The Cage Is Not of Our Own Making

Today’s Fairy Dusted Lesson:

It makes sense that trauma survivors would not know what they want.  For so many years, we just wanted to not feel so miserable all of the time – and usually blame ourselves for that misery.  All we wanted was to survive.  

Guess what?! We got what we wanted!  We survived.

Last week I wrote about not having goals and what that cost me.  Then, the next day, I taught about what trauma does to the sense of self and sure enough, what I was doing with my goals or lack thereof is basically textbook.  One must have an activated sense of self to know what they want.

Dr. Ruth Lanius conducted an experiment in 2004 to find out “what happens in the brain when they are not thinking about the past (Van der Kolk, p. 92)?” She asked participants in an MRI to not think about anything and breathe, they discovered the “default state network” and found that when people aren’t thinking about anything, they “pay attention to themselves (p.92).”  They found that compared with trauma survivors, “normies” have what looks like a mohawk inside of the brain and 5 areas lit up that give us our sense of self.  These areas tell us 

• where our body is in space and time (our internal GPS)
• the watchtower (overview of what is going on around us)
• the insula that transmits what’s going on in our body 
• the parietal lobe which integrates sensory information
• thinking and feeling areas

Trauma survivors’ brains only had one area lit – the internal GPS.  Great.

Basically, without an active default state network we are not able to have the experience of feeling fully alive.  Here’s what Van der Kolk made of the study,

“The disappearance of medial prefrontal activation could explain why so many traumatized people lose their sense of purpose and direction.  I used to be surprised by how often my patients asked me for advice about the most ordinary things, and then by how rarely they followed it.  Now I understood that their relationship with their own inner reality was impaired.  How could they make decisions, or put any plan into action, if they couldn’t define what they wanted (p.94).”

To me, this is so freeing.  I thought I was to blame for my own bondage and lack of direction, but it was a trauma compromised brain all along. If there is anything I keep learning from years of trauma work is that the cage was not of my own making and educating myself and putting my self in the hands of professionals that know the way out, purpose and direction appear…like magic.  

An experiment if you choose:  Catch your self-blame in the act, then say something to the effect of, “Nope, that was the old belief before I found out about the brain mohawk. All I need to do is keep healing and never stop.”