In previous posts, we worked on forming an understanding about what trauma is and how it can affect your day-to-day life. Whether the event that caused the trauma was a major one or a minor one, the trauma itself is not limited to that event alone. It’s actually the impression or the imprint that has been left behind from that experience. This imprint affects you mentally and emotionally but it also effects you physically.
One of the things about trauma is that once a person is traumatized, their entire perception of life quickly changes. Experiences and activities that don’t appeal to most people, or that even disgust most people are attractive to trauma victims. Freud noted that trauma victims had a deep propensity to return to the behaviors that led to their traumas. For those for whom returning to those activities wasn’t impossible, they relived them by talking about them and telling stories of their experiences with great enthusiasm. Freud called this the “compulsion to repeat.”
The question is, why do people do it?
Trauma and Addiction
To put it simply, when the body has an experience that might be traumatic, it adjusts to that stimulus. Endorphins, which are secreted when you’re in a stressful situation, can create an environment within your body that feels normal to you. It might feel uncomfortable at first, and it might even continue to feel uncomfortable, but over time, the body recognizes it as expected and ordinary. When those endorphins are missing, withdrawal takes place, which leads many people to be compelled to repeat or relive the behaviors that led to their trauma.
If you think about it in the same way as what a drug addict feels during times of withdrawal, the experiences are very similar. You begin to adjust to the pain and many people actually derive pleasure from it over time. As a result, they often will try to recreate those experiences the best way they can. For some, that might mean telling vivid stories of war. For others, it might mean turning to prostitution as a way to process sexual abuse that happened to them as children. Every person is different.
Healing from Trauma
Many people attempt to heal from trauma for years without any relief. Some of them turn to drugs, alcohol, sex or another dangerous outlet in order to cope. Many of them repeat the same types of behaviors over and over again because they just don’t know what else to do, and that is a type of stimulus they can understand and process. Trauma can be a vicious cycle, and in order to being the healing process, that cycle has to be broken.
