Do you allow yourself to acknowledge that you’ve been traumatized, or may have been? It’s an essential beginning step for understanding why you feel a certain way, or have a particularly negative view of yourself. Emotional abuse can definitely create trauma within you. In this episode, you’ll hear very specific information about trauma and how the body takes it in.
When you are traumatized, you often have diminished ability to describe the feelings you have in words. You need to be able to do that to recover. Freezing and/or collapsing are ways to protect yourself by shutting down. You need to overcome the overwhelm of that.
HIGHLIGHTS OF TODAY’S EPISODE:
- A definition of trauma and how it feels
- Why you simply stop talking about the trama to suppress it
- How you find yourself outside of the community you need
- Why Hijackals–narcissistic and anti-social folks–need to isolate you
MACHINE TRANSCRIPT
There are so many things to think about when we realize that emotional abuse has been in play in our lives. So very many things to think about. And so I’ve done episodes on many of them and will continue to do that. Tonight, though, I want to talk about realizing that we need to be able to recognize when Hijackal drama turns to trauma. And sometimes we don’t want to recognize that because we don’t like to feel that we’ve been traumatized.
We don’t like to think of ourselves as being traumatized. We may have the feelings, but there’s no stigma to being traumatized, is something that happened to you. You didn’t create it, it happened to you. And it’s so important to make that distinction. So that you won’t think that you’re weak, you won’t think that you were easily overwhelmed, or that you were not aware, trauma happens to you.
We’re going to talk about that for a while to make the distinctions very, very clear. And then also to give you a fine understanding of what trauma actually does to you, and all of the symptoms so that you could have a thought about, Do I have some of these symptoms, and maybe that will be a way in to recognizing that you have had trauma in your life, and to pinpoint it.
So … recognizing when Hijackal drama turns into trauma.
First of all, let me tell you what my term Hijackals really means. I created this term because in my view, too many people were going to Google and deciding that they had become armchair psychologist, and we’re endeavoring to diagnose the people in their lives. Which makes sense, you want to do that. But it isn’t helpful to put psychological labels on things, it’s much more helpful to realize what the patterns traits and cycles are.
So I created the term Hijackals to describe the people who have these patterns, traits and cycles. A Hijackal is a person who hijacks a relationship for their own needs and purposes, and then relentlessly scavenges it for power status and control. So right then you can decide if you have a Hijackal in your life. Do you have somebody who likes to scavenge your relationship for power for status for control? If so, you’re in the right place to be listening to this. And if you know someone who has somebody with those traits, you want to invite them to come on over. And that’s available to you too.
So let’s talk about what trauma really is. And I have a couple of definitions for you to make it very, very clear. But first, let’s talk about the drama that turns into the trauma. Drama simply means that exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or circumstances. That doesn’t mean they’re all positive, but they’re exciting, emotional and or unexpected set of circumstances. But what you make of it and what it turns into and may have been perpetrated to create is trauma.
And that is a deeply distressing and disturbing event that overwhelms your ability to cope. It causes feelings of helplessness. It diminishes your sense of yourself and Have your ability to fully feel a wide range of emotions. So trauma can shut you down. trauma can dampen you down. trauma can make it feel like you’re not safe with yourself, because you have these emotions, and they may be overwhelming. So it’s important to understand that we need to restore the balance between our rational brains and our emotional brains. And in restoring that balance, we can work through our trauma.
So when you’ve been traumatized, you don’t want to know what you know. And you don’t want to feel what you feel. So you kind of skip it, or you ignore it, or you suppress it or depress it or repress it. But you don’t want to know what you know, and you don’t want to feel what you feel. And if there are things that you just drew, who you know, that shut you right down. Those may be related to trauma in your life.
A great expert on trauma, Dr. Bessel Vander Kolk, he wrote this, he said, understanding why you feel a certain way, does not change how you feel.
So we have to get in touch with how we feel. And it’s important to talk about what happened, it’s important to acknowledge that it happened to acknowledge if it’s happening to you right now, and to acknowledge what has happened to you. And sometimes we don’t want to touch it with a barge pole, you know, we just just want to put it in the past and not mention it. But that doesn’t work for you very well, because your body has experienced the trauma. So it’s going to keep coming up in a variety of ways. So he can’t do it any younger, now is the best time to address the trauma.
As soon as you are listening to the podcast, as soon as you are realizing some things are happening to me or have happened to me, and I may only have fragments and feelings about something. But there are ways to help you understand what happened, and to restore yourself to heal some of those things. Because we really need to be able to describe what we’re feeling in words so that we can tell it to ourselves, so we can explain it. And traumatic memory functions differently than normal memory. So we can have it in fragments, as I said, little, little scenarios, little glimpses into something that happened. But until we actually address it clearly and purposefully, we may not understand. And of course, that’s a protective thing that our body and mind wants to do for us. We want to protect us from from those difficult feelings. But we can’t heal what we can’t bring up. So in this turning drama, into trauma, then we have to acknowledge that we actually have the trauma, we’ve experienced it, it’s been taken into our mind, it’s been taken into our, our emotional body, it’s been taken into our physical body. And those things are absolutely entwined, so important to know.
And when we have trauma, we just get so much adrenaline happening. And it puts us into a danger situation. And when we’re in that dangerous situation that we would describe as traumatic. We’re actually shutting down our rational mind is too much. It’s too much I can’t deal with it. It’s too much it isn’t happening. I trust this person. This person promised they wouldn’t, you know, whatever this scenario is, but it puts you into that place where your rational mind shuts down and maybe you dissociate and you just can’t deal with it in the here and now.
And that’s what makes it hard to retrieve whole memories. That’s where we get those feelings and fragments that I spoke about. Have you heard any of that? I certainly did.
You know, I remember. I was about 12 and my father and I were going somewhere and a man was picking us up to take us. And so it was a bench seat, no car. And I went in the middle between the two men. And my father, of course, is in the passenger side. And he draped his arm over me. And I just instantly pulled back and elbowed him. He didn’t complain, he was embarrassed. And I remember the look on his face. And I remember that he never ever, ever touched me in that way again.
I remember that incident. But it took a long time to put all the pieces and the glimpses and the fragments together, to come up with a full understanding of what had actually happened in that relationship, and had been happening for a long time. And you may have that experience too. But the relief is to know that when you get to working through those things, you can find those things, give voice to those things, write to yourself about them, journal to yourself about them, get some help, both from a, a trained person, a psychotherapist, and someone who does body work.
I used to own a yoga retreat. So I was able to help many people in that regard. And you may not even know that, that the yoga that you’re doing to relax can also be used very specifically, in ways to help you overcome trauma.
But there’s a big difference between our stories of our trauma, and the traumatic memory that lies in our bodies, that gets stuck in our bodies, we may be able to tell a story about it. But what is lodged in our body about it really needs to be expressed. And if we were abused when we were children in any way, emotionally, physically, sexually, and we experienced it emotional trauma, through three main ways abandonment, abuse, and deprivation. Now, those are very charged words, when I say them to you, abandonment, abuse and deprivation, do you feel something? This is stirs something inside you? Do you automatically maybe feel like crying? Or do you feel angry, we start to look at things from there. And it can be triggered in adult relationships as well as abandonment, abuse and deprivation. If we’ve had it in our childhood, or if we haven’t, good, it can be the three big issues that we fear the most or have experienced in our adulthood as well. So Hijackals like to isolate you, we’ve talked about that frequently.
They like to get you off by themselves so they can have power over you. So you have no one to talk to no one to tell the story to therefore they hope that no one will really know what’s going on in your house alone. And in cutting you off from social engagement and support that gives them power over you, as I said, but it also it turns on your fight or flight responses.
And your and making your finding and freezing responses more likely. Because the freezing, which is just like deer in the headlights, I don’t know what to do. And, and that collapsing is a way that you can protect yourself by again shutting down. Okay, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to feel this, I don’t want. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to imagine it could possibly happen. And so you shut down. And you begin to deaden your responses to life to not feel fully alive. This is where we can really give up in a relationship. You know, you didn’t have much to say about it. When you were a child, it was unsafe to say about it.
But if you are having trauma or abuse in a current relationship or an adult relationship, you can do something about it. And one of the ways that we cope with life is we know that humans need humans. So it’s important to be in community. It’s important to have people around who are supportive Hijackals know this so they want to remove you from those people and make themselves the source that you have to come to for comfort or advice or in their case. What they like to do is to withhold things and make you wrong, but they want to be the person who defines your reality who gaslights show. So they don’t want any other people in the mix.
They don’t want anybody else sort of glazing over their territory. And having a different view, they don’t want to be contradicted. So they like to perpetrate their abuse and create trauma in isolation. And that lack of support that that is present is missing, when you are isolated, is really hard on you. Because you don’t have any way to to recognize your trauma, you only have one set of input. And when you don’t have that support, it can cause more trauma, or it can make a bad experience into a worse experience, that will again, traumatize you. I know that seems very convoluted, but it is circular. And it continues to happen.
And when you’ve been traumatized and isolated, it makes it much more difficult to feel you don’t feel safe with your feelings. So you have this shutdown situation once again. And you don’t feel connected to others. And, of course, you’ve been removed by others. You know how Hijackals Like to triangulate them. And I did a whole episode on that. They like to get you away from your family get you away from their friends. And then they’ll tell specific friends or family one story. And they’ll go through to that person telling that story hoping that that person will go and tell that story to other people. But they will tell a different story in another context. And they will endeavor to shut you down and give you further feelings of alienation. I speak to clients every day who say, now that now the Hijackals convinced my mother, that I’m a terrible person. Or one person said to me now my Hijackal mother has the opinion that I should have my children taken away from me.
And that happened because they were isolated. The Hijackal told the clients mother, oh, it’s alright, she’s losing it. It’s terrible. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her. But she really can’t deal with the kids right now. So I’m going to take them away, or I’m going to send them away. Horrible things happen in that name of triangulation. And they can be extremely traumatic. If you are the one this is perpetrated upon. Don’t make light of this, it’s in within yourself, Oh, I’ll survive. It’s okay. You know, it’s not that big a deal. It is a big deal. Trauma is a big deal. It affects your life. It lowers your ability to enjoy life, to participate in life, to feel safe in life. And we need to recognize that so you can work on it and work with it and work through it. So very important.
When you’ve been isolated, you tend to not think or talk about the trauma, you lose that sense of self after all, who’s going to listen, the person who’s perpetrating the traumas certainly isn’t going to listen. And they cut you off from other people who therefore cannot listen. And that shuts down your ability to connect with others even further. We have I tell them, they won’t believe me anyway.
If I tell them I’m in trouble, or there’s going to be more trauma gets very circular, very negative, very toxic, very difficult. And when you shut down or shut off your feelings, you’re not engaged or you’re not present. You don’t feel fully alive. You start thinking you don’t have anything to contribute. You feel that sense of hopelessness that I don’t I don’t have any power in this situation. And you’re suffering, you’re suffering trauma. And then someone says, Well, you’re weak. Just suck it up. Buttercup.
You’re not weak. You’re worn out, you’re worn down, you’re exhausted, emotionally exhausted. And then they pounds, more trauma. So you begin to feel the world is unsafe. And for you it is in the world that you’re living and you live in a constant state of threat. Just think what that does to your body. Are you living in a constant state of threat, you’re looking over your shoulder, you’re second guessing yourself. You’re wondering what’s going to come out you from where you feel like that proverbial walking on eggshells is a terrible way to get your exercise. And there are people who like to shoot at your feet all the time, or gaslight you and tell you you’re fine, it’s all in your head.
That too is terrible. So the world is unsafe, you feel like you’re living in a state of threat, you start to distrust your feelings. distrust your memory. You lose yourself, there goes another piece of yourself. And you you question your memories. So I remember correctly. Is that actually the way it happened? Could I be wrong? Or well, of course, that could be wrong, because the Hijackals will always tell you that you’re wrong. And then you start to believe them. And in that second guessing yourself and your memory, and your feelings, then you start to second guess the feelings of others? Will? Do they really like me? Am I likable? Am I a bad person? You know, all kinds of questions come up, don’t they?
If you’re listening to this broadcast, you have good reason to be listening. You want an affirmation, you want confirmation that these things actually are happening. And they are. This is when drama turns to trauma. That Okay, there were all these heightened feelings, heightened emotions. And then the hammer came down and you now feel like you’re the bad person, and yet it was perpetrated on you. It was directed to you, it was withheld from you in some cases. So then you can’t retrieve or access your feelings. And that makes it hard to protect yourself. And then you come more likely to accept further trauma. And that’s what happens when I see a client who says, you know, I had a Hijackal parent. And I have had three subsequent Hijackal relationships. What’s wrong with me?
Well, the first sentence was what was wrong, you had a Hijackal parent. So you were taught to accept what you were given. You were gaslit, to say that you weren’t experiencing what you were experiencing. And then you were set up and groomed for another Hijackal to come along, sweep you off your feet get you to believe that they’re never going to be like that last person that you unfortunately told them all about. And then they set you up, they do what I write about in escaping the Hijackal trap that whole chapter on the gotcha factor, then they’re nice.
Their love bombing, they seem interested, they can’t do enough for you. They’re thoughtful, what’s that for, is to get you to fall in love, move in have babies anyway to get you nailed down so they can get off the hook. They don’t have to be nice, they don’t have to be thoughtful. And they can go about their life perpetrating their trauma and their drama. So sound familiar. It is what happens. Your many times I’m working with clients to have it so that they are Hijackal proof that you will not get it.
Even if you attract another one, you will see them coming a mile off. And you will never again where you rose colored glasses. So you’re missing the red flags. So we don’t want for the trauma, we don’t want to invite in further trauma. So why you attract serial Hijackals is because you haven’t interrupted that cycle that flow, that abuse situation. And why do you do well, it’s familiar, is comfortably uncomfortable, sometimes uncomfortably uncomfortable, but yet is familiar. And so you go with it hoping for a better result. So trauma, isolation, more trauma. Very, very difficult. So how do you recognize these? Well, trauma can be the kind of trauma that’s acute. It’s a single incident, a single event or one big trauma, or you can have chronic trauma repeated and prolonged like in domestic violence. So you know it’s coming, you know is coming. So you are chronically Exposed. variants in trauma are the one that’s a little more like death by 1000 paper cuts. It’s complex trauma that is varied in multiple traumatic incidents that are invasive or interpersonal. And that’s why many people make the distinction between PTSD, which comes from the acute trauma, and maybe the chronic trauma in some cases, and complex PTSD, which comes from the repeated experiences over and over and over, and maybe from different people, but you keep experiencing them. So it is very complex. So I wanted to give you a list of possible symptoms that you can look for in yourself to see if I have many of these. I wonder how much trauma I have experienced and endured. So I wrote them all down. Trauma shows up pas, anxiety and panic attacks, they can show up, it doesn’t mean there’s a direct correlation. I’m not saying trauma causes this. And therefore if you have this, you’ve experienced trauma, I’m saying that there are many ways that it shows up. So just listen to a few. So anxiety and panic attacks. living in fear, easy to anger, easy to arouse constant irritability, because you don’t trust obsessions and compulsions. Shark. You’re just constantly walking around, like how did this happen? And go with with it, disbelieve, you know, you thought you could trust that person and you find out you truly cannot. Maybe you have had so many that you know, have become detached. You just don’t put any stock in anybody or any relationship? Or don’t feel like you can or should. Maybe you’ve become depressed. You don’t have any faith in yourself or the world anymore. You’re beginning to experience and expect to experience negative things.
Maybe you feel shame. You know, the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is you made a mistake. Shame is you are a mistake. I was working with a client today, whose mother used to tell her repeatedly, you know what a mess she was how she’d never amounted to anything. And why did the mother do that? Well, the mother had had a diagnosable personality disorder. But the mother had also a golden child could say nothing but good about her son, and nothing but bad about her daughter. And so there was shame involved all the time. Have you ever had a parent say to you, I brought you into this world, and I can take you out the ultimate, ultimate powers. These are things that are traumatic. You may not even think of it as traumatic. But I’m here to tell you today, consider that it was so shame and guilt as I said, and then intrusive thoughts. Can’t stop thinking about something you’re obsessed with the thought of it. And if you’re anxiously attached, I’m going to do some, some episodes on attachment theory. But if you’re anxiously attached, you are overly fixated on the relationship all the time. That’s what causes someone to where are you? When are you coming home? Why are you five minutes late and blowing up people’s phones? Do you love me? Am I good enough to I look good in this. Or you never leave me for anybody would you know typical things when we’re anxiously attached? I’m worried all the time, I’m preoccupied with the relationship. Another way that we can find trauma in emotionally abusive situations is that we can have memory issues or even experienced nightmares. Maybe we experience mood swings that we can’t attribute anything to. We don’t know why they’re happening. A good thing to explore is Do I have deep seated trauma or avoiding people’s in places because you’ve already made up a story in your mind about who they are and what they mean and what they might happen. So you avoid it to avoid any shame or guilt or toxicity of any kind. Maybe you have a startle reflex that’s really extreme that you’re just something barely goes by your vision and you jump a mile hypervigilance I talk about that frequently. You’re so sure something is going to happen and it’s not good it’ll be good. So you’re constantly expecting it, you’re looking for signs of it. You’re You’re fixated on, how, when is it coming? And how can I avoid it? And, and how can I make myself small, so I won’t be seeing even. We may be energy. Of course, if we’re hyper vigilant, we’re already edgy. But then it can get into our body and called aches and pains, and you go to the doctor, and they said, there’s nothing wrong. It’s all in your head. That can be from trauma to you may experience sexual dysfunction. Not only disinterest, but it just body doesn’t respond anymore. Maybe an eating disorder or an eating, they’re eating.
Practice that is very, very unhealthy, maybe not a disorder. But you’ll only eat chips and strawberry jam or something like that, that gives you some control overnight. That’s what you’re looking for some control. Or you may have muscle tension chronically, or be emotionally and physically exhausted. So recognizing this connection between drama and trauma, the drama being that exciting, unexpected beginning place that maybe is emotional. And it’s a series of events that happen. And it’s like that it’s quite quite possible that that can happen in your life doesn’t indicate trauma. But if you go from drama to trauma, then we have the other situation where actually, we have that deeply distressing or disturbing event. And it overwhelms our ability to cope. And it causes feelings of helplessness and powerlessness. And it completely diminishes our sense of self. And we just lose our ability to feel a full range of emotions. So if you’re feeling jammed, if you’re feeling less than if you feel you’re not really participating, or you find yourself to be reluctantly participating in life because of fear, then it’s worthwhile looking to see if drama has turned into trauma. And that you can do something to alleviate yourself of that stress and anxiety. Now, if you enjoy the show, and you find value from it, I invite you to contribute. There are lots of costs that go along with producing a podcast. And I’d love you to help out and demonstrate to me that it has value to you go to patreon.com/save your sanity patreon.com/save your sanity. And if you’d like to join my emerging empowered community, you can do that by coming over to join in today.com. There we have lots of discussion threads, we have videos, we have a gifts, we have all kinds of things for you. And to group Ask Me Anything calls with me every month as part of your membership, lots of ways to get help and to find community. And remember, as I said earlier, if you’ve had trauma, you may have lost your sense of community. And emerging empowered is a great way to get it back. So as usual, you can find me at for relationship help calm. I’m Dr. Rhoberta Shaler. And until we meet again, take very good care of yourself. Because you’re precious, and you matter. Talk soon. Thank you for joining me on the save your sanity podcast today. I hope you’ve had some new insights, some ideas and strategies to help you gain clarity and confidence from moving forward toward greater emotional health and safety. You deserve that and so to your children. If you found value here and would like to support this podcast with $1 of five each month, please do so at patreon.com/save your sanity. Learn more about how to work with me via video conference. Join me optimize circles or subscribe to this podcast on my youtube channel at my website transforming relationship.com Talk soon
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