When We Suffer Abusive Treatment

– by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Dr. David Lykken of the University of Minnesota says that the evidence tells us “that most of the 1.4 million American men currently languishing in prison would have grown up to be tax-paying citizens and acceptable neighbours if they had been switched in the nursery and sent home with a mature, law-abiding married couple rather than with their biological parent or parents”. By “mature” he’s referring to parents who love and care for and protect their children.

The complex harm to psychological development caused by child abuse and neglect sets a course for a big range of big problems – relationship instability, violence, addictions, physical and mental health problems, you name it.

The neglect and abuse of children is a product of generations of conditioning. If you want to shine a light on why a parent may be rarely or persistently abusive or neglectful, you’ll often glimpse the next layer of insight by looking at the parent’s parents, and then at their parents.

When we, as children, suffer abusive treatment and a life that feels dangerous we all reflexively use what we have to protect ourselves and to just survive. Leaving home or calling a responsive grown up is not always an option that a distressed child can muster. Kids are often left to their own meagre adaptations to manage their life.

One protective adaptation is for kids to pay careful and ongoing attention to the abusive parent. Kids can then shift their own behaviour in order to modulate the state of mind of the distressed parent. By “being good” somehow, some control and safety may be had. And the felt reason is to be safe, to be accepted, if not loved.

But vigilance is not just something someone does now and then – it becomes a way of living born of the need to be safe. So paying rigid attention to the Other becomes a deeply ingrained pattern for distressed kids, a habit that we don’t even know we’re strengthening through repetition. It’s automatic. And we grow up that way.

To not pay attention to the Other but to pay attention to yourself can be dangerous because when the guard gets let down you might be open to a new kind of attack. Scolding “What’s wrong with you?” would do the job, but sharper sticks are easily at hand. The internal reaction to one’s own emotion then becomes complicated instead of being one of acceptance. Kids may be ‘taught’ to feel ashamed of their own emotions, and so there can develop an internal sense that our own emotion is wrong, bad, awful, disgusting.

And so yet another way we commonly protect ourselves is by keeping our emotion hidden even from ourselves. Children experiencing frequent fear may use and over use their natural ability to space out, slipping away from awareness to nothingness. No feeling, no problem. An emergent problem here is that children don’t learn about their emotions and how to tolerate, regulate and know them, a problem which can extend through adulthood.

These and so many other ways of protecting ourselves and trying to get needs met become an automatic way of life that we carry on into adulthood. The emotional infrastructure from childhood results in the understandable tendency to live our adult life with other people in ways that are similar to our developmental history.

Our development doesn’t end with childhood. Hopefully those unfortunate early relationships will be supplemented by the loving aunt or teacher or friend’s mother, or by later healthy relationships that help to undo the earlier abusive conditioning. It is indeed never too late to face and to work on your life.

Projection

– by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Lights! Camera! Action!

The bright beacon behind us delivers the images to the screen. We know that what we’re seeing is something that was recorded to film some while ago. But here it is now, right there, and we squirm or cry or cheer or boo.

Good movies are compelling because they pull us in and we react as if to reality.

OK, cue the psychologist.

Our own life, our own history, which was also recorded some time ago, is something that we project into new moments all the time. But because the projector is invisible to us and because we live in the theatre of life all the time, the actual projection of our past onto the present isn’t noticed during our usual, day-to-day activity. Let’s look at some examples.

Do you ever think you know what other people are thinking? Can we ever really know what’s on someone else’s mind? It seems to me that we have a hard enough time knowing our own thoughts and motives. ‘Knowing’ what someone else is thinking is really our own thinking being projected on to someone else, and we then laugh or cringe or judge.

Some people react to mishaps in traffic, such as a bad lane change, with anger, feeling like it’s a personal inconsideration. It takes a mindful moment to realize that people just make mistakes and that our anger is about our mind, not someone else’s evil intent. A similar, scary scene is of men glaring at each other in bars, challenging “What’s your problem?” if someone looks at them – it’s like their past abuser needs to be confronted in each moment.

We assign motives and make attributions about things all the time. These come from our mind, as we construct our reality. Parents may react to what their teen or even their toddler does as if their child is defying them in some profound way, when the child may be simply responding to his own wishes to be with friends or just exploring her world.

Is love at first sight not a full on projection, perhaps keeping us from taking a second look? Isn’t dread of future disasters, a.k.a. anxiety, a projecting out in time of our past pain?

Here’s some hard science: A functional MRI brain imaging study in the 2010 journal Emotion found that the sadness we feel watching a sad movie clip (think Terms of Endearment) is accompanied by activation in “cortical areas that are characteristic of cognitive elaboration, increased self-focus, and ruminative problem solving that would be typical of reappraisal processes”. Translation: We relate to the movie with what we know about ourselves. What’s more, another group of subjects who had completed a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course showed much less of that “It’s About Me” cortical activation, although they felt just as sad and even read their body signals of sadness more vividly.

I have no doubt that it’s healthiest for us to take a more discerning role in our life, perhaps as the director (if you’re not too tired of this metaphor by now). Paying attention helps us to keep that boundary between us and the rest of life, and to better see what’s actually going on.

When you’ve been watching a scary movie, have you noticed yourself pulling out of the movie from time to time in order to calm down your fear, reminding yourself that the film isn’t real – “It’s just a movie!” We manage our fear with mindful awareness, and then laugh at how we get pulled in. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot just by watching”, and if we watch ourselves we’ll find a lot to laugh about.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

– by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Take a deep breath…

The profoundly dirty secret came out recently that upwards of 1000 U.S. Veterans attempt suicide every month. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and inadequate help are frequently a part of their misery. This tidy label, PTSD, references the horrendous human burden and infinite complication caused by witnessing and suffering the worst depravities on the surface of our planet – not only in war but at home, school, work.

The forms of trauma are as varied as life itself, including natural disasters through to interpersonal assaults. Physical, sexual, emotional and verbal abuse, accidents and injury, sudden loss, bullying, harassment, betrayal, rape, genocide, terrorism, war – it’s quite a list. Age, severity, frequency, history and variety of traumatic exposure, and interpersonal complexities all matter. Falling down the stairs is far more traumatic if you were pushed. Some victims marinade in abuse.

And much more happens psychologically in the injury from trauma than some recording of the event itself. The fact is, trauma may lead to a whole range of adjustment problems affecting our behaviour, emotions, thinking, relationships, physical health and life-course. Because everything is always unique about trauma, in that each unique person with their own unique history experiences some unique trauma in their own unique way, the impacts are personal and highly variable. Nonetheless, there do exist general similarities across sufferers.

The tidy list of PTSD symptoms includes (a) unwanted memories of the trauma popping up anytime, (b) our bodies leaping into stress reactions and living lodged in emergency mode, and (c) avoiding anything that might cause (a) or (b) to happen, including our own memories. And life is clouded with uneasiness, all the time. Even when the mind is asleep traumatic memories commandeer our dreaming and physiology. Trauma can relocate your mind and body to a world of felt threat, emergency and despair.

Our recall of our life is most typically an uncomplicated thing. Watch as you answer this: What did you have for breakfast this morning? You’ll probably notice that you had a feeling of recalling, and that what you recalled included images and details about which you could talk for some time. These kinds of autobiographical memories are also tagged by the mind-brain with a sense of person, place and time. No one could convince you that that breakfast actually happened yesterday or at some other location.

In contrast, emotional or traumatic memories are felt and relived more than recalled.

Let’s imagine taking a veteran of, say, the Vietnam war with us for a summer hike in Algonquin Park. What might our friend experience and do? He might just freak out in response to the dense foliage, the lack of sight lines, the felt sense of mortal vulnerability from possible traps on the trail and threats in the greenery. The experienced threat doesn’t match the ‘real’ risks in the park, but instead reflect the emotional memories that flood in from another time and place, inappropriately.

Unhealed trauma means that the mental tags for place and time are unborn. The neurobiological underpinnings of healing ultimately place trauma in our past, to great relief.

Healing trauma is complicated in part because of the immediate bind between undesirable alternatives. It is our tendency to avoid unpleasant things, which include terrifying memories. I like the metaphor of dealing with slivers. Avoidance, just leaving the slivers (horrible memories) in your arm alone and wrapping them up in dressings (avoiding any reminders), perhaps with some nice local anaesthetic like xylocaine (beer, doobies), gives immediate relief. After a while of one-armed living, punctuated by explosions of pain should the slivers get bumped (reminded), life lectures us that the only wise course is to have the slivers out (to face the memories).

Our incredibly associative mind-brain is a medium for the subtlest of triggers for traumatic memories, jumpy-startle and threat-based anger. Every moment can be seen through a lens of dread, with the threat feeling as real as real can get. And it’s so subtle and so unconscious.

Trauma victims may be touched by literally hundreds of thoughts and things each day that prick a memory, sending the mind spinning, the body bolting and life to the crapper.

I was recently talking with a Veteran of many tours, including Bosnia, and his wife about PTSD and these qualities of emotional memory. His wife then connected how he was unduly upset by his present-day neighbour’s unkempt lawn with the once mentioned threat of hidden landmines on tour. Bingo! When our mind connects these dots, relief follows because the connections are now seen, their origins located in time and subject to management.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any anaesthetics for emotional pain. Skillful courage and skillful support and skillful help to face and open up to past trauma are the right ingredients to heal trauma’s injuries. Talk about easier said than done! But suicide and the many other forms of avoidance are not the way.

Making Decisions

– by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Many have said that life is about making decisions. Of course, if we are each the master of our own ship, we would chose our own course in life deliberately and wisely, giving our choices the care that they deserve. After all, it is our very life that we’re tending and we all want what’s best for us.

But how do we really go about making choices in our life?

We know that we’re much more skilled in making decisions when we have good existing knowledge. Also, less complicated decisions benefit from conscious deliberation more than complex ones. Decisions made under stress more often take less or too much time and deliberation, using too little or too much of the information at hand.

Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman and others have amassed a big bag of evidence that wags a finger at us, showing that we humans make even simple decisions illogically, emotionally and from the muck of our biases and idiosyncratic conditioning.

There’s little question that the past conditions of our life, the repetition of our ways of seeing and reacting, and the present conditions in our life influence our intuitive judgment and Malcolm Gladwell’s rapid cognition.

No one would argue that we steer a premeditated course toward any of the many ruinous places that seem to outnumber the ‘happily-ever-after’ ones. Instead, we may be pulled like a space-station by the steady gravity of invisible forces into lower and lower orbits around trouble. Another way to look at how the illusion of deciding about the directions in our life develops is to consider a domino of reactions, rippling forward over the moments.

Who in their right mind would have an affair, cheat the law, hurt loved ones, court addictions, embrace hobbling debt or veer toward pain. Well, rather quite a few of us. Actions often precede awareness, and our actions can be doozies. Although we might feel confident, this confidence might be just a feeling of mastery that precedes seeing the real situation accurately.

If we stop and review what guidance we have had in learning about making decisions, for many of us the education has been meagre. For the majority of us, many major life ‘decisions’ seem to be less a matter of clear deliberation under the sun of brave honesty and thorough review of the issues at hand. While reason and logic may make cameos while we navigate choices, in the company of some amount of conscious agonizing, the reality is that much of our unconscious nature acts as our guide to choices that determine the eventual landmarks of our lives.

The forks in the road are more often navigated by processes outside of our awareness. We may be like passengers looking out the window at aware moments, exclaiming about the dangers or that we like what we see, yet submitting to the general course set by some unseen driver. Maybe that’s why blaming someone else can be so easy.

When we meet choices and crossroads, sometimes doing nothing for a while may be our best course of (non)action. You could try that with one of the decisions that’s stalking you these days. When we take some time we may become acquainted with the underlying motives, unmet needs or emotional imperatives that highjack choice. Distinguish between wants and needs. Filter out irrelevant and distracting issues. Look in the mirror to discern whether some choice reflects an aversion to some discomfort or pain that we’re better off to face and know more clearly. Boredom, anger, insecurity, ego, feelings of entitlement and fantasy can push up impulsive ‘solutions’ like mushrooms from old soil – not all of them edible, if you know what I mean.

Police

– by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

“There are not enough good things said about the people that put themselves in harm’s way every day for us. What does that say about us?” wrote Julie Hébert.

Police (and Fire and Ambulance personnel) keep us safe from ourselves and clean up our messes. They respond to the results of human pain and depravity, accidents and mistakes and mindless hurrying and inattention, suicides, crimes of passion or planned crime assisted by opportunity. You and your loved ones would not be safe or subject to being saved were it not for our police.

Many of us have acquired our understanding of police work and life chiefly through the lens of movies and TV. We might look up from time to time and remind ourselves that TV is not a faithful presentation of reality. It’s entertainment, the News too, developed to make money when advertisers buy commercial time. Our minds tend to immerge into, or merge with, the stuff on the screen.

Police work, on the other hand, is an immersion into the often unseen reality around us that is not in any way for the faint of heart. Police spend about 80% of their time with that 20% of the population who are the most tragic and unfortunate among us, and who are often violent, addicted, abused and suffering terribly. They expose themselves to situations and conditions from which most of us would run. Police enter worlds foreign to most of us, the world of the abused child or spouse, of shocking suicide, of those who’ve been raped, beaten, cheated; they witness the hatred among us, the damage done by people to other people.

“How was work today, dear?”

Police have huge hearts. I’ve seen their pain and their dedication to doing the right thing, to protect us and to catch the bad guys that would otherwise do us harm. They care deeply about their city and the people and families and businesses and brick and mortar that make it up.

If we know that our soldiers are risking everything that they have to serve Canada in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we need to also know that police embrace huge personal risks for our wellbeing. On a ride along I’ve seen female officers wade in to a stew of drunks fighting in a dark alley, replacing chaos with order and safety (although the drunks surely thought less of it). Even so, police work may not be the physically most dangerous job in the world, but it is one of the most emotionally dangerous jobs out there.

The work may be dull and passive or hyperactive and pressured in the extreme, changing abruptly without forewarning. If you know the exhaustion of vigilance, straining to influence outcomes as though through hope and thought alone, hour upon hour, you might know part of the burden that accompanies investigation or search and rescue.

A recent paper in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior confirms what all officers lament, which is that the uncivil, discourteous, and disrespectful behaviours by the public are a significant source of their stress.

I’ve heard some of their examples of how the public behaves and you have to shake your head. The public sometimes acts like a teenager in full huff, biting the hand that helps them. Suffering undeserved abuse by an ungrateful public is terribly ironic and rather inhumane. But then it’s a cop’s job, as it is a parent’s, to be polite and patient and to labour emotionally (another stressor).

Please, be an adult with our police. Practice courtesy, play nice, say thank you and respect that they are people doing a very difficult job – for you! And if you offend in some way and get caught, remember, it’s your fault.