Open Up, Confront The Fury (part 1)
Changing Trauma Into Triumph,
Some Thoughts
If you ignore the pain of this trauma-object and suppress your reaction to the reexperience, you leave the object unresolved and perhaps more painful. You practice avoiding, and in a way, every video locked in your mental vault becomes more scary and harder to avoid.
If you ignore the trauma object, you are in an arms race. Your avoidant skills need to remain stronger than the fears you repress. Good luck.
There’s but three
Furies found in spacious hell
But in a great man’s breast
Three thousand dwell-John Webster, The White Devil1
A relationship is never far away. Just close your eyes and remember a person who you will never see, talk with, be with again. When I close my eyes, I recall an “I-Love-You” I will never hear again.
Subliminal images blow by so fast consciousness flickers. After a moment, I find myself again in the gist of it all.
My body immediately responds: A jolt from the surprise, joy when I see her face, sadness when she looks at me that way, and anger.
The run of emotions evokes feelings, and thoughts, a distinct yearning, and finally a sense of some closure. But what was I angry about? Specifically? What’s the story of the fragment of anger?
I feel pain. Some trauma remains.2 A Fury is about, so I confess. I write something. I contemplate.
The imagery triggered me. I fear the many other scenes from other events locked away in a vault. Even with tools, it’s hard work to clean up this locker-room of painful stories.
The hard work creates generous rewards. I will feel peace and triumph. My body will be more relaxed and healthier. I will feel fewer threats.
The work begins with step one:
Confront a Fury.
Get triggered, hijacked away from consciousness for a moment, and relive the flood of imagery and emotion. Watch the body react. Mind your body. Imagery and emotions are the currency of the right brain.
The Fury is an emotionally-significant object. Because of the pain, I call such objects 'trauma-objects.'3 They trigger pain. They are represented primarily in the right brain.
If you ignore the pain of this trauma-object and suppress your reaction to the reexperience, you leave the object unresolved and perhaps more painful. You practice avoiding, and in a way, every video locked in your mental vault becomes more scary and harder to avoid.
If you ignore the trauma object, you are in an arms race. Your avoidant skills need to remain stronger than the fears you repress. Good luck.
The better course is to let the trauma-object (your Fury) stir your pot. Notice body reactions, emotions, and feelings. The trauma-object wants to feel felt. Do so (and change the object into a felt-object).
Hold the felt-object in working memory. Represent its qualities with language. Thoughts and stories are the currency of the left brain. You are moving the object from the right to the left.
Each brain-half represents differently (right - imagery, left - language) and has difficulty understanding the other half. Integrating the trauma-object is the process of making sure the different representations cohere.
Construct a remembered present from descriptions of the emotions, feelings and thoughts of the felt-object. This new object (a considered-object) is encoded in working memory, the left hemisphere’s domain. It engages Gazzaniga’s interpreter5:
..the interpreter [is] omnipresent in our lives. It toils away at duties from perception to memory. In general the interpreter seeks to understand the world. In doing so it creates the illusion that we are in control of our actions and reasoning. We become the center of a sphere of action so large it has no walls.
Engage the left-brain’s interpreter by asking questions. For example, Why did this happen? What good can come of it?
The interpreter tries to broaden perspective, discover useful insight, and develop appropriate actions. It creates theories about the objects (the trauma-, felt- and considered-objects), often influenced by limited information, faulty beliefs and self-serving biases (generating an interpreted-object).6
Naive acceptance of interpreted-objects can bolster a false sense of perspective, control or agency. Such acceptance disrupts the integration process. In other words, don’t jump to conclusions.
Wait. With time, the unconscious processes the interpreted trauma-object reducing distortion from cognitive and defensive biases. It improves the selection of best possible actions and highlights useful understanding (creating a contemplated-object).7
The contemplated-object differs from the original trauma-object (however modestly). It will trigger different emotions. The body’s response will change (however modestly).
After being triggered by a trauma-object, I am rigid, feel defensive and limit my actions and options. After a period of contemplation, I find improved mobility, more resources, better outcomes.
Contemplation makes sense of trauma. Sense-making heals.8
James Pennebaker described his experience:9
After about a month of emotional isolation, I started writing about my deepest thoughts and feelings. I remember being drawn to the typewriter each afternoon for about a week, where I would spend anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour pounding on the keys. I initially wrote about our marriage but soon turned to my feelings about my parents, sexuality, career, and even death. Each day after writing, I felt fatigued and yet freer. By the end of the week, I noticed my depression lifting. For the first time in years - perhaps ever - I had a sense of meaning and direction. I fundamentally understood my deep love for my wife and the degree to which I needed her.
Perhaps Pennebaker was overcome by a muse or a spell of automatic writing, the gift of depression’s havoc. He walked away with a sense of himself in his world. He triumphed over his Fury, however much destruction his prolonged depression caused.
I imagine Pennebaker’s story as a fable about the transformation of his Marriage Fury into a story of his life purpose. He conceived the Fury as a threat, hid and became depressed.
His Marriage Fury demanded Pennebaker’s contemplation. He persevered through the pain, mindful of the trauma buried in scene after scene.
Through this process, Pennebaker could understand the Fury’s message - “a sense of meaning and direction.” His outcome bore triumph, insight and health. Something about this idea reminds me of the Fisher King or Where The Wild Things Are.
Lucky for us Pennebaker is a social psychologist..
Open Up; Let The Fury Out (part 2)
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One of the principle themes of The White Devil is the different between the way events and characters appear and the reality of these events. This difference is also the theme of this essay.
When we reexperience a traumatic event, we relive the way the event and characters appeared. The experience is isolated, only loosely connected with ‘autobiographical reality.’ The wider the divide, the greater the risk of pain and tragedy. ↩
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For my purposes, psychological trauma can range from mild irritation (my boyfriend does not immediately respond to each text message) to unbearably severe (my father beat me all the time). ↩
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The foundation of much of writing in the notion that non-body objects (e.g. a bug) cause the body to react and change, acting out an Emotion. Body reaction is the primal first sentence of all stories that create feelings, thoughts and consciousness.
Objects can be very complex - feelings, thoughts, stories, anything with imagery and consideration that causes change to the body-proper or our neural map of the body. Our mental experience is formed by a parade of objects - a crumb falling on your lap, or the images of watching the vet put your favorite dog down.
Be prepared for me to use terms such as trauma-object, felt-object, considered-object, interpreted-object and contemplated-object. These are descriptive terms for elements that cause emotion. In this specific case, these terms describe how a trauma-object changes under mindful contemplation.
For details on concept and usage of object, see ▲▼▲ Perspective: Objectify Yourself, Witness Life. ↩
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Trauma that is the source of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) requires more specialized consideration. Many of the concepts discussed here are influenced by techniques used for PTSD.
PTSD offers valuable insight into the neural activity cause by recall of emotionally significant objects. In the case of PTSD, the emotionality of the object is significant, the object lacks qualities of integration (so it appears as a flashback rather than recalled memory) and the patient has heightened sensitivity to the object. Its recall triggers a traumatic process rather than an integrative process.
The treatment of PTSD often focuses on the means to inhibit the traumatic process and engage the integrative one. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is one such method. Ogden, P., Minton, & K., Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. W.W. Norton & Co.
Even if recall of an emotionally significant object does not trigger a PTSD retraumitazation, it might trigger maladaptive defenses to avoid the recall and inhibit the integrative process. This distinction seems to a marker of PTSD therapies on the one hand, and more traditional therapies on the other. (Issues related to DSM criteria might compel such an abrupt distinction.) ↩
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Gazzaniga, M. S. (2000): p 151. The Mind's Past. University of California Press. ↩
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Gazzaniga pioneered the concept of the interpreter module. He is a pessimist [Gazzaniga, M. S. (2000): p. 2]:
The brain, particularly the left hemisphere, is built to interpret data the brain has already processed. Yes, there is a special device in the left brain, with I call the interpreter, that carries out one more activity upon completion of zillions of automatic brain processes. The interpreter, the last device in the information chain in our brain, reconstructs the brain events and in doing so makes telling errors of perception, memory, and judgment. The clue to how we are built is buried not just in our marvelously robust capacity for these functions, but also in the errors that are frequently made during reconstruction. Biography is fiction. Autobiography is hopeless inventive. ↩ -
The interpretation of a considered-object likely happens unconsciously with occasional theories recognized in conscious thought.
Another step in the process may be to remain opened minded about the interpreted-object [an unconsidered-object?]. Studies of this step indicates it improves actions and outcomes:
Rahman S, J Sahakia B, N Cardinal R, Rogers R, Robbins T. Decision making and neuropsychiatry. Trends in cognitive sciences. 2001;5(6):271-277; Overskeid G. The slave of the passions: Experiencing problems and selecting solutions. Review of General Psychology. 2000;4(3):284-309; Bechara A, Damasio AR. The somatic marker hypothesis: A neural theory of economic decision. Games and Economic Behavior. 2005;52(2):336-372. ↩
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Pennebaker JW, Kiecolt-Glaser JK, Glaser R. Disclosure of traumas and immune function: health implications for psychotherapy. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology. 1988;56(2):239-45. ↩
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Pennebaker, J. W. (1997): p 30. Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. The Guilford Press. ↩
Cole Bitting
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Reader Comments (4)
Another great article, Cole. You have a unique way of describing things and, as I read through this, I found myself considering the value of exposure therapy (of which I am already a big fan due to the empirical evidence supporting is efficacy/effectiveness for a number of diagnoses) from a new angle.
Here's a question for you though...one that has bugged me several times before. Pennebaker has published some compelling research on the value of writing about negative emotions. At the same time, there is also compelling evidence that the idea of "catharsis" is often off base and, when I think about writing about my negative emotions, I have a hard time figuring out how that differs from ruminating. I believe that it is, but I can't quite articulate what is different about it. Any thoughts?
Thanks for the compliment and your provocative question. If I try to give a short, organized answer, it would be three days in the coming so, some cuffed bullet-points instead:
J. Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis discusses the conflict between confession and catharsis (he cites Tavris, 1982). He frames the issue as the difference between blowing off steam and sense-making.
Though I don’t describe it in duplicate with a highlighter, I think an element of body mindfulness is very important at the start. The idea is get some attention away from the story at the very beginning.
In many cases, before clients open up to a therapist, they need to feel felt. In many cases, a therapist then is allowed to act as an interpersonal sociobiological regulator :). But not until the therapist ‘gets’ the client. It’s improper to suggest a trauma-object wants to feel felt, but I like the metaphor. Again, it’s mindful, and also separates the some attention from the story.
Also, the focus on feelings caused by the trauma-object might be the most significant step. My goal for this step is to help someone says, “I have this horrible story on the one hand, and this pain in the other. And I want to heal the pain.”
In rumination, there can be a quality of trauma-objects competing for attention. And in the throes of the crisis, it can simply be a run of overwhelming facts of the matter. The minute the mind quiets to one collection of negative emotions, that object loses priority, and attention shift to a different trauma-object whose ‘negativity’ is now the highest.
Also, the quality of rumination suggests the writer either hasn’t found a level of safety or regulation to confront the trauma-object. Many confessions are made to people rather than anonymously in writing. Simply, the presence of an interpersonal sociobiological regulator is helpful and perhaps outright necessary.
To characterize writing=sense-making with some PTSD therapy approaches, the important point is to start small and remain safe. Body-based PTSD approaches might avoid talking about the trauma-object altogether until a window of tolerance can be strengthened.
Diagnostic of sense-making is a sense of movement in the narrative. The writer’s story about the writer becomes more coherent and seems to change in the retelling.
This is what I got before dinner.
Cole,
Thank you for your thoughtful article. You put down 'on paper' what I've been discussing with a friend for a long time. And this should make our conversations clearer.
Did I 'enjoy' your blog? No actually I didn't. Probably because just today, I was hit by a stimulus that took me down into that dark hole of icky emotions and dysfunctional crud left over from prior relationships. So it hit a little too close to home for me today.
Nonetheless it was interesting to be able to use your specific steps/instructions/definitions to be able to really look at what had happened earlier.
So, Thank you,
Gayle McCain
www.gaylemccain.com
It's a joy for me for my thoughts to be recognized and helpful. Thanks for your kind words.
My gratitude probably doesn't measure well against your disquiet. Relationships are one area, in my experience, where we benefit most from cleaning up elements of trauma. You'll feel better, be more confident about them and feel more able.
You recognized instinctively the work to get out of these dark holes is hard. Find someone to talk with or work with. This piece looks past the hugh benefit of support from others. Other people just help regulate how you feel even if you don't talk about the issues.
My approach in this essay was somewhat confrontational. First I talk about a trauma, then put the reader in the seat of working on her trauma. Certainly, I caught you unprepared.
Congratulations on you book! I hope people click through to your website. If stepping outside a comfort zone is only getting to a place where we don't feel defended, it's a wonderful chance to grow.