The shock, helplessness and guilt of trauma

 The shock of trauma

What I have learned is that reading about the harm that one human or group of them can do to others, or seeing it in the theatre, even in great plays, is nothing like the experiencing.  It doesn’t come close. All you can register is that such things do happen. Nothing I have ever read prepared me for the feeling of the horror of so much betrayal.  Literature, even the greatest literature profoundly fails to do that.  The shock of it to an extent puts a break on meaning making. It’s like mental, open-mouthed freeze.

What Bessel van der Kolk says

In Ezra Klein’s interview with Bessel van der Kolk, which I keep returning to, the author of The Body Keeps the Score says about trauma “Suddenly you’re confronted with something, you are faced with horror and helplessness  that nothing prepared you for”.  The things he mentions absolutely resonate with my experience: the abruptness, the shock the horror, the helplessness and the unimaginableness of it.  

Helplessness and feeling trapped

Helplessness was a big factor.  I can distinctly remember feeling trapped: not just by trauma memories, but, while being traumatised, not being able to exercise agency. If I moved this way, this would happen, if I moved the other, I was equally stuck.  It was a feeling of not being able to escape from the attacks, of powerlessness in the face of great and ongoing harm.

I am still stuck, but less so.  If a letter comes in and I feel fear pangs in my chest I can ask my husband to open it.  So I have an option. I can’t go to social events easily in my own town, because of the threat and fear of meeting social workers, and indeed they are everywhere I go, masquerading as human beings. But I can go to other towns, where, unfortunately I still find them with uncanny regularity as though the universe has a really warped sense of humour. 

All the while these bombs of abuse and betrayal were raining down but none of the agencies that are supposed to help, did help. That compounds the trauma and now you have institutional or systemic betrayal added to the relational abuse - of two people recall: mum and me. I remember feeling the same during domestic abuse: trying to get help and my parents turning away, not wanting to see.

Guilt

At the time of the attacks on mum and me I had Power of Attorney. I was supposed to try to look after and protect mum but was blocked at every turn from doing so.  So there was guilt I could do nothing about added to that. That is a common aspect of trauma.  You can’t imagine such terrible things happening so your mind says you caused it. Van der Kolk says this is among some of the most difficult feelings, of worthlessness, to get rid of.  I didn’t feel that probably because I didn’t suffer molestation as a child, which is a common source of these feelings, but I did feel guilty that I couldn’t protect mum even though I was prevented from doing so.

All the while I knew from childhood that the abuser was laughing and getting off on the cleverness and the power trip of it all.  Meanwhile, my mind and body and emotions was responding in frightening ways you don’t recognise. There is a lot happening.  Far too much. The abuser was also capitalising on feelings of inadequacy, any bad feeling they seemed to intuit, to be able to predict and take advantage of  by ensuring there are plenty of extra accusations of the same.  It was all part of burying me under so much shit I couldn't get out.

I think that's a common experience. That's why a lot of women stay abused: they're too scared, feel trapped, feel worthless, feel gaslit, they lose agency, they don't have enough support, they are made the problem, they are disbelieved. It's a story many people have heard.