Couch 237: Social Rules

I am not feeling well now. I am starting to feel suicidal and wanting to self harm. Ugh. I am supposed to go to Church tonight but I don't think I am going to. I don't feel like socializing.

Hugs, Kit.

And to anyone else who wants/needs.

I have started counting down the days until our trip to the Oregon coast to visit one of my friends (the one who used to host the sister weekends every year back in MO). We fly up there in 37 days woohoo! Can't wait to walk on the beach and hike in what she calls the 'fairy forest' there. This trip is the only reason I'm not totally dreading turning 60 anymore just before we leave.

I still can't believe that I'm going to be 60

Cool I've sort of been counting down to a trip I plan to take next July for my 40th Birthday, nothing is officially planned yet but I hope to start doing so in the coming months.

I am so sorry you are feeling this way right now. One thing I learned at the crisis center I was just at, was that reaching out despite your entire being telling you "NO," helped. Even if it was just for 10 minutes. It helped ease the anxiety and SI.

If reaching out looks like talking in here, that is great. It is okay to reach out to your T when you are feeling this low. They want to know.

Velcro, how was your stay at the crisis center? Was it helpful? I know you were really unsure about going there...

Thanks for asking, EM. I was very ambivalent for the first few days. But, I was honest to my T’s there. I do think it was helpful in the sense that I got to experience different modalities of therapy, all which gave me a different perspective on my life.

I also really saw that having support 24/7 was extremely beneficial for me. There was a T there every day until 10. So if I was really upset about something, I could talk to that T for a bit. I am pretty sure I cried to all of their T’s-and there are lot.

One of my T’s told me that she doesn’t see just depression in me, that she suspects I have trauma, specifically relational trauma, in my life.

To me, trauma is such a BIG word. That’s used for war veterans, people who are abused physically or sexually. Serious stuff. I never experienced anything like that.

The only real thing is that I have no memories of childhood. I don’t start having a narrative of my life until I was about 11 or 12. That is a LOT of years to not remember.

overall, it was beneficial. i am not suicidal currently, and so far have avoided the unhealthy coping mechanisms I fall back on when I go down that spiral.

I had a hard time with the word "trauma" too. Things weren't great when I was growing up, but it could have been much, much worse. I was never beaten and I was never, like, a child soldier. When I talk about the lack of classic traumatizing events with my EMDR T, she has mentioned that those are actually much easier to recover from, especially with EMDR, because you reprocess one big event and it takes a handful of sessions and then it's done. Relational trauma is tougher because it affects your development of a sense of self and your feelings about being close to people. If you had your feelings invalidated, you just think that that's normal and continue to do it to yourself as an adult, which makes life infinitely harder than it has to be.

One thing I think about a lot as a parent of young kids is how memory works in early childhood. Basically you don't form long-term episodic memories until preschool age (like, we lived here, this happened at school, etc) but you form implicit memories from birth (I'm not actually sure about prenatally, but I wouldn't be surprised). So even if you don't remember specific events, you have a TON of feelings, impressions, sensations etc that have been stored but are not accessible to your conscious mind. I do think adults respond in characteristic ways when they were traumatized as children (particularly relational trauma), so I wouldn't be surprised that therapists who observe your symptoms and personality might have some clues about your past based solely on that.

I'm glad it was helpful, even though it sounds like it gave you some heavy things to think about.

People often tend to say "it wasn't as bad as X...", and the thing is, you could have been physically abused or sexually abused as a child for many years, and likely you would still have said "other people have it worse, I at least wasn't starving", for example.

What matters most for you is the impact of your lived experiences (whether it's trauma or not) on you, so that perhaps working through them can help ease the chronic symptoms.

You don't have to use the word "trauma" if you don't feel it fits.

People seem to have awkward responses to the word/concept of trauma. Some people don't feel entitled to use it for fear of being fraudulent; some people want to claim it in order to validate their painful experiences. I think trauma is over used and misapplied in some circumstances. Experiences can be painful and distressing without being traumatic. Societally, I think we marginalise pain and distress and this leads people to need bigger and more serious words to evidence how much they are struggling. We should take our pain seriously and not play a game where we need to up the ante in order to describe our "ordinary" wounds. The ordinary pain is painfully real enough.

I also have a hard time with the word "trauma". But when L describes it as relational, it makes more sense to me. T, L, and Pdoc have all agreed I suffer from trauma. T and L know me best, so I'm trying to understand the word and see if/how it fits me.

Ex-T, ex-MC, and Dr. T have all said that I act/react like someone who has suffered trauma. I used to think it had to be what I called "capital-T trauma." (And ex-T seemed puzzled that there was no big thing jumping out, even wondering if I'd repressed something.) But I've come to learn through talking to them that it can be "lowercase-t trauma," where a bunch of things that may seem minor from the outside (compared to much worse stuff) can add up over time. Including relational trauma, like EM mentioned.

Dr. T has also said it can have to do with one's natural emotional temperament (I forget the actual term he used) how they respond to such things, where two people could have the exact same experiences, but one has lasting effects and the other doesn't (to use a more stereotypical example, why two soldiers could be in the exact same battle, and one gets PTSD, while the other doesn't).

And that's all helped me to understand myself better and feel less like I'm overreacting (as so many others had it much worse) and should just get over things.

There's a brilliant book by a therapist called Aundi Kolber - the book is called Try Softer. It discusses big-T and 'little T' trauma in quite some detail, whilst offering some useful exercises to increase self-compassion.

Thanks for this, Lost.

I can't decide if I am feeling better today. I think I need to get more into the day to find out. I stayed home from Church last night but I admitted to my friend who leads the group that I was isolating. I also told my parents what was going on. Not that they were particularly helpful, but at least they knew. I'm wavering on texting my T to let her know about my feelings of the past couple of days. Her response likely won't be all that helpful. She'll do the mushy gushy thing and the I wish I could make it better for you thing and I don't think that is what I want. But I don't know what I want. I just want to feel better.

I was adopted when I was one week old. Obviously I can't remember anything from that age, but I wonder how it's affected me. I spent 9 months inside another person and then I was born and likely taken from her immediately. This was the 70's at a home for unwed mothers and I'm assuming they separated the babies and mothers after birth, although I was told she was allowed to dress me when my parents came to pick me up and she took a while. I love both my parents and I wouldn't change them being my parents, but I don't view adoption as this 100% rosy thing that people seem to view it as. There has always been a wound there. Something was taken from me. I felt rejected and abandoned. Other kids were cruel when they told me that my mother didn't love me because she gave me up or made comments about my "real" parents. My parents are my real parents. When I was older and found the papers with what they paid the adoption agency, I felt like a commodity, a used car purchased off the lot. I wonder if she remembers me on my birthday. Anyway, your comment made me think of all this.

I'm sorry you had that experience, NP. I can't imagine effectively having a 'receipt' for your existence.

P rarely shut up about the notion of pre-verbal trauma in my early experiences. Whilst I may have some, that certainly wasn't what brought me to her office. I think she was just looking for something she felt half capable of helping with.

I have fallen on both ends of this spectrum, often feeling both things at once. There was a point in my therapy when I really needed him to say that I have PTSD because I needed the validation that what I went through was real/mattered. It also felt like if I didn't have that diagnosis, then I was a fraud and I couldn't talk to people about what happened. Who the hell am I to say he abused me? I'm also very afraid to claim for myself PTSD because I don't want someone to think I'm attention seeking or trying to claim what I went through was awful when maybe it wasn't that bad.

This Johnny Depp thing has really been triggering me around this whole concept. Some Iraq veteran tweeted that living with Depp must be worse than being in Iraq because some psychologist said on the stand she had very bad PTSD. I even hemmed and hawed with my therapist when I brought this up. I told him that living with my ex may not be as bad as war but it sure wasn't a walk in the park. I told him I'm not claiming I do or have ever had a PTSD diagnosis (because he's never been 100% clear on that point and I have such shameful feelings around the topic that I can't clearly ask him), but that this tweet still bugged me. He did tell me that at some point he changed what he bills my insurance as from depression to PTSD, so I guess there's that.

I am confused. Can all adverse experiences be classified as trauma? Relational trauma still entails some events which we would reasonably define as trauma, doesn't it? It's difficult to talk about classification without getting into a useless leader board approach where some traumas are understood to be worse than others, but at the same time trauma has a meaning and it is a particular kind of experience. The concept of "little" traumas sounds like being a bit pregnant. I am not commenting on anyone's personal experiences of trauma or adversity, trying to think through my own understanding of trauma.

I should also add that it's also okay if you now or later feels like "trauma" fits.

I don't understand "big t vs little t" with regards to trauma, and trauma or distressing event, folks deserve to have the support they need.

For example, grief is extremely painful and often for years.