WHO ARE YOU?
As someone who has struggled with life long, what is now often called “cPTSD”, I have often had to ask that question of myself. Because early life experiences are meant to communicate or program that information in an infant, when something goes wrong in the downloading process, a child can grow to adulthood missing a few files and at times, having the operating system software corrupted. If it happens enough to damage the processor, we may struggle to find our identity our entire lives. In other words, sometimes we wrestle with things in adulthood because of the corrupted messages we received in childhood that were never challenged enough. In current psychosocial thought, these corruptions are often considered to be a *trauma*. When injuring events or messages are pervasive over time, the resulting damage is often categorized as “complex (or sometimes, *childhood*) PTSD” (cPTSD). Personally, I would like to find a replacement for the word “trauma” because it is usually understood as an injury to physical tissue, but at this time in human history, it is how we define things that are overwhelming and life-altering.
For purposes here, I prefer to think of an episodic trauma in terms of “before and after”. Before 911, for instance, we could fly relatively freely, meet and send off people from their actual airport gate and remain fully clothed going through checkpoints. After 911, we all saw life differently, globally. Our current global and regional traumas will have a similar life-transforming effect. Over time, however, the pandemic may fit more neatly into the category of complex trauma simply because it could alter how we navigate systemically as humans. These are thoughts that keep me up nights, but they are not necessarily relevant here, so back to the point.
Trauma, by my definition, relates to events or circumstances that are deeply distressing and that alter our sense of safety and goodwill in the world. When trauma is episodic, as in an event in time like a rape or a car accident, it changes our perception abruptly and can rapidly rewire our nervous system as I described in the article CPTSD 101 (link below). When the trauma is complex (or from childhood or chronic over time) it can warp our perception of the world so thoroughly that we believe all people are out to get us or even that God is just waiting for an opportunity to nail us for some random offense against him. Often the teachings we received in our faith communities reinforce this fear by using imagery similar to the famous sermon by the Great Awakening era preacher, Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.”
This sermon still causes me to shudder because I had to study it in my Christian high school at some point, spiders being held over flames and all. I don’t know to this day, what to do with that orientation toward God so I will leave that to others more qualified. What I would like to look at here is how our early wiring impacts how safe we see other people and how that perception impacts how we see ourselves.
When we are born, we are absolutely incapable of doing life on our own. Everything we experience feels like trauma to us because we do not have enough information to know that there are bigger beings there to make sure our needs are met and we feel safe and welcome in the world. Over time, we realize that fewer and fewer experiences are actually life-threatening, but an infant doesn’t know what they don’t know, so everything is overwhelming to them.
There are myriad ways this can happen, but for a significant number of us humans, the message that we are safe and welcome in the world did not get programmed completely. There are files missing and in some cases, the whole hard drive is damaged. We are pushed out of adolescence lacking the proper tools to create a fully formed adult and so we limp by, trying to find someone who can tell us who we are. If we are fortunate, good friends and even a healthy enough spouse can add updates and software patches that help us function and life experiences, in general, and can help us mitigate the fear we feel so that we don’t feel overwhelmed all the time. I am blessed to have many people in my life that have helped me reprogram my software and rewire my harddrive.
Often, all that is necessary to learn to function better is an updated version of how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Sometimes the strategies we used in childhood to help us manage are no longer necessary or useful. We have all witnessed a very distressed customer at a service counter displaying a grown-up “throw-yourself-on-the-floor-kicking-and-screaming” toddler tantrum any self-respecting three-year-old would be embarrassed by. The anger displayed usually has triggered a fear of being devalued and deemed irrelevant. When toddlers experience that level of distress, it is because they fear being abandoned for not being important enough to the caregiver. The tantrum is intended to demand to be noticed. It is an effective tool for a pre-verbal child. If it works to get the attention, the behavior will be repeated as often as necessary. Conversely, if behaving politely gets the job done, that will likely be what is encoded. Either way, the goal is to establish that the toddler’s needs are met and that they are important enough to pay attention to. Eventually, their brain develops enough to reason this out and make conscious choices with their behavior, but that happens at a later stage of development. For now, this is the strategy that gets the desired result, so it is what a toddler uses.
Now back to the adult version. If an adult did not receive upgrades and new software programs throughout their childhood experience, they may not have those tools available as adults. We all need to be deemed relevant and valued by those in our lives. When we feel that sense of safety and being welcome in a relationship slipping away, we feel an inner sense of panic, just like we did as an infant. Having people withdraw from us then would mean death for us so every time a baby wakes up and feels that they are alone, they cry out in distress until someone enters their experience to calm them and meet their needs. Over time, children are meant to learn how to calm themselves more and more so that they can tolerate being alone without literally being “scared to death”.
When the periodic upgrades and programming fail us in childhood, we sometimes don’t know what to do with that fear of abandonment so we revert back to the strategies that worked for us as infants. We protest or we pander. We can clearly see protest in the adult at the service counter. What we may miss is the pandering that happens when the clerk works extra hard to meet that customer’s demands, apologizing over and over to the customer for being the cause of the rager’s distress and then finds themselves sitting in a fetal position in the breakroom, trying to reclaim the courage to go back out to that service counter jungle. In this case, both people are asking the same questions and looking for the same answers. “Who am I?” and “Do I not matter?” As children, and inadequate answer to these questions would have felt like pending doom because we would simply die if we were not relevant to someone. As adults, if we have not upgraded our software in order to be able to answer those questions internally, we will experience these events in much the same way.
We will never be able to stop people from raging at us, but we can teach ourselves to not let their virus infect our software function. We can find the patches and the upgrades we need to complete the task of learning how to adult. It can be harder to see the need at times, but even when we are the ones raging at others, we can stop and ask these questions as well. If we can learn to see who we are accurately and be able to answer the question of relevance for ourselves, we may find that raging at people is no longer the best strategy.
The secret to being able to adequately adult, in either case, is the same. Figure out who you are and recognize that you are intrinsically relevant as a being that was created by God in his image. That way, when others question your worth, you will know that they do not have the power of life and death over you and you will be able to find a welcoming place of safety that is not affected by anyone else’s actions or opinions of you.
Complex PTSD often leads people to one of two places. Sometimes both, sometimes in the same relationship. One place is when you become so desperate to know who you are and if you matter that you become domineering and demanding of attention from others. The other is when you hear yourself saying over and over again to people, “I’m here for you” “Just checking in on you to make sure you are ok” or “I will always be here when you need me” only to feel crushed by the weight of not being certain that you will ever hear those words back from the people you love.
You can tell that you are recovering when you no longer feel a need to do either, but can still cherish the gift of being told you are valued by another human. Even when you don’t hear those words from anyone else, a healthier, more complete you can understand how to whisper them to your own heart and know that you never have to abandon yourself again. Even better still is recognizing that God will never leave nor forsake you.
