When you emerge from the womb, you emerge with a host of built-in survival programs. Your initial adaptive fears might be about drowning, suffocation, being violently attacked, or any other potentially life-threatening situation. It’s intrinsic to your nature to start life as a self-protective, self-protective force, with a full complement of defenses ready to deploy against external threats.
But when you’re faced with a truly serious threat—whether it’s a hurricane or an angry, out-of-control parent—what we might call “learned defenses” are automatically added to your innate arsenal.
So, is this a good thing… or maybe not? What I’m suggesting here is that these environmentally generated defenses are a largely negative byproduct of trauma. They can lead to all sorts of self-defeating behaviors.
About the title above, keep in mind that Wikipedia offers two major sources of encouragement for not repeating past traumas. The first, proclaimed by the Jewish Defense League after the Holocaust, is one of several sources including this crucial directive, and is subtitled “A Program for Survival” (by Meir Kahane, 1972). The second source of this powerful command to resist is called “Never Go Back to Normal!” and is, in fact, the original title of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
In both declarations, written on behalf of oppressed minorities, the thesis is the same: that we cannot passively allow ourselves to be treated as less than human. We must stand up for our humanity. Such protest affirms our human dignity, pride, and self-respect.
However, such a categorical and absolute response to long-term situational trauma is unwise on an individual level. It can be overblown and lead to a life of aggression, underachievement, crippled relationships, and overall self-defeat
So what exactly does personal trauma do to you that it leads to such negative consequences in the future?
The phrase “never again” intersects with the determination to consciously or unconsciously avoid—or combat—any situation that resembles the original trauma. Such a determined stance fosters an intense, rigid, and often disproportionate response to what was initially unpredictable and frighteningly uncontrollable. But it’s quite another when the necessary vigilance turns into hypervigilance, overprotection, and extreme avoidance—or exaggerated aggression. However, when past trauma prompts you to distortedly magnify potential threats to your survival in the present, you may be unable to prevent yourself from responding inappropriately.
For example, if a woman has been raped and has not been adequately deconstructed from this horrific trauma, it may be impossible for her not to see every man she meets as a potential rapist. This may render any opportunity she might otherwise have for intimate intimacy remote. Physical proximity beyond a certain point may set off alarm bells to fight, freeze, or flee immediately. It is impossible to relax and let go when one feels a life-threatening crisis is approaching. (And here we might add that in general, if one has been brutally betrayed, one may be very wary of trusting anyone afterward—no matter how well-founded such suspicion may be.)
The example of rape illustrates what might be called a single-event trauma, which can then have a profound effect on one’s emotions, beliefs, and behaviors. But equally common is complex trauma, which refers to a recurring pattern of abuse and neglect that usually dates back to childhood. But what if this is true? If your parents neglected you as a child because they were self-absorbed, you may have decided that you needed to cope with this situation by raising yourself. Once you had decided, albeit unconsciously, that your caregivers could not—or would not—meet your dependency needs, you decided to deny those needs entirely in defense of yourself. And because your various attempts to express those needs were met with such intense disapproval, the feelings of rejection and abandonment that ensued were, in their entirety, traumatic.
Unfortunately, if you generalize (or rather, overgeneralize) these persistent parental rejections, you might conclude that the best way to cope with others is to distance yourself independently: make no demands on them, regularly assert your independence, and defensively downplay anything that has to do with intimacy—which is now so closely associated with emotional pain. It is easy to imagine how, as an adult, such an adaptation might be dysfunctional and maladaptive.
Part of you still long for the intimacy you so desperately missed growing up. However, a more controlling and protective part of you regularly assures you that such a relationship is not only impossible but that pursuing it would reopen deep childhood wounds. This would presumably re-traumatize you. So you try to maintain a safe separation from others, literally ensuring that your unmet needs from the past will never be met. Ironically, in such cases, the old wounds are never even healed because they are “deliberately” not consciously acknowledged. Or, based mostly on your biological makeup, you may unknowingly be presenting your relationship partner with a “bill” to make up for all the painful neglect you suffered as a child. By implicitly insisting that they pay the balance of what you always felt your parents owed you, you may be making excessive demands on them: their time, attention, affection, help, sympathy, validation, encouragement, guidance, trust, respect, dedication, etc. This is neither fair nor realistic.
There is an expression in Twelve Step programs that an adult allows what is offered to him to be enough. Unfortunately, your so-called “inner child” may be insatiable. Because what your inner child craves is love and devotion from your parents, not just a proxy for them. So you can hardly satisfy it. The relationship will inevitably collapse under the pressure (unless the other party is a people-pleaser). This will certainly confirm that you are on your own in life and that no one really cares about you or will “be there” for you.
I could cite countless other examples of how trauma not only makes you more sensitive to potential negative outcomes, but also makes you more sensitive—making you more likely to overreact (or, in some cases, underreact) to anything your mind associates with past trauma.
Extremely upsetting experiences generate a perverse or misguided expansion of your innate survival programming. So, without some form of psychotherapy, you may be doomed to resort to various defenses when current circumstances render such old survival tricks not only unjustified but also woefully self-sabotaging.
I should conclude by pointing out that these no longer relevant defenses can take many forms: active or passive, angry or reserved, over-involved or withdrawn. But no matter how they may express themselves, they are no longer in your best interest. They were there to protect you, no doubt. But ultimately, your well-being is best served by learning how to safely neutralize or modify them. In this way, you can, finally, remove its irrational power over you.
