Once the extraordinary difficulties of veterans who returned from the Viet Nam war could no longer be denied, PTSD was formally included in the DSM classification. Although trauma was still not fully defined, awareness of trauma entered the public consciousness. However, generally speaking, early childhood trauma was neither clearly recognized nor on most psychiatrist’s index of suspicion with patients in difficulty.
Before 1980, trauma-induced disability was generally limited to obvious trauma inflicted on the battlefield. It was labeled as “effort syndrome,” “soldier’s heart,” “shell shock,” and “war neurosis.” Subsequently, significant trauma in civilian life arising from natural disasters was seen as an acceptable use of the PTSD label. However, most therapists’ index of suspicion in considering diagnoses failed to include early childhood trauma related to family violence, parental/caretakers’ abuse and neglect, failure of attachment, and other overwhelming life- threatening experiences.
There is no doubt that we are affected by our past. Sunny optimistic personalities usually can be traced to an early life of love and nurture, like a seedling growing in a protective and nurturing environment. Sour and mistrustful personalities carrying behaviors that sabotage both intimate and other social relationships can often be traced to active abuse or a severe absence of love and care by the individual’s primary caretakers.
In these ways, people can be primed to become warm and happy individuals or cold, angry or depressed individuals. This happens in varying degrees across the spectrum throughout the general population. But, some individuals may be traumatized so early and so deeply as to end up with the extreme consequence of Dissociative Identity Disorder. They present as different identities depending on the which triggers they encounter as they move through their life situations.
Adverse childhood experiences that have not healed continue to impact individuals well into their adulthood. Trauma is not something that one just “grows out of.” Rather, it continues throughout and even to the end of one’s life journey. The result of such intensely negative experiences, left un-countered by nurturing warmth, is that individuals develop protective armor. This armor develops in order to potential recurrences of negativity from getting too close.
Protective armor is not always bad. It is the basis for the ordinary vigilance one needs to navigate one’s world – like looking both ways before crossing a street. But, when that protective armor hypervigilantly raised up all the time and cannot ever be relaxed, it keeps one isolated from others. This hypervigilance undermines the ability to perceive and correctly analyze potential threats, or lack thereof, from another person. It often cuts off the healing qualities of a supportive nurturing relationship by preventing anyone from ever getting close enough to cause harm in that same intimately familiar way.
Many traumatized individuals spend a large part of their life unhappy, prevented from achieving their full potential because of unprocessed past trauma. Many continue causing pain and suffering to their significant others, their next generations, and to people at large that they encounter. Many such people operate camouflaged under the cover of financial success and/or professional status. Reading news reports and interviews with celebrated successful people, we are often surprised to find that the external appearance of success masks their private burden, and sometimes hell, of unprocessed trauma.
While most people presume that the majority of people are not operating out of the impact of trauma, statistics betray the prevalence of debilitating results arising from negative life experiences. I suggest that these numbers may be directly and/or indirectly related to unprocessed early trauma.
Look at the number of adult individuals in developed countries who are prescribed pharmaceuticals for anxiety and depression, plus the almost normalized alcohol drinking social “norm” in those countries. Then, examine the incidence of family violence, or the figures on the use of comfort foods, with their consequence of gross obesity and/or Type 2 diabetes. These highlight how much time, energy, and money are spent on toxic self-soothing activities.
One might reasonably conclude that most people are engaged in that kind of self-soothing rather than actually enjoying life. Look at how advertising works. All of those smiling actors with 6 pack abs downing in the ads beer or eating chips infer that you too could be happy just like those smiling actors if only you were drinking and eating high salt/high sugar snacks. It is a mass market deception.
