LAYERS OF TRAUMA ARE LIKE ONIONS…THE MORE YOU PEEL, THE MORE TEARS FLOW

As with all things, our choices include healing who we are at our deepest level. There are layers and layers of painful psychological healing that must take place, however, before we can even manage baby steps to the door of the magic zone. Each layer, says Steve Kessler, MFT, EFT, explains when the layer below doesn’t repair itself and moves to the next layer while still broken, this next layer cannot fully conquer the psychological and emotional challenges either, due to its repair boundaries and those the bottom layer did not fix. The unresolved issues usually float to the top, where we perceive our own flaws from past experiences. We “think” if we fix these problems, we will be fine. Not true at all! What we are looking at is the top of the glacier instead of underneath, where all the damage has been done to YOU and ME. And, when we are unable to heal ourselves from the visible damage, we become disillusioned.

1. Layer One – Phobias: A woman drives on the freeway to work and back daily with no problem until one day she gets on the freeway and becomes extremely anxious. She is confused by her response. She decides to ignore it, yet chooses to drive on country roads now instead of the freeways. This is known as ‘ego dystonic.’

2. Layer Two – Trauma: “The next, more complicated level is what we typically call trauma. Here the wounding incidents are so big and/or repeated that they have re-organized the person’s relationship with the world. The person’s whole life may now be organized around making sure ‘that’ never happens again. And they feel justified in feeling the way they do; the feeling is ‘ego syntonic’. If they have been coping with this wound for a long time, it usually has become an identity structure, so that now they identify themselves by referring to it, as in “I’m an incest survivor” or “I’m an adult child of an alcoholic.”

3. Layer Three – Addiction: “At the third level, the level of addiction, we have all the trauma and defenses of the second level, but they are now buried under an additional layer of defense, an habitual behavior that serves to numb the person to the pain and anxiety of the core trauma. Here, the person’s solution to the underlying problem has itself become a problem. Usually, people come for help with stopping the addictive behavior, completely unaware that it is their medicine for a deeper wound, and that we must heal that deeper wound to really cure the addiction. This extra layer of defenses makes the healing process that much more complicated. In addition to healing the original core wound and the feelings, beliefs and identity arising from it, the addictive behavior itself must be addressed.

4. Layer Four – Self Defeating Behaviors: “The numbing agent may be anything. Some of the favorites are alcohol, drugs, food, sex, work, money, success, and popularity, but any substance or activity can be used, as long as it works well enough to dull the feelings from the trauma. However, all addictive behavior is ultimately unsuccessful because “You can never get enough of what you don’t really want.” If what you really want is to feel loved, there is no substitute that will give you that feeling. If what you really want is healing for the original hurt, there is no amount of anesthesia that will work. Sooner or later, the numbness wears off and the hurt returns.”