may have taken the only option that seemed open at the time. That option was to deny and disassociate from a scary and perhaps genuinely dangerous reality until enough years had passed that you now could take care of yourself and move away. The problem is that by that time, at least 10 years on, you’d forgotten that there ever existed a locked room in your psyche in which you’d stored your fear and despair.
Until recently, misinformation and denial so blinded humans to the prevalence of trauma that only such experiences as violence and sexual abuse were thought to deeply affect a child. Sexual abuse and it’s long-term effects are still largely misunderstood. Any form of inappropriate behavior, be it verbal or physical, is traumatic to a child. This is especially true if the behavior is displayed by a trusted figure, or figure the child has been directed to trust. Even if a child does not understand the specifics of “what is wrong with this picture” they are aware of its wrongness. Trauma has been described as any experience which is “unexpected, unwanted” and which the child feels powerless to stop. Thus, experiences that are common in our adult lives can be deeply traumatizing to a child because of their interpretation of them, like living in poverty, abruptly changing schools, having a sick sibling, being bullied at school, having an accident/needing an operation, seeing a parent hurt or being neglected or shamed by a caregiver and so forth.
Reading this you may be thinking, “I don’t remember anything of my childhood, but I don’t need or want to. I could just think about the effect of unpleasant things in my adult life, like the time I was fired, crashed my car, or got dumped by someone I was dating.” Examining your childhood is so essential, all the while being so difficult is because that’s where your mindset originated. It’s hard to complete the reflection called for because for most of us it’s only natural to love your parents. Even if they had faults, as a mature adult, you now understand that they did the best they could.
This process is not about assigning blame in any way. It is about being smart about living your life and running your business today. Because along with the leap forward in understanding how prevalent trauma really is, there has also been a leap forward in ways to treat it. Today there are many effective options for lifting you out of previous ways of thinking about yourself and your world and bringing you to a much happier and empowered place. Please feel free to call me if you want to talk in person about any of these issues.
