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Hyperreactive Behaviors
The lingering effect of trauma is that you continue to react to mild stressors as if your life is in danger. And so you tend to become hyperreactive. People see your reactions as exaggerated. You may have a difficult time putting up with misbehavior from your spouse or your kids. Somebody may irritate you in the supermarket, and you may yell at this person. You may develop road rage. You have exaggerated emotional responses. Doing cognitive therapy with that is really a misunderstanding of what happens with traumatized people. They have automatic responses, and they don’t have these responses because they’re stupid or because they don’t understand what’s going on. Most people actually do understand that their reactions are completely out of whack. They don’t need to be told that, but because they react in such an extreme way, they feel deeply ashamed about themselves because they say to themselves, “I’m a nut cake. I screamed at people. I collapsed when I had to stand up for myself.” So you have these automatic responses that are not a product of your cognitive assessment. They are a product of your animal brain trying to stay alive in the face of something that that part of the brain interprets as a life threat. Even though people around you by now go, “this is not a life threat at all.”
Disconnected Relationships
It oftentimes is very hard to negotiate intimate relationships. Negotiating both of our needs, your needs and my needs, actually is a very complex phenomenon. How do we make compromises? How do we make both of us happy at the same time? And when you have a childhood trauma, that often times becomes very difficult. It’s very difficult to say, “okay, honey, if that’s what you need, I will not do that, but I’m fine with you if you do that.” And these issues are boundaries, and who’s responsible for what becomes very hard to negotiate oftentimes. You are not able to engage or to learn or to see other people’s point of view or to coordinate your feelings with your thinking. It becomes an internal issue — how the trauma continues to fester inside of you in a variety of different sensations and perceptions.
So people don’t come to see me because of what happened to them. People come to see me because they feel “there is something really wrong with me. I cannot connect with my kids. I become angry with all my coworkers. Nobody can stand being around me because I am so reactive.” Yes, trauma causes there to be something wrong with you. And my job as a psychiatrist — and all the colleagues and students I have — is to help you to feel safe in your body and to feel like the trauma is over. So that you don’t continue to react to all kinds of things now as if somebody is trying to hit you or rape you.