Below is an excerpt from the article entitled: “Something Wicked This Way Comes: Trauma, Dissociation, and Conflict: The Space Where Psychoanalysis, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience Overlap” by Philip Bromberg, a leading figure in the world of trauma and psychoanalysis. I share it to add texture and depth to the term trauma–a term often tossed around without precision or a shared understanding. I’ll present some takeaways at the end of the post. However, the story stands alone as a parable about trauma.
Famed trauma expert and psychoanalyst, Philip Bromberg
When I was a kid, an endless source of fascination was looking out of my bedroom window at our backyard garden to silently observe the mysterious interactions between the animals, birds, trees, bushes and flowers. But like the Garden of Eden, it received periodic visits from an infamous inhabitant of our neighborhood: A cat who was referred to by everyone in the vicinity as Adolf (I was a World War II kid). Adolf was an aggressive, predatory, seemingly fearless animal, whose viciousness and mean-temperedness terrorized the other neighborhood cats as well as most of the dogs. I hated this animal totally and, I think, somewhat afraid of him myself. Adolf would suddenly appear in our garden as if by magic–by magic because it was a very well fenced-in area, and we were never able to discover how he entered. What he seemed to enjoy most was climbing our fruit trees to see whether he could find a nest containing a baby bird or two to feast on. He seemed totally indifferent to the parent birds wildly flapping their wings and shrieking hysterically overhead (way overhead, I might add). In the animal world he was sort of like the neighborhood bully.
Present experience & future expectations are shaped by past trauma
One morning I was watching the action in the garden, I spotted Adolf. He was climbing stealthily up the trunk of an apple tree, clearly on his way to a nest. As he neared the top branches, two adult birds materialized, seemingly out of nowhere, and began to put on a performance that was nothing short of awesome. They were blue jays, and those birds gave new meaning to the word tough. Screaming, they swooped down on Adolf, reversing course inches from his head, precisely at the point beyond which Adolf’s claws could not reach. I had never seen Blue Jays in our garden beyond this moment, nor had I seen them in action anywhere else, and, I suspect neither had Adolf. Adolf and I were both in a state of shock, but for Adolf the shock was horrifyingly personal. Over and over the two jays repeated their dive-bombing until Adolf did what I had never-before seen him do or believed he ever could do. He shinnied backward down the tree trunk, falling the final 8-10 feet, and began to run. But there was no escape. The two birds pursued him wherever he went, though he was now far from their nest. Neither the ferocity nor the precision of their aerial attacks showed any sign of diminishing, and their abrasive bird-curses became, if anything, even louder. To this day I can recognize a Blue Jay’s call the instant I hear it, and I still love it. The sound has always reminded me of the strangely comforting rasp of a rusty clothesline pulley as the line was being yanked on by my mother. These guys were literally driving Adolf crazy, and I was cheering them on. He could not fight (because they were not reachable); he could not flee (because it was a fenced-in garden and Adolf apparently had forgotten where his secret passageway was). It was then that I observed (though I didn’t know it then) what I now realize was a remarkable example of dissociation as a defense against trauma–what Putnam (1992) has called “the escape when there is no escape (p. 104). Adolf suddenly lay down right where he was and remained motionless. His body took on a strange, almost flaccid shape, and I began to wonder if he had died of fright. The blue jays kept up their counterattack for a short while longer and then flew off. As I said, I hated the animal, and I was in no rush to help him if he was still alive. But I stayed at the window, probably somewhat numbed myself at seeing this feline terrorist reduced to mush. Was he dead?
Preservation of the self takes precedence over life in response to trauma
No! Adolf, as if hit by an electric charge, suddenly sprang upright, fur standing on end, and took off to a far corner of the garden where he lay shaking behind a bush. As I look back on this now, I wonder what he was like after that incident. I have no recollection of him in the garden after that time, but I don’t really know if that is more of a wish than reality. Did he develop a cat version of post-traumatic stress disorder? Maybe his memory loss for the location of his hidden tunnel was the first sign. I was probably too young to hope that he was plagued by flashbacks of blue jays, but that is neither here nor there. The point of this vignette is to make as vivid as I can the power of dissociation when used as a defense. It is a defense unlike any other defense. In human beings, it bypasses cognitive modulating systems and, as LeDoux’s (1989, 1994, 1996) research powerfully demonstrates, is clearly anchored in an evolutionary response that is equivalent in survival priority to certain genetically coded response patterns of lower animals to a life-threatening attack of a predator.
The difference between dissociative experience in human beings and dissociative responses in non-human animals (including Adolf) is that humans are blessed (sometimes it feels more like cursed) with a self and with self-awareness. The similarity is of course in the Darwinian survival need, but for humans the highest survival priority is the survival of a self. For lower animals it means primarily survival in the face of a potential threat to biological life. I think this accounts in large part for the fact that the emotion of fear is usually what is observed in traumatized animals and what is studied when observing them as subjects. But for humans, selfhood (its cohesiveness, coherence, and continuity) is life, and the need to sustain it when it is in jeopardy obliterates all else. The emotions we find when we look at human trauma certainly include fear, but they are far more complex because they are products not simply of biology but of self-awareness.
The courageous blue jay–the same bird that haunted Adolf
Click here to read the full article
5 Key Takeaways On Trauma from Bromberg:
- Trauma divides: A key characteristic of trauma is its dissociative effects. It splits our subjective experience from what is happening to us. This splitting effect happens at the time of the original trauma, and again whenever that same individual encounters reminiscences of the original experience
- Trauma comes with shame: Shame is an experience we feel whenever an experience of “self” cannot be tolerated. Most commonly a person feels shame when her core thoughts are feelings meet disgust or condemnation from her tribe. But shame is also a product of inability to tolerate a subjective experience; that is, when “I” mercilessly reject “myself.”
- Trauma gets acted out instead of symbolized: This is to say that the effects of trauma get expressed whether we like it or not. Since we mostly don’t like expressing feelings of trauma, shame, fear, rage, sadness, etc. get “acted out” or come out “sideways,” as Marsha Linehan is fond of saying. An example of this would be to disown shame by banishing it from subjective experience and actively shaming the mistakes of others.
- Trauma becomes a script that gets repeated with others: A natural consequence of trauma dividing and getting acted out is that it expresses itself through conflict with others. It’s easer to fight with you than to fight with me. Therapists use fancy terms like “projection”, “projective identification”, “enactment”, etc. to label the human capacity to recreate internal drama with people who appear in our lives. Therapists know the feeling well, but many others well recognize that around certain people they consistently experience intense, alien feelings that overwhelm the usual defenses and coping strategies. This is a reliable sign that trauma is being revisited.
- Trauma gets “healed” by assuming its place within an organized story of self: People are storytellers. Our sense of ourselves is one in which we are the protagonists acting in a constructed model of the world. When the story gets overwhelming, we tune out or close the book. This is trauma. To heal, we need to stay with our avatar of self, share in the pain, and come through the experience with a favorable–or at least tolerable–feeling about that character.
Conclusion:
Understanding trauma means grappling with abstract and disorienting concepts and psychological laws. The advantage of learning about this confusing terrain is that it becomes easier to navigate and tolerate the challenges when you have a model for what you are experiencing. Signing up for my newsletter, commenting, or engaging me on Twitter (@mindsplain) are all ways I’m here for you to help clarify some of the more complex and misunderstood aspects of trauma.
*I’m saddened to have learned that Dr. Philip Bromberg passed away on May 20, 2020. His obituary can be found here. Although I never had the opportunity to meet or work with Dr. Bromberg, his ideas and legacy have deeply touched and impacted me. It pains me to know that such a bright and benevolent presence is no longer with us to help us navigate the challenging times in which we live.
Bromberg, P. (2003). Something wicked this way comes: Trauma, dissociation, and conflict: The space where psychoanalysis, cognitive science, and neuroscience overlap. Psychoanalytic psychology, 20(3), 558.
Ledoux, J. (1989). Cognitive-Emotional Interactions in the Brain, Cognition and Emotion, 3:4, 267-289,DOI: 10.1080/02699938908412709
LeDoux, J. (1994). Emotion, Memory and the Brain. Scientific American, 270(6), 50-57. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24942732
LeDoux, J. (1998). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. Simon and Schuster.
Putnam, F. (1992). Discussion: Are alter personalities fragments or figments?, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 12:1, 95-111, DOI: 10.1080/07351699209533884