Episode 18 | Complex Trauma, Emotional Neglect and How Self-Attunement Can Help you Heal

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 It will be a 90-minute somatic workshop on trauma triggers, body memory, and how self-attunement can help you begin to work with the anatomy of your triggers in a more grounded and compassionate way.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Trauma Educator podcast. Today we're going to talk about emotional neglect as a hallmark of complex trauma. And I want to start with sharing a small part of my story that turned out to be very significant later on as I was on my own healing journey and realizing what really impacted my well-being as I was turning from a child into an adult. As some of you might know, I lost my mother to suicide when I was 10 years old. Of course, this on its own was a big traumatic experience for me. Even though in the beginning I didn't know it was suicide the cause of her death. But nonetheless, of course, the loss of a mother for a child when they are 10 years old is devastating. And it was devastating for me, especially because I was so close to my mother. She used to be my safety net. I remember I would go to a summer camp, and every time I would go, I had a very hard time being away from her. And I would call her crying, saying, Can you please come and pick me up? I don't want to be here away from you anymore. I was that close to her. Now imagine what this did to me when I found out that I wouldn't see her again. She wouldn't be my safety net again. Now, what happened after that though was that the way I landed following that traumatic experience was also traumatic. Because remember, trauma is not only a specific incident, it's also how we land after the traumatic experience. This means whether we feel resourced, whether we feel supported enough, whether we receive what we need, not just internally, but also from the world around us. And especially when we're children, we need the world around us to feel supported and resourced. Now, of course, this applies to adults as well, but even more so to children who don't have the capacity to look after themselves, to suit themselves, and to develop a strong sense of self on their own. So the way I landed after this traumatic experience was, I would say not equally hard, it was even harder than the initial trauma itself. Because unfortunately, the environment around me did not have the emotional capacity to care for my grief, to create space for me to navigate this immense loss and the grief that came with that. My father made the decision to not raise me, and this is a different story on its own. I was raised by my uncle and my aunt, my father's sister. At the time, I remember I was around 13 years old, and my father moved to Switzerland and got married to another woman. And as I was navigating the world as a teenage girl, I started experiencing a very silent shame and loneliness that I never spoke to anyone about. I remember I would have this fantasy that one day my dad would take me with him to Switzerland because that's what he had promised, and I would finally feel as happy as I was when my mom was around. I would have these daydreams that at some point my life will go back to what used to be before my mother's suicide. I felt this sense of powerlessness and helplessness, and those daydreams helped me feel a sense of hope. Hope that actually never turned into reality because my father never did that. Now, during that time, I needed my father, and my mother, of course. I needed them to reflect back to me my own wonder, because every child is wonderful in their own way. But they need an environment around them to mirror this back to them. I needed my father's encouragement, I needed his presence, I needed his attunement, especially during this time of immense loss. And he wasn't there. My aunt and my uncle were there for sure. We actually became very close eventually. But who I needed was my father. And he wasn't there anymore, and he wasn't coming back. The sense of powerlessness and helplessness I experienced at the time was because deep down I knew that I couldn't do anything to change what was happening. I knew that even if I voiced something around why am I not with my father anymore? Why am I not in Switzerland with him? Why am I back in Greece with my uncle and my aunt who are wonderful, but they're not my parents? Nothing would change. So deep down I knew that, I felt that because I had already lost trust in my father. And that's one of the most hard and challenging things a child can experience, losing trust in their caregivers. So when this happens, the child begins to blame themselves. And what I did, I started creating these beliefs that for someone to never abandon me, I have to be the best. I have to be super smart, I have to be aesthetically pleasing, I have to be very impressive in some way. And from then on, I started creating those coping mechanisms that reinforce those beliefs. And I would start living under immense pressure. And this was because not only of the trauma and the loss of my mother, but also the emotional neglect I experienced following that loss. The child I used to be longed to be seen, to be witnessed. I longed to have a caregiver's presence to have their eyes on me and to support me and to feel that they have my back no matter what. To tell me that it's okay to feel this sadness, it's okay to feel anger because your mom is not here anymore. But it's not that no one was there to say those things to me, it's also that I did not express those things to anyone because I felt the disconnection between me and those around me. And yes, my aunt and my uncle were wonderful in terms of looking after me in practical terms, but they were much older people, and their kids had already moved away from the house. They were already married. Now I turn up in their house and they had to become parents again, and they did the best they could given their age and the time, but of course, they were not my parents, and also they did not have the tools and skills to fill in the emotional gap that was left by my own parents. Deep down, what I needed was to feel that I'm the delight of my caregivers. This is not just the need I used to have, but it's a need that every child has. Children need to feel that they are delighted in by their caregivers, that they are the core source of happiness for their caregivers. That once their caregivers see them, look at them, they feel, oh, this is my child. I'm so enamored by them. And of course, not always 24-7 because things happen, life can be challenging and can be very busy, especially nowadays. But still, the child needs this consistently enough, frequently enough. When this doesn't happen, the child starts believing that who they are is not enough for their caregivers to be delighted in by them. Instead of saying, my caregivers are not available to create this emotional connection between us, because it's the parents' responsibility to do that, not the child's, the child starts believing I don't have what it takes to preserve a warm bond with my caregivers. There's something wrong with me. When the child receives that need, has that need met, the result is that the attuned presence of the caregiver becomes a corregulating anchor for the child's nervous system. The child feels in their body, not cognitively only, but in their body, that I'm safe, that I'm enough, that I'm lovable. I have someone who's looking after me, who is gonna nourish me, who's gonna feed me, who's gonna protect me. When this doesn't happen, and the caregiver, because maybe of their own mental, emotional, other challenges are not available, they are not able to be that anchor for the child's nervous system. Under these conditions, the child's ventral vagal pathway, which is the pathway of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system that allows the child to feel safe and connected is not being developed appropriately. That's why emotional neglect is such a pervasive wound. Because when it happens, the child is growing up feeling unseen, unwitnessed, and disconnected from what is going on around them. Because of that, they develop a sense of self that often is fragile and comes with a negative self-concept. I would even argue that emotional neglect is probably the most pervasive wand in complex trauma. Even I would say more than abuse sometimes. Why? Because emotional neglect is in every aspect of disconnection between a child and a caregiver, including abuse. Because even when abuse is taking place, the needs of the child are being neglected. Physical needs, absolutely, but also and always emotional too. Something important to mention here, of course, is that a child's neglect, emotional neglect, is not always intentional. Sometimes it can be as a result of a caregiver who might be narcissistic or malicious in some way, which in that case neglect might be more intentional. However, in other cases, many other cases, emotional neglect is not necessarily intentional. Emotional neglect, for example, can take place when a caregiver is going through addiction challenges. Because of that, they're not able to provide the care, the emotional care or other types of care to the child. Or the mother or the father experiences depression. And when they are depressed, of course, they will have a harder time to emotionally connect with the child because they are disconnected from their own selves. When the child doesn't receive consistent enough messages from their environment that they matter, and this doesn't only happen through words or through physical acts of care, but also it happens through emotional attument, which is the core aspect of co-regulation in caregiving. Unfortunately, the child doesn't build the internal resources to feel resilient enough when they become adults. So the impact of neglect, of emotional neglect, continues even when we become adults. And it can show up in many ways in our daily lives. Now, what happens from a nervous system perspective when the child grows up misattuned, mostly misattuned, is as they are emotionally neglected and they go through the ebbs and flows of life and they feel different feelings, they might feel shame, fear, sometimes terror, sadness, all these hard emotions. Or sometimes they might feel pleasant emotions, but no one is there to mirror back how wonderful this is or to celebrate them, which then as a result, those pleasant emotions might be coupled with something negative. All these different experiences, emotional experiences that are also felt experiences in the body, become associated in the brain with something terrifying, not just something unpleasant or uncomfortable, something that equals danger. Because for a child to be able to metabolize emotions and felt sensations in the body, they need to feel safe. And in order to feel safe, they need to feel attuned and be attuned by the caregiving environment around them consistently enough. If this doesn't happen, then the brain starts associating these internal experiences, for example, a more rapid heart rate, or our breathing when becomes more shallow or a knot in our stomach as something that signals a threat in our environment. That's why we live our lives. And at some point during the day, we might be triggered by something small, but then we might spiral into something that feels like this black pit hole that we have a very hard time to come out of because we feel very overwhelmed or shut down. And now our body doesn't live in the present anymore. It's traveling in the past. Let me give you a more practical example. Let's say I wake up in the morning, I go to work, and my boss calls me to their office and they give me feedback on a presentation I delivered recently for the company I work for. To someone who hasn't experienced complex trauma, this might feel uncomfortable when the time comes to receive this constructive feedback. But for me who experiences complex trauma might become overwhelming. Because as I've been receiving the constructive feedback, and first I'm told what great things I did, but then I'm told, you know, this is the opportunity for growth. I might start feeling shame. I might start feeling fear. And core beliefs about myself that were formed as a result of complex trauma start popping up. I'm not good enough. I fail them. I will always make mistakes. When I make mistakes, I don't deserve good things. All sorts of core beliefs that I developed as I was growing up because I grew up in an emotionally neglectful environment. At that time, my coping mechanism might be to shut down, or might be to phone in that meeting with my boss, or it might be pretending that everything is fine and I'm super confident and wearing my high performance mask, but when I go home, I cannot stop thinking about it. And I spiral into this ruminating thinking loop that doesn't allow me to even celebrate the good things I did during that presentation. So it's a very black and white thinking and perceiving things in life. Now, during that time, what was really happening in my nervous system? So when we talk about trauma and the nervous system and how the trauma is stored in our body, we don't mean that specific memories are stored in our muscles or in our joints. That's not what we are talking about. What we're saying is that our experience of trauma is imprinted and is manifested through our mind-body connection. Mind and body are one unified system. Although in our culture we are taught to see them as separate, mind and body are one unified system. And in somatics, we approach trauma through that lens. When a trigger happens, when for example, my boss gives me this constructive feedback, even alongside positive feedback, my brain will start looking for any danger that might signal that what happened in the past might get repeated again. Now, if I was raised in a way that I didn't feel that I mattered, that I was good enough, I am wonderful in my own way, not better than others, but in my own way, wonderful, right? Then during that moment, my brain will ignore the positive things my boss is telling me and will hyperfocus on the constructive feedback that's perceived as negative. Because for the brain, this is a reminder of do you remember back then in those times when you felt ignored, when you felt not good enough, when you felt that you have to be perfect to receive love, to feel attuned by your caregivers, to attract their positive attention? Well, now this is not happening. You are not perfect enough, you're not who you vow that you are going to be, that you need to be in order to receive this warmth and belonging and positive attention from the world around you. So you're failing. And since you're failing, all these horrible things you felt back then, you're gonna feel again now. And it's not only that you're going to feel them now at some point in the future, but it's happening now. Our felt experience in the moment is actually what we experienced in the past back then, whether we remember it or not. And that's the challenging thing because what I'm describing right now is our implicit memory being kicked in. Implicit memory is the type of memory that we all have that comes through our felt experiences. It doesn't come through the recollection of actual events and images in our mind's eye. It comes through emotions and felt sensations and impulses and nervous system states. And this is challenging because we have the felt experience of the past, but we don't have the images that come with that past. So we feel things and we have the present moment in front of us, and we believe that everything we're feeling right now is about the present moment. That's why trauma triggers can be so overwhelming, because we experience the felt experience of the past in the present moment, and this is also projected as a catastrophic scenario about the future. So there's no win for us. It's loss, loss, loss. But also sometimes something that my clients report to me often, but I have experienced in myself, is that a trigger doesn't have to be related to what's happening in our world outside of ourselves. Sometimes the trigger can be a physiological, simple physiological shift in our nervous system, in our body. For example, let's say I wake up in the morning, I take some time to have my breakfast. Now, for some bodies, this will be fine, but to me, this will be hard because I'm used to having breakfast very soon after I wake up. And if I delay, what happens is uh there's a Cortisol spike and this makes me feel anxious because my body says, Well, I should have received food by now, but I'm not receiving food, so we need to go into a survival mode until we receive food. So cortisol spikes and I start feeling anxious. Now, when I start feeling anxious, it's not just neutral, let's say, anxiety. When we start feeling something challenging and our body hasn't developed emotional processing capacities, we go into a downward spiral. This means that one challenging emotion or physical sensation can trigger another, and that can trigger another, and that can trigger another. And then suddenly one physiological shift has turned into a trauma trigger, and we're not in the present moment anymore. We start having all sorts of thoughts about ourselves that might be negative or about a specific situation. We might feel different things in our body, we might not be aware of, we might feel suddenly fear, or we might feel shame, we might feel guilt about something, and we're not able to concentrate on what needs to be done. So this is another way that trauma triggers take place in our lives when we live with complex trauma. So it's not just about what's happening outside of ourselves, a trigger can also be completely internal. And of course, when this happens, we resort to our usual coping strategies to self-soothe. Of course, this makes total sense. For example, a coping strategy might be let me scroll on my phone instead of going about my day and do something creative in my work. Or it can be grabbing something that's not really good for me to eat, but I'm gonna eat very quickly, so I can just find some sort of homeostasis in my overwhelming state. And all these are so valid and so important for us and viable in the moment, however, through the lens of the bigger picture of our life, eventually don't help because they are not supporting our body's capacity to process emotions and integrate what is happening in the present moment. For those of us who live with complex trauma and experience the impact of emotional neglect, self-attunement is one of the ways that can help us get back to our bodies and our current experience. And why is this important? Because remembering what happened and talking about what happened in the past is not recovery. Is part of the recovery and can be part of complex trauma recovery, and rebuilding a new narrative around what happened in our past is vital and at the same time on its own is not enough. In fact, through the lens of the nervous system, how we heal our past neurobiologically is not by constantly talking about what happened and analyzing what happened, which, if it happens too much for too long, can keep us stuck. So instead of saying, So this is what happened when I was 10, and this is what my dad told me, and this is what my mom did after that, and keep talking about the same thing again and again and trying to understand more and more things, and this endless pursuit of understanding sometimes can be a sign of being stuck in freeze. Instead of doing that, what we do is we bring our attention to the present moment, paying attention not just to our thoughts and to the stories our mind is playing out, which is of course a valid part of our experience, but also we're paying attention to what is happening in the body in terms of felt sensations, what emotions are present right now for us? Are there any impulses our bodies have to do something? Let's say to run, to hide, to fight, to reach for a phone and doom scroll or something else. Are there any images in our mind's eye that pop up that might be specific and related to the past, to an actual memory, or maybe something completely random, like a pink cow or a brown broccoli, let's say. Also, we pay attention to any impulse to use our voice or to express any sound, which is very primal and very necessary for somatic healing. This is the process of self-attunement. Now, of course, healing from complex trauma with somatics is a much more complicated and complex process, and of course, it's nonlinear. However, core ingredient that I would encourage everyone to develop is self-attunment. Because self-achuning is the antidote to the lack of achunment we received in our childhood. Self-attunement is the practice of gradually and slowly bring your attention to our current experience now. And of course, this doesn't mean obsessing over how we're feeling every moment of our day and what's happening in our bodies and what emotion is showing up. Absolutely not. Of course, we're supposed to live our lives. Plus, if we do this too much too fast too soon, it's gonna be very overwhelming. We don't want to do this. However, what we want to do is to learn to practice the same way we go to the gym or we do any kind of uh sports activity to support the well-being of our body, whether it's dance or kickboxing or anything else, but we don't do it all day, every day. I hope so that you don't do it this way. And at the same time, in the same way, we want to practice self-attunement. Through repetition, intentionality, and consistency, real change can happen in our nervous system. In fact, I'm hosting a workshop on the 18th of June, completely dedicated to self-attumment, developing self-attumment after complex trauma. It will be a Somatic Foundations workshop on body memory triggers and how to tell the difference between what happened in the past, what is going on in the present moment, and if something in the present moment actually needs our attention and any catastrophic fear about the future versus actual instincts and intuition about the future that we want to pay attention to. Self-achuning is a doorway, is a pathway to better somatic and emotional processing and nervous system capacity. There's a lot of talk about self-regulation aspects of the conversation I agree with, other aspects I don't agree as much with. However, when it comes to self-regulation, in order to be able to self-regulate or to emotion regulate, we need to be able first to attune to what is happening in the here and now. When it comes to myself, but also the people I work with and the students of my programs and courses, I always say that I'm not interested in you fixing how you feel in the present moment. I'm more interested in you learning to be attuned to what is happening in the here and now and learning to approach it with curiosity. That's why nuanced self-attunement is the first marker of my return framework for complex trauma healing with somatics. And the catalyst of this marker is curiosity. Because without self-attunement, that is also nuanced, and that's important. This means that we are not just saying I'm overwhelmed and shut down. We are able to discern and identify more nuanced internal experiences. Because when we start having language for more nuance, we're able to connect with ourselves better. We're able to understand ourselves better. Imagine a parent who is emotionally intelligent, who is emotionally articulate, and has the language, how much better they're able to connect with their child versus someone who doesn't have the language. Because don't forget that a lot of us who were emotionally neglected when we were children, as I said before, it didn't happen intentionally. It's because back then, caregivers, because of the culture and the times that they lived in, did not have the emotional understanding to connect with their children in deeper ways. They did not have the language, they did not have the internal understanding that would be expressed through connection externally with their child. So that's something that we want to develop within ourselves now so that we start offering this to ourselves. And of course, this also means that we find spaces and communities and corregulation with other human beings because it is essential for our nervous systems in a way that's titrating and supports the pacing of our nervous system. But also being able to do this and start offering this to our own selves is going to be a gift that we'll never stop giving. If you feel called to join my workshop, I would love to have you. You can find all the information and link to register in the show notes. I would also love to hear from you what you thought about this episode. Thank you so much for watching or listening, and I'll see you very soon in the next episode.