Interpretations of Trauma

When growing up in an harmonious family, the child who is emotionally balanced can develop mature levels of vanity and self-love, so enabling him to become a pleasant and level-headed adult. His self-love enables him to feel good about himself, so he has good self-esteem, and his vanity produces his sense of self-worth and self-importance. I give a couple of definitions:

I define self-esteem to be one’s belief about one’s spirit and character and self-confidence, whilst in a mood of narcissism (mode of self-love). The depth of self-esteem represents the degree of authenticity of oneself.

I define self-worth to be one’s belief about one’s worth and importance, whilst in a mood of narcissism (mode of vanity). The depth of self-worth represents the degree of validation that one has received. This is the factor of narcissism that sets off abreaction.

Other terms are sometimes used by various writers. For example, self-regard can be considered to be the same as self-esteem. Also, the feel-good factor can be applied to either self-esteem or self-worth, though I usually restrict it to self-esteem.

When a child grows up in a dysfunctional family, however, the two factors of self-love and self-worth become unbalanced. Consider the child who has experienced some degree of trauma, either by excessive punishment or by regular denigration. When he receives excessive punishment, fear collapses his self-esteem. Now self-love is replaced by self-hate. Narcissism (in self-love mode) is replaced by guilt (in self-hate mode). To compensate, he may emphasise his vanity. In this situation, the child cannot put realistic boundaries to his vanity. So as he grows into an adult, his narcissism becomes over-weighted towards the vanity component: his sense of importance grows to compensate for the inability to feel self-esteem. He has become egotistical. If the trauma is severe, then the vanity may inflate to a sense of grandiosity and may produce a teenager and adult who has grandiose dreams of power and fame. The compensation effect is based on fear, and acts rather like a see-saw: when one component of narcissism is down, the other component goes up.

The reverse effect is seen in an overly-indulgent family. No trauma may occur to the child. In this situation, its self-esteem is inflated. Now the narcissism of the child becomes over-weighted towards the self-love component.

When the child receives regular denigration from a parent, then his self-worth is gradually eroded and eventually collapses. Vanity gives way to self-pity. Narcissism (in vanity mode) is replaced by jealousy (in self-pity mode). To compensate, he may bond excessively to the parent. Or he may find that his sexual identity has become problematic: later in childhood, or even later in adulthood, he may pursue a change of gender identity, and become transgender, for example.

As jealousy (in self-pity mode) becomes dominant, then sexual activity may become inflated. Now the child, once it becomes an adult, may become licentious and disregard traditional sexual norms.

Motivation and Meaning

Slow-onset trauma [²] from my mother produced the effect that I was unable to handle sexuality in a mature manner. Being afraid of her, I was afraid of sexuality, of having my fragile personality swallowed up by a woman. I developed a schizoid personality, or more accurately, a schizoid character trait. My view can be generalised to embrace schizophrenia. Schizophrenia indicates trauma based on faulty sexual bonding with a parent, usually the parent of opposite sex to the child.

A schizoid character trait can be very useful. It allowed me to maintain a very private internal world of phantasy. The only time I sought emotional support from people was when I sometimes sought social validation for my emerging sexual identity as a transgender person during my 60s. My view has always been that my problems are mine alone, and I cope with them alone. The only thing I ever desired from other people was friendship.

The fast-onset trauma from my father gave rise to different effects. It primarily affected my motivation. And it turned me into a non-assertive weakling during my early childhood. Since I had not bonded with him, I had no desire to emulate his successes in life. As a teenager I had no motivation. Subconscious fear has the effect of eliminating motivation. I drifted into university and managed to get a degree despite not doing much work for it. After university I drifted through my 20s, and then began the traditional spiritual soul-search in my 30s.

Drifting causes problems. People who are drifting nearly always have difficulties with forming and keeping significant friendships and relationships. One main reason for this is that, because we are so immersed in our own confused troubles, we cease to be interested in the daily ephemera that makes up “normal” living. We therefore have little or nothing in common with most people, and so cannot communicate with them or make interesting conversations. Hence we think other people will find us stupid or boring. This lack of communication breeds loneliness and desperation in us, and so we sometimes go over-the-top in our attempts to find new friends. But then other people find us too intense.

Another way of looking at this is that I felt a lot of meaninglessness about life in my 20s; I lacked any sense of purpose or direction to my existence. Mainly because I did not bond with my father. The sense of meaninglessness gradually intensified until my life was almost at the level of desolation. The desolation propelled me, in my 30s, into the search for meaning in life.

A lack of motivation can produce other effects. During periods when anxiety is intense, the person may feel lost, empty and desperate. He has little sense of self-worth or self-love. He cannot explain his fears and his pessimism. He cannot identify the cause of his malaise. A long period of high anxiety (or mental stress) “fogs” the mind and prevents us from accurately remembering what happened to us. The fog is simply the focus on emotional states of mind rather than rational states. Since the emotional states are often negative states, eventually life appears to lack any meaning. Life becomes meaningless. We think that the “system” is insane. We abandon or reject it, in much the same way that as a child we felt abandoned or rejected by the parent.

Here we have two concepts: meaning and motivation. Motivation is derived from the person’s sense of meaning. When he finds something to be meaningful for him, it will motivate him to pursue it. For a social person, meaning and motivation require validation, whilst for the individual, meaning and motivation require authenticity [³].

Needs and Values

The major beliefs of most people are social ones, that is, each person defines himself in terms of other people. Hence the most important aspects of his life are his various relationships. Such people only have a weak sense of being an individual. What the sense of meaninglessness signifies is that the person’s social beliefs are not fulfilling him; what he needs to do is to develop his sense of being an individual. When relationships no longer carry significant meaning for the person, he has to find meaning within himself.

The issue of meaning comes up when there is little or no sense of quality to our life. The person who is searching for meaning has reached the point where he is searching for his genuine needs and values.

My view is that, for a boy, when fast-onset trauma is caused by the father or other significant male, it sets up a moderately standard pattern of response that will activate at some time in his life. First the trauma produces a lack of meaning in life, which in turn gives rise to a lack of motivation. The lack of motivation is more obvious than the lack of meaning. This state of mind can lead eventually to a sense of inner desolation: the person may feel crushed, which signifies that the person is no longer repressing his childhood experience of trauma but is actually living it again. Then often this desolation sets up the person to search for meaning and motivation in life.

The intensity with which we search for meaning relates to the intensity of the childhood trauma. If trauma was mild or moderate, then the person may stop his search when he finds some social support network that he can rely on. If trauma was intense, then social support networks will not be sufficient. Social support networks cannot hide the sense of inner desolation.

My search for meaning led me into the soul-search, when I explored various spiritual groups. This exploration resulted in the experience of finding faith in an English yoga teacher, Jack Bolton (who was himself a disciple of an India yogi Swami Dev Murti). Therefore the drama of trauma can give rise eventually to the familiar spectacle of religious conversion. The flight into blind faith is the flight from desolation. The desolation is the result of not bonding to a beneficent father. Then the teacher that is bonded to becomes symbolically a beneficent father figure.

There is another possibility different from the search for faith. The lack of meaning can arise from the feeling that something has died within oneself. What has really “died” is the sense of self-love or self-esteem. This can then lead eventually to the belief that the social system that was responsible for this lack of self-esteem is no longer valid or worthwhile. The person may then embrace any philosophy that invalidates the social system, such as existentialism or anarchism. If he is interested in politics, he may become subversive or even a revolutionary; if he is a cleric, he may preach hatred of Western capitalism.

These ways can run together. Before my search for faith, I became an anarchist in my politics and an existentialist in all other concerns.

The sense of desolation makes the search for meaning intense. There can be another factor to the intensity and this is a deep sense of injustice. The person feels that he/she does not deserve his/her bad fate. Hence a deep feeling of injustice helps to drive the search for meaning. People who are satisfied to believe that they do deserve their bad fate will always stop their search when they find a teacher. There is nothing wrong with this; it is simply that they do not need to go further for the time being. This point in the spiritual journey is the stage of faith. However, a human teacher can never assuage the feeling of injustice, and so the intense idealist eventually has to leave the teacher and continue his or her search. Journey’s end is probably the point where the idealist enters into an harmonious relationship with his or her own higher self. This is the stage of divine love. Some idealists may go further and find equanimity, or even perhaps peace.

Three Primary Themes

Now I begin developing my ideas on trauma. I consider the child’s responses. When experiencing stressful situations that the child finds difficult to handle, it will interpret those situations in ways that seem to make sense to itself. These interpretations will shape its future reactions to similar circumstances. It will not usually put its interpretations into language; instead, the interpretations will usually stay at the level of symbolism and subconscious beliefs. These beliefs will not usually be clearly-defined ones, but more of a medley of mixed ideas. For convenience, I separate these beliefs into three primary themes, those of punishment, denigration, and rejection. The theme of punishment includes the idea of domination too. In articles 17 to 20 (first article beginning with Six Variations and Seven Roots of Trauma-1), I will develop three secondary themes and one tertiary theme as well. How the child interpreted trauma will have to be deduced from his adult behaviour.

As the child grows into the adult, whichever theme becomes the centre of attention depends on whatever is stressful in the current situation. Each theme produces a cluster of associated ideas in the child as it grows into adulthood. Often these states of mind remain subconscious and indistinct, so that the child (and adult) cannot clearly identify what it is feeling. The overall effect is that the child cannot explain the reasons for its background uneasiness and distrust, thereby having the effect that when it grows up into an adult it will not know how to clearly identify and harmoniously handle the problems that arise in its relationships.

The common themes are not always easy to separate. Why have I selected just three primary themes? Trauma creates intense feelings. When I first began my analysis of common themes, self-pity was extremely intense in me, and self-pity comes in three modes: the self-pity modes of guilt and jealousy, and self-pity just by itself. So I allocated a separate theme to each mode. Then later I refined my analysis but still kept three primary themes since I had three dominant negative responses at that time. The emotions that underlay these dominant responses were mainly fear, guilt (mode of self-hate), and self-pity. Then once again at a later date I re-organised my ideas, since I had encountered new experiences which were relevant to these ideas; I accepted that fear can be present to some extent in all themes of negative experience. So finally the three dominant emotions became guilt (mode of self-hate), jealousy (mode of self-pity), and self-pity.

The severity of the consequences of experiencing one or more traumas is dependent on the age of the child at the earliest time of occurrence of such experiences. The younger the child, the greater will be the degree of severity. Often the child will develop a victim mentality later on in its life. The three themes are continued in the next three articles.

Trauma and Faith

A familiar form of compensation to trauma is the attainment of faith. Faith is the sublimation of the three modes of self-pity. When guilt (in self-pity mode) is the main issue, then the person finds faith in God, or rather in his conception of God. If this faith is too abstract, then he seeks a strong, dominant authority figure to have faith in. The figure of faith symbolises the “pure” parent, “uncorrupted” parent, a replacement for the parent who created trauma.

Where jealousy (in self-pity mode) is the main issue, he will seek a caring, benevolent figure to have faith in. If self-pity alone is the main issue, then he needs to find something about himself to put his faith in – in my case I found faith in my intellect, that it would eventually enable me to understand all my problems and create the pathway out of them.

Effects on Sexuality and Authority

Childhood trauma affects the ways that the child bonds to the parents. Some degree of underlying conflict is generated, depending on how intense the trauma was. Most children and adolescents have conflict with their parents, but this passes as they grow up and mature. If the adult has continuing conflict with the parents, then this indicates the probable existence of significant trauma in childhood.

In general, past-life experiences of trauma have the overall effect of making a child over-sensitive to any difficulties in its relationships to its current parents. This is one reason that some children are more affected by excessively harsh treatment than other children are.

When a male child bonds to the mother, she becomes his pattern of sexual femininity. He will later admire her sexuality and women who are like her. When he bonds to the father, the father becomes the child’s pattern of empowered masculinity. He will later admire his father’s authority and other men like him.

When the child fails to bond to the mother, he loses his sense of sexual femininity, and becomes confused. He may become wary of intimacy with women. When the child fails to bond to the father, he loses his sense of empowered masculinity and becomes confused. He may become rebellious and defiant towards all male authority figures.

The experience of excessive punishment may generate the feeling in the child of being psychologically crushed and so have a major impact on his sexual identity. If a boy is crushed by the father, the boy’s masculinity may become ambivalent and different from social expectations, propelling him to take a different approach to masculinity than his conventional father did. He may begin to explore a sexual interest in other men. Or he may explore the bohemian side of himself, and perhaps even become effeminate. He may go further still and develop an interest in BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, machochism) as ways of resolving his confusion towards the issues of punishment and control.

Excessive criticism from the mother will almost certainly impact on his sexual identity as well. As he evolves his sexual identity into adulthood, he is likely to be wary of sexual intimacy, making it difficult for him to have fulfilling sexual relationships with women. Traditional sexuality no longer excites him, so he may switch to non-traditional forms in order to generate the excitement that he needs: he may explore fetishism.

The experience of rejection may propel the person to explore his own sexuality. His own sexuality becomes a source of freedom to him. He may awaken the feminine side of himself, and gradually explore feelings of being transvestite or transgender. This immersion into gender issues enables him to bypass and reject the social and sexual conditioning that he feels his male identity is trapped in. Past-life experiences are particularly relevant to gender issues. If a male child begins to like wearing women’s clothes from his late childhood onwards (as I did), then the issue is probably due to his present difficulties with the parents. If he begins at an earlier age, then he is probably carrying issues from his past-life into his present life, and his present parents may not be the main difficulty for him.

I put these ideas another way. My father crushed my masculinity. My subconscious way of handling this was to allow my feminine feelings to gradually emerge. Trauma reduces the self-love, the self-esteem of the child. So the boy doesn’t have any good feelings about his masculinity. This situation continues into adulthood. He finds that by switching to the feminine aspect of himself, he can generate good feelings about himself.

Another way of handling trauma is by focusing on the need for validation. Normally an adult, when he is under stress, seeks validation from others, usually his peers or people slightly older. However, a person who has suffered trauma will most likely seek validation from parental symbols. For example, if his father caused trauma to him, then when he is an adult he may seek benevolent father figures to give him validation. Similarly, if his mother caused him trauma, then he may seek benevolent mother figures.

If the child has experienced more than one kind of trauma, then these effects of the common themes will get mixed up together, so leading the child, when it has become an adult, to explore the variety of non-conventional ways of handling sexuality and authority in its own particular style.

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Ian Heath
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.	Compensation and Inflation Effects within Narcissism and Jealousy Trauma can give rise to serious long-term effects on the child, and these can persist even after he has become an adult. I look at two common effects, those of compensation/inflation and motivation/meaning. Then I extend my ideas into previously uncharted waters. For some psychologists, narcissism has become a term of abuse. If an individual gets into trouble, he is blamed for having a narcissistic personality. This labelling represents confusion about the way narcissism functions. Narcissism is the basis of individuality and stimulates the person’s ability to think for himself – without it, he would be merely a socialised robot, obeying orders automatically. All authoritarian systems depend on minimising the person’s stimulation of narcissism [¹]. However, there is a serious issue here. Narcissism is a compound emotion which has two simpler emotions as factors. These factors are self-love and vanity. The issue with narcissism is that one of these factors may become over-emphasised and produce unpleasant consequences.
Sub - Headings
Motivation and Meaning
Needs and Values
Three Primary Themes
Trauma and Faith
Effects on Sexuality and Authority
References