I’ve always found it interesting that so many people believe healing and recovery is a process of upward growth. That once you are removed from a traumatic environment and placed in a safe place, you will naturally begin healing with consistent upward movement. Like a plant growing toward the sun. This idea, to me, is rather disheartening. Firstly, because it is very, very wrong. And secondly, if you believe this, you will be constantly shocked by and disappointed in the person healing, because this belief is so very wrong.

Maybe there are some individuals out there who are able, through some miracle, to take a journey of healing in this manner. The reality I have experienced in my own life, learned of in my studies, and seen in my experiences with others who are healing is this: It get’s worse, before it get’s better. Healing is not a simple journey upward. It’s a dangerous switchback path on a mountainside with no railing. And often, initially, you won’t even be moving upward at all. You will be trembling in the mud, digging fruitlessly with broken fingernails trying desperately to sink even deeper into the despair you should be clamoring to escape.

This seems counter-intuitive. After all, why would we want to stay some place so vile and so damaging? Why wouldn’t we naturally, given the opportunity, jump at a chance for freedom from the hell that has been our lives? Why, when the sun finally shines into the darkness, do we cower in fear and cling to the bones and feces of the horror? It’s confusing for those who are trying to help the person heal. And even more so for the person healing. Because the reality is, the person does want to heal. When you take a step back, though, and you look beyond the moment the door is thrown open, you will see the whole story. And you will begin to understand why for so many of us, it gets worse before it gets better.

The Loss of Survival Mode

The very first reason for this is because we have lived in survival mode, and safety and freedom allow us to shift from this. While this seems like a wonderful thing, finally having the chance to live beyond our immediate worries for survival, truthfully, it’s a jarring and overwhelming shift. When we live in survival mode, there is no time for contemplation. We shut down everything but core systems and focus on nothing but putting one foot in front of the other. Many of us even dissociate, directing our bodies as though from afar. The moment, the now, is the only reality we have to handle.

When survival mode slips away, though, we finally have the chance to see all of the moments. Every experience we lived through, every horror done to us, every feeling of violation. All of it is now available for the viewing. There is no more work to distract us. There is no oppression to keep things in order. The boxes we so carefully tucked everything away in start falling apart and their contents are splattered across our minds. One day, our only worry is making the pasta in just the right way. The next day, our worry is years of pain and suffering for every single time we failed to make pasta just the right way.

All the feelings we never had the luxury to feel come pouring in on us. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine in a single instant feeling years of sorrow, horror, and fear? And, they don’t simply come and pass. They come and stay. They have to be dealt with. But these feelings, these experiences are too big. They were too big to process when they were happening and now, they have banded together to attack all at once. So yes, the environment we are now in may be safe, and loving, and healthy. But the world inside our heads is now drenched in more horror than we have ever before singularly experienced. If you can imagine this, you can begin to understand why we fall apart, why we scream to go back, why, at first, we may rally against the peace that has become our lives.

Reliance on Past Behaviors

Once all the horrors of life come knocking, our systems get overwhelmed. We feel threatened. We feel as though we may truly die. Interestingly, this particular aspect is not a new experience for us. We understand this fear. We were born and bred in this fear. And we know what it takes to survive this fear. So, we perform the actions that we were taught, at our hand and at the hand of others, during our trauma.

Unfortunately, though, these behaviors only worked in the traumatic environment. But we’re not in that environment anymore. These behaviors now make no sense in the context of a safe, loving space. They are self-sabotaging, they are destructive, they are wrong. And that, in and of itself, is terrifying. These actions, these rituals, these behaviors are all we know. They kept us alive and as safe as possible. If they are failing, we have nothing else. Death and destruction have come knocking and there is no protection. This, like nothing else, will trigger a blind panic.

People mock all of those teens in horror movies for running up the stairs when the monster breaks down the door. It makes no sense to run up the stairs. There’s no way out up there. You could have stayed and fought. Or even better, ran out the back door in the kitchen. Why, oh why, did you run upstairs?

The reality is, this is not simply a device to fit the movie plot. It is a picture of what would really happen for many of us when confronted with horror of our own painful death. We would stop thinking and instead react blindly on instinct that was informed by our past experiences. Those past experiences said we are safe from the world behind a locked door. Those past experiences said our room is a haven where the world can’t get us. Our past experiences said that our parents made sure there were no monsters under the bed, so crawling into that bed is safe. None of this is logical, but these individuals are not THINKING they are only reacting.

It is often the same for individuals from a traumatic environment. We are overwhelmed, confronted with what truly feels like destruction of our self, if not our life. We are in a panic. So, we rely on what we know. Desperately repeating the same behaviors, even though some part of us may realize the behavior is futile. And in our panic, we don’t have the capability of learning new behaviors. This is why creating safety and calming the nervous system are so important in the treatment of trauma. The person needs to be calm before they can be open to learning new behaviors, before they are capable of making conscious choices to change.

Lack of Necessary Emotional Skills

And that’s the next piece of the piece of the puzzle. Many of us were never taught the behaviors necessary to live. We were taught, often at our own hand, how to survive. Nothing more. We only have the behaviors we know. This is very true for things like emotional regulation and emotional expression. These concepts don’t exist for us, because these are skills that must be taught, and we were never taught. So, we are blindsided by all of the horror of years, and we have no skills in place with which to handle it.

The ship we were given to navigate the ocean of life was, at best, a raft of garbage. Empty bottles and debris, tied together with twine and plastic bags. And now we are navigating an ocean during a violent storm. We never even learned to sail, being always tugged behind a larger vessel. And now we are cast adrift and have to figure it out. This raft of garbage is difficult to keep afloat in the best of circumstances. Now, it feels nearly impossible.

And, even if we had the energy to try to communicate what is happening, most of us do not have the ability to do so. Emotional expression and effective communication are skills that even individuals growing up in normative, healthy environments don’t often have in spades. They take years to learn. And now the world is expecting us to learn these skills at a time when we feel like we are drowning. Imagine you are falling from a very high cliff, and at the top people are shouting instructions on how to sew. It’s difficult to realize at the time they are telling you how to make a parachute. And even more difficult at the time to learn the skill and believe you can learn the skill quickly enough to save you.

Human Response to Invalidation

I know the analogies I am offering here seem dramatic: drowning, falling, dying. But that is how things feel. The reality may be that the individual is in a safe, loving environment where their needs will be met. But this is not the reality the individual is experiencing. The reality the individual is experiencing is dramatic, and violent, and overwhelming. The world sees us as over reacting. But the truth is we are simply reacting. It’s just that we are not reacting to the environment, we are reacting to years of unprocessed pain triggered by the environment. It makes no sense to throw a tantrum, self-harm, and destroy property simply because there was a dish in the sink. It does, however, make sense if you realize that dish in the sink instantly pulled up years of trauma, pain, grief, and failed responsibility; placed the person’s body in the exact moment of that horror; and the person has no means of controlling the memories and or dealing with the pain.

Unfortunately, though, the outside world does not see what is happening inside the person’s head and body. They only see the dish in the sink. And the person may be unable to communicate what is happening to them. So, what often happens is the world around reacts by telling the person they are over reacting. By saying it is not a big deal. By, essentially, completely and totally invalidating years of horror and pain. And this is another reason it can get worse before it gets better, invalidation from others.

If an infant is hungry, uncomfortable, or in pain, it cries. When no one responds, it cries louder. When still no one responds, it wails. It is doing the only thing it knows how to express its needs. Ultimately, that is how most humans still operate emotionally. They attempt to communicate the intensity of their emotion. If the other person refuses to acknowledge the emotion, the person makes it louder. If they continue to be ignored, they will eventually be emotionally screaming their message in hopes of being heard. This is part of why tiny spats can turn into huge relationship-shattering arguments. The person had to keep turning up the volume to be heard.

Remember, we are not closed systems. We rely on others to help us regulate. And we rely on others to help soothe us. This is very true of individuals who were traumatized during childhood as portions of their brains are still stuck at those critical years of need. If I tell you I am sad, I am asking that you acknowledge this and in doing so validate my reality and help soothe me. If you tell me my sadness isn’t that big of a deal or possibly not real, it doesn’t make my sadness go away. It’s still there, still creating a need in me. So, I will attempt to get the need met again by telling you louder. I will prove my sadness to you. I will escalate from words, to tears, to sobbing, and possibly even to self-harm and suicide attempts just to try to prove to you this feeling is real. Just to try to get this need met.

Luckily, for most people, they come from the same reality, the same type of childhood experience. This means that the same external cues produce similar reactions. Thus, it is easier for those with similar experiences to hear one another and in so doing validate one another long before the message needs to be carved in the skin with a razor blade. Those coming from a traumatic homes, however, can have vitally different experiences. Meaning the same external cue will provide drastically different internal results that another person is unable to understand.

It takes a lot of insight and a lot of training to be able to step back and realize what we are doing. Insight and training that most normative individuals do not even possess, let alone those just escaping from trauma. This means the traumatized person is then left with no options but to escalate the behavior, getting louder and louder, until someone is, hopefully, finally able to hear them, acknowledge the feeling as real, and in so doing begin the process of helping to soothe them.

The reality of our open systems and need for others helps to explain additional reasons why it gets worse before it gets better especially when a person finally finds a safe, loving relationship. I will explore this topic in the next installment of the Different Functional blog: Why It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better: Relational Contexts of Initial Healing with Trauma.

Part 1: Why It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better: Factors that Complicate Healing from Trauma

Part 2: Why It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better: Relational Contexts of Initial Healing with Trauma

On the Meaning of Fine