“I swore I’d break the cycle,” people often say, “but I’ve become just like him (her).” As a follow up to my last post regarding the long term effects of early childhood trauma, it made sense to share a post regarding how to heal from it. Survivors of abuse begin to realize the power they assume as they become parents and partners themselves. With this awareness comes the fear and realization that they may not know how to be different, although they desperately want to be. Adult survivors of abuse often find that breaking the cycle is vastly more complicated than they first thought and involves a lot more than just not doing what was done to them. Breaking cycles usually involves a deeper exploration of the psychological patterns that lead to abuse. But, fortunately, doing the work not only reduces the likelihood of repetition, it also offers a chance for healing as we break the chain of learned responding.
We repeat what we know, even if what we know isn’t good. How often do we hear our own parents’ voices when we talk to ourselves or respond to our children, especially when we’re upset or stressed? These are ingrained internalized responses. They are the patterns we have wired into our brains from early on. And it’s not only the behavior patterns, but we also inherit and play out the echoes of them in terms of the reactions and feelings and how they are talked about or not talked about.
No one sets out as a parent or partner to inflict pain. Defensive behaviors occur when we don’t know how to regulate and cope with conflicting or uncomfortable feelings. Healing involves turning toward difficult emotions that weren’t safe to express, being able to label them and feel them. Once we can sit in the discomfort of them, we begin to gain control over them. In therapy, we work from the outside in, so to speak. First we look at the behavior that a person wants to change. It can be yelling, eating, drinking, lashing out, criticizing themselves or someone else. What triggered the behavior? What was happening right before we acted? What feelings were there? Usually people can identify some sort of overwhelm. But if they can sit with the experience, they can dig a little deeper into anxiety, shame, or guilt. If they can still sit with this a little deeper, underneath the anxiety or shame is a feeling that was unacceptable in the family. This may be anger, sadness, or a need that was responded to in the past as threatening. The chain becomes revealed – the defensive behavior was in response to shame/anxiety, the anxiety/shame was in response to potentially feeling an unacceptable feeling that could not be voiced.
Breaking the cycle involves slowing down and allowing yourself to feel something that at first may be scary or uncomfortable or even hard to identify. For example, in many families, telling the truth about someone’s drinking was unacceptable. To fit in the family norms, a child learns to shut down in response to the drinking behavior and stay quiet, convincing themselves that the craziness is normal. Maybe even they are the crazy one for being upset about it. Now as an adult, when things seem out of order, they’ve learned not to speak up. Instead they stuff their feelings of concern and disapproval. When the feelings come up, they feel guilty and maybe even withdraw rather than confront someone. Because they shut down, they never speak up and address the problem in the relationship directly, and the effects cause unhealthy patterns to persist. Cycle breaking would involve being able to give permission to become aware of the feeling that something is wrong and that it is ok to address it. This may involve using feelings of anger or discomfort as messengers that we need to listen to rather than shameful acts of disrespect that need to be hidden
Identifying, labeling, and interpreting our own feelings are a key pathway to emotional regulation and communication. By unblocking emotions that have been off limits, we can learn to understand them and what they’re telling us. Once we understand them, we can choose to act in a variety of ways, based on rational thoughts rather than fear and shame. We can use these emotions to direct us toward actions that empower us and bring us closer to people, rather than destructive and repetitive behavior chains.
When people tell me, “I was doing ok, and then, I don’t know what happened, I just snapped,” it’s true. They didn’t conciously experience the emotional chain that led to the behavior. It takes time and real effort to turn inward and learn what’s there. Breaking a cycle is not a one time event. It takes small steps to do things differently over and over until it becomes the new pattern. Breaking a cycle involves unhooking each link of a chain to free it up from its predecessor. This gives us the opportunity to create a new path with every freed up disconnection. Now who says being unhinged is such a bad thing?