I’ve been reading Trauma Through A Child’s Eyes by Peter Levine and Maggie Kline. Peter Levine is the person who developed Somatic Experiencing as a method for healing trauma. The book describes a number of ways children can be traumatized from being born in a standard hospital, to falls and bicycle accidents, to simply having their basic needs neglected. Trauma is NOT in the EVENT, it’s in the nervous system’s inability to cope with the event. Babies and young children with highly sensitive nervous systems which are still developing are far more likely to be overwhelmed by events that wouldn’t faze an adult.
Imagine you’re a baby lying in her crib. She’s so young she can’t even turn herself over yet. She’s hungry and she’s crying. Crying is her only coping skill to try to let someone know she needs help. The truth is that she is completely helpless to feed herself, and if someone else doesn’t bring her food, she WILL DIE. Once the reptilian brain stem concludes that she is going to die, she enters the realm of trauma. Mother may walk through the door with a bottle five minutes later and it’s too late.
I first read Waking the Tiger in June 2001. This is Peter Levine’s earlier book about his theory of trauma based on studies of animals, and his development of a method of healing trauma. When I got to the chapter on Hypervigilance, I went into a hypervigilant spiral, my terror went through the roof, and it lasted for months until I was finally calmed down by medication. It was only at this point that I began to take seriously the idea that I had been traumatized, and started to see a Somatic Experiencing practitioner.
The mechanism behind hypervigilance starts with a nervous system that is easily triggered by innocuous happenings — a word said a certain way, a particular smell, even a door slamming. Once the nervous system has been triggered into red alert, the person starts looking around for the danger. When they can see nothing dangerous, the body doesn’t relax, as it would for a non-traumatized person, it stays in red alert. The feeling is “I know I haven’t been able to see it, but it must be there because I still feel scared.” The search becomes desperate, and can’t end successfully because the scary event happened in the past.
Unfortunately, but as I expected, reading about traumatized infants and children definitely re-stimulated my own trauma. Fortunately, because of years of Somatic Experiencing I’m much more resilient and able to handle it. I knew what I was dealing with, I got the baby doll and held her as close as if to say “I know you’re having a hard time, and I’m here.” I let myself “hide” in a book, in computer solitaire, and didn’t force myself to go out and “enjoy” the beautiful day.
I suspect that what I was dealing with was birth trauma, because in the past I have often been uncomfortable on bright sunny days and been puzzled by it. One day started out grey and rainy as I drove to Montpelier for a therapy appointment. Part way over, the rain stopped, the clouds opened, there was brilliant sunlight, and I felt completely blasted, in a state of shock. Later, when I thought about it — at that time I didn’t know enough to bring this up with my therapist — I saw that I had suddenly been transported from a dark wet environment to one with bright light and everything glittering. I thought how this mirrors the transition from the dark wet womb to the brightly lit hard-edged environment of the hospital room.
Gosh! Just writing that all out helps. I feel much more solid. AND, it’s clouded over since the morning.
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