I made a draft of this post back in December 2021. I’m not sure why I didn’t post it then. Matt Licata can be found here.
from Matt’s course on Tending to the Soul:
“So, just to define trauma in a really simple, experiential and nonclinical way, which I’ve been asked to do, trauma occurs when our capacity for information processing is overwhelmed by emotional and somatic experience, that we don’t have the internal resources or the external support to integrate and metabolize. So, what happens in these moments of overwhelm is that this material is stored outside of our conscious awareness in subcortical and bodily circuitry, where it’s held for a future moment, a time when those resources are in fact available.”
One way to understand this is that experience that we don’t have the resources to process stays in our brains and nervous system as unintegrated parts: sight, sound, emotion are stored in separate parts of the brain so we only remember one part of it, and it feels like it’s in the present moment, not the past. This is why I like the word “metabolize” for the integrative work of processing trauma: the undigested pieces of the experience are integrated and stored as ordinary memory instead of fragments of an eternal present.
He talks about developmental or relational trauma and describes this type of wounding “as the result of ongoing failures of empathy and mirroring. Chronic misattunement or neglect, rejecting, dismissing, shaming behavior from early caregivers, various forms of narcissistic injury and attachment wounding, … the unbearable, the unendurable, the unworkable psychic and somatic states which arise from this sort of misattunement …. [as a result] our sense of self is profoundly affected, often resulting in severe shame and low self-worth and feelings of being unsafe, of being unwelcome and that we just don’t belong here, that something is profoundly wrong with us at the most basic level.”
For me, my mother’s “mis-representation” left me with a sense of being defective. I first went into therapy in my 20’s to try to fix myself.
“Because as young children, it’s not possible for us to see our caregivers as anything but perfect and safe and strong and wise. What happens is that when this empathic failure occurs, we internalize the blame for that as a way to make sense of something that is actually unbearable. ‘Oh, I see,’ we say to ourselves. ‘I’m continuing to get shamed and rejected, or not understood, or not tended to, or not held. But I know the reason for that it’s because there’s something wrong with me at a basic fundamental level. It’s my fault and if I can just change and become someone different, then maybe I’ll be seen and held and loved.’
“.. It’s more safe to take this on than to see our caregivers as anything less than perfect. I mean, if we can internalize the blame, then there might be something we can do about it. But to see our caregivers at fault is unworkable in the psyche and the nervous system of a little one, it can provoke a real terror.”
The work that I did with the terrified parts of me in June and July was a result of this protective inability to see Mother as “less than perfect.”