Do you somehow feel the need to deny or stuff trauma that you’ve experienced in the past? Do you tend to avoid looking at wounds from the past in the hopes that they’ll go away somehow? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then I urge you to read on.
Trauma on the Rise
We live in a time where there is ever increasing amounts of trauma in our world, so it’s no wonder that people often feel the need to suppress it for one reason or another. People in some countries simply need to survive physically more than they need to address trauma wounds from the past. For this reason, it can be a practical necessity to suppress your trauma.
Suppressing Trauma as an Adaptation Growing Up
You learn from behaviors that were modeled for you at an early age, and often the adults who raised you may have taught you by example that stuffing trauma is a virtue. For example, a child who grows up with a parent who becomes a martyr in their role as a spouse teaches them a lesson that it’s more important to suffer than to address your trauma wounds and recover. The problem is the child learns this and either emulates the parent or runs the risk of becoming a trauma perpetrator by negative identification.
Suppressing Trauma Creates a Hot Plate Effect
There certainly are instances where people have to suppress their trauma for practical reasons, as I described above. The problem is that this can often become a default adaptation reaction and keep you from responding to present circumstances the way they are. For example, someone who’s trying to outrun a violent perpetrator may continue to feel an inherent lack of safety despite them being removed from that situation many years later.
The Pressure Builds
If you succumb to the default reaction of suppressing trauma, then it will tend to build up much like something sitting on a hot plate. After a while, everything bubbles over and it becomes a hot mess. The way this may show up in your life is that you might develop somatic or physical symptoms that make you think you have some sort of a physical disease and wind up going to the doctor to get treated for that instead of your trauma. Some people can very easily develop physical illnesses that are often related to stuffing trauma. A common one that’s often dealt with in women is fibromyalgia.
Getting Help and Shutting Off the Hot Plate
Getting effective professional help to address trauma is much like turning the heat off the hot plate and removing whatever is cooking. You’re able to isolate the trauma and treat it as it is through effective means, such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). This allows you to continue to function while also recovering from the trauma you suffered from.
Where to Start in Getting Professional Help
There are many clinicians now trained in effective treatment of trauma to help prevent the hot plate effect of suppressing trauma. You can find EMDR clinicians at www.emdria.org for starters. I’m fully trained and certified in EMDR, and also use Image Transformation Therapy (ImTT) to help my clients recover. I strongly urge you to get the help you need if your symptoms have risen to a level that you can no longer tolerate on your own, for your own sake and that of those you love and care for.
Written by Scott Kampschaefer, LCSW – C
Visit our page on trauma therapy to find out how Scott can help you in recovering from suppressed trauma.
