Couch 237: Social Rules

ATAT: I’ve been thinking about you. Have you seen Info at all during this?

There are too many people to quote, but you all gave me a lot to think about. EM: I swear we are on a similar journey. I’ve related to so much you’ve talked about on here.

My T at the crisis center did say she thinks it is relational trauma. I also just read The Body Keeps The Score, and made myself write down any of the symptoms of trauma the book brought up. It is so conflicting, because I relate to so much of what he said, but all the examples in the book are so much “worse” than my experiences (that i can remember).

So much to think about!

I hope it goes well. I'm glad to see you around, Lemoncake.

Hugs if wanted, NP.

For what it's worth, there's a lot of adoptees who speak about complex feelings with regards to their adoption. Especially as some do feel that there's a really strong societal push to be grateful VS care and support about their feelings of rejection and abandonment. Particularly those where there's a fee and/or international adoption where the child is of a different country. Whether it was a closed adoption or open one where the birth parents stay in touch.

There's nuanced books these days for adoptive parents to read to teach them to hold space for their child's feelings. Books for them to read together etc.

I have thought a few times that our therapists sound similar, so it makes sense that we are on somewhat similar journeys. My depression symptoms lessened significantly once I started to get into core issues, so I hope your next steps will take you there too.

I know what you mean about The Body Keeps the Score. I imagine other people have good recs for relational trauma (maybe the one Lost mentioned?). It's not a trauma book, but the first time I really saw myself and my life reflected back to me in a book was when I read Running on Empty. I like that she doesn't talk only about the extremes, which makes it more relatable for people in the middle.

Hugs if wanted, velcro. If it helps, a lot of people minimise their trauma, especially because the word sounds so serious.

For example, a lot of people think emotional neglect is not serious because "I had food, shelter, I wasn't emotionally abused, I wasn't beaten or sexually abused..." but Pete Walker says not having a single caretaker whom you can turn in times of need or danger is "the core wound", especially as many dismiss it VS more obvious abuse.

He (and some others) is of the opinion that some individuals can suffer some active abuse without developing PTSD, if there is one caretaker who does not emotionally neglect them.

Pdf link, since his website doesn't have a page on it: http://pete-walker.com/pdf/emotional...omplexPTSD.pdf

My parents were always very open about the adoption and I remember them telling me it was fine if I wanted to know more about my birth mother. When I was about 13 or 14, I remember a talk I had with my mother where I expressed a desire to search for my birth mother. She immediately burst into tears and I felt horrified, like the worst daughter ever, for making her cry. I guess in theory those desires were okay been when they became reality, she wasn't prepared. I don't think we ever talked about that incident, but I was pretty unwilling to talk about my desires for more information for many years and she apparently did whatever she needed to do to be okay with it eventually. I don't know what kind of books were available back then. I definitely think adoptive parents need to do some work on themselves in order to handle the feelings that come up in themselves and in their children. There are three parties in this triad, and one of them had no say in the matter.

I’d be more worried about the bison than stopdog.

"Dog smokes bison."

Oh yes, i checked off every single one of the symptoms of emotional neglect. I guess it made me wary because it is just one psychologist’s view and not something that has been empirically studied, at least that i know of.

thank you! i will check this out.

This conversation about relational trauma, emotional neglect, etc. really has me thinking tonight. I need to learn more about relational trauma especially, I'm not familiar with the term at all. (How this can be after 10 years of therapy I won't ask. That ship has sailed.) But I am wondering about it re: my childhood. Even though I don't recall hearing or seeing the phrase before it still has an aha kind of feel to it for me. Hmm.

What you describe is sadly common, almost every "run by adoptees" websites / blogs / Instagram content creator accounts I've come across talks about how adoptive parents really need to work on themselves. Wanting to validate that heavily.

I haven’t heard the term for it either.

It's been studied in recent years I think. Past 5ish years? About the effects of emotional neglect with or without abuse, with regards to developing depression and other mental health issues.

Don't quote me though. I search and read in bursts and never remember the dates of publications or study titles.

It's definitely part of the Adverse Childhood Events study: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

I also previously participated in a local group for child abuse survivors (using the World Health Org's International Questionnaire for ACEs), where sometimes people said the emotional neglect compounded their emotional pain from chronic bullying in schools (folks have been beaten up at school etc) violence at home etc.

Anne Wright talks a lot about relational trauma on her blog.

Blog | Annie Wright, LMFT | Berkeley, California

Dang, my memories are blurring together a lot and I kept thinking "wait, I haven't talked about concepts like relational trauma with the couchies on MSF?"

Must have been with my local group before my life imploded roughly 6 months ago.

I don't think every single person on the planet is traumatised and/or have adverse upbringing experiences, but I think a lot of people with chronic difficulties do because it's your early life "templates" about people and the world around you.

According to my ex T and current T, people who "just" have situational depression or anxiety which resolves within 3 to 12 sessions of CBT...have important protective factors. (And of course, neither of my therapists and myself believe therapy is the only way to heal.)

I had commented feeling like I failed CBT, asked what's wrong with me to need more than 12 sessions etc as time limited therapy is very common.

Eta: sorry for spamming the couch.

You may very well have talked about it on here QM it is probably me who just forgot. Or maybe I wasn't ready yet to think about it.

Thanks QM, I'll check it out.

Sending you love @@.

Not taking Annie Wright as a guru

(I feel some of her opinions about people with personality disorders are biased, given as there are 10 in the DAM but she focuses on particular cluster B ones and over-generalises them hard.)

So here's basically what I've been trying to understand in my own therapy but couldn't think of words.

I've 3 siblings, and we all turned out differently, due to differing ages, birth order, gender, interests, and how we as people affected how our parents treated us, school environment with teachers and peers, which relatives cared or didn't care (huge extended family), etc etc.

It wasn't about wanting my siblings or myself to "have it worst", (other than the fact that my abusive brother compared and then decided to abuse me, and he outright said it) but because for a long time, I would argue with my therapist "I must be the problem because 2 of my siblings turned out alright." and my sister and I excused my abusive brother with "he had it worse than Quietmind from our parents which is why he SAed Quietmind."

Yeah, so I got stuck in a loop lasting quite a few years with "but other people have it worse."

"But what makes these relational experiences traumatic?

The bottom line is this: when children experience traumas and stress, it is not necessarily the trauma itself that becomes the problem.

If a child has securely attached, attuned, loving, consistent caregivers who can support them in metabolizing the stress, organizing and making sense of it, the child can more or less move through a trauma or stressor functionally.

However, if the trauma or stressor is happening within the attachment relationship with the parent or guardian, the child, therefore, cannot usually rely on the adult to help them integrate and process the stress.

Or if the trauma or stress happens outside of the attachment relationship but the caregiving adult still fails to support the child in managing, healing, or recovering from it, a child will likely develop maladaptive and compensatory responses to organize their experience simply because, as children, they do not have the resources and coping skills to do much else.

Maladaptive responses are numerous and varied but essentially, if left unaddressed and untreated, they can lead the child to become an adult who has ineffective beliefs and behaviors about themselves, about others, and about the world.

The impacts of complex relational trauma will be wide, varied, and unique to the individual who experiences it.

There is no one-size-fits-all description.

It’s absolutely possible that two children, growing up in the same household where the relational trauma took place, will have wildly different responses due to many factors including but not limited to the child’s temperament and resources, length and intensity of exposure to the trauma, the type of trauma, and any if at all support in managing it, etc..

All the little fragments: Understanding complex relational trauma.

Thanks for sharing this. A quiz popped up, I took it, and got "Based on your answers to this quiz, there’s a moderate to high likelihood that you come from a relational trauma background." So I'll definitely read up on it some more.

Note: The quiz asks for your name and email, but it gives you the results at the end (rather than emailing them), so you could just put in a fake name and email.

I just did a quick search on Pubmed for "childhood emotional neglect" and 98 results came up, which is not a lot but not nothing either. For me, the concept helped me understand my experience and my maladaptive thoughts/coping strategies, and it gave hints about what to examine more closely with my T. The emotional neglect concept doesn't totally come out of nowhere either because it has underpinnings in attachment theory, child development, research on parenting styles, etc, which are all more established. It is more or less a way to take somebody who appears in therapy with certain issues but without specific events that might explain them more easily. As the book says, it's the blank spaces in the family photo.

I took the quiz last night, and I ended up with that result also. so I'm going to be reading up on it too.

So at the last minute I registered for a summer class about childhood development. I logged onto it the first day which was 5/31 excited to start, read the syllabus, and I'm not really sure what caused this rather knee-jerk reaction, but I dropped the class about 15 minutes later. I probably should think about that reaction a bit huh... it was weird.

I think everyone gets "there’s a moderate to high likelihood that you come from a relational trauma background." I did. But I think it is more a way to drum up business than accurate assessment.