Thursday's Therapy - Damaged

Thursday's Therapy

Damaged

~Tommy and Angie Prince

"Central to the experience of traumatic stress are the dimensions of

• helplessness
• powerlessness, and
• a threat to one's life.

"Trauma attacks the individual's sense of self and predictability of the world."

~Bessel A. van der Kolk

We are impacted on so many dimensions by our Grief and our Trauma:

• body
• soul
• spirit
• mind
• emotions

*****

I am a damaged person. Yes, I can function through a day (well, it may not be pretty, neat, or as organized as someone else's functioning, but it is functioning). I can walk, I can talk, I can think, I can smile, I can even laugh. I can relate in many different ways. And yes, I can work. I still have a practice in psychotherapy which I love. I love helping people. But my case load is not up to par -- it is about 1/3 of what it once was.

One of my clients is a creative designer in advertising. He had seen me a few years back, and he has now re-entered therapy. I believe he must sense I am different. (He knows we lost Merry Katherine.) The other day, he asked me if I had enough business coming in. Why he asked this I'm not sure, but creating business is his line of work after all. But I stopped and thought about it. My studied response was

"I have as much business as I can handle right now."

Fortunately, he seemed okay with my response.

But you all know:

Losing a child is downright debilitating. I am a different person now. My life has been damaged. I spend a great deal of time grieving. In terms of working and knowing what I am capable of handling, I do not even know who I am anymore! My system has been ripped up. I am hyper-vigilant. I am fragile, for my system, my entire being, is compromised. For the past month, I have been unable to sleep through the night like I did before. I am agitated. My body is hyper-aroused as if ready for danger.

Many psychologists say PTSD includes avoiding triggers that remind one of the trauma. I cannot relate to that symptom really.

I do not avoid triggers that remind me of the loss of my child -- I welcome them and cry over them. They remind me of my child, and in their own way serve as my only way of "being with" my child right now. And so I feel them to the full and work to grieve them.

But I do avoid something else.

Secondary Trauma is what I avoid because my Primary Trauma of Losing My Baby Girl is ALL I can deal with right now.

I do not need any complications of further trauma to my heart.

What is one of the secondary traumas that I face?

Unrealistic Expectations: We child-loss grievers are experiencing a damage that the world is not willing to accept, especially the Christians it seems --

There is a pressured expectation of a rush to heal, a sprint, a drag-race expectation really, to heal, be-done, fini, instantly recover.

This expectation alone is harmful, so misguided, and in many ways downright cruel.

There are indeed benefits to this Refining of Fire through which we are going. We find we do not have the "layers of stupid" on us any more. We are no longer walking through the world looking through the lenses of Idealism nor Romanticism. We relate to people -- not for how we want them to be, as we once did... I used to assume people were there for me. I was assuming they cared for me and that they had my best interests at heart -- but now we try to see them for who they really are... We no longer just assume such sweetness to be there.

Now, thanks to our increased vigilance and God's sweet discernment, we have a Clarity we did not have before about the world and about people. For example, we can very quickly sniff out if other people have their own self-serving agendas for us, despite our being in very raw grief.

How dare anyone have their own self-serving agenda for us when we are Under Assault, Under Siege in this ongoing Grief-and-Trauma-War we are having to fight in every single dimension of our lives: body, soul, mind, spirit, and emotions.

We therefore expose ourselves to these people in a different way, in a much more protected way.

For WE CANNOT AFFORD TO ADD SECONDARY TRAUMAS TO OUR PRIMARY TRAUMA.

Dr. Bessel A. van der Kolk, a psychiatrist specializing in trauma (even helping to coin the term Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder), says about PTSD and traumatic event(s)' effect on our being:

"It is this Sense of Being Damaged, rather than the immediate horror of the Trauma, that many victims describe as the worst aspect of their ordeal in the long term."

~Dr. Bessel A. van der Kolk

(capitalizations and highlights mine)

This is a very important statement. This sense of being damaged IS overwhelming. Some even call it an "Invisible Disability."

NOW, ADD to Severe Trauma the absolute Worst Grief in the world--that of losing your child!

Losing our child is the worst thing that could happen, but it did happen, and our child's death and the inherent loss of her life here with us while we're on earth is the worst aspect of our ordeal. And while trying to grapple with such great hurt and loss, we have the debilitating damage to all dimensions of our very being brought on by the trauma, and you've got one sick puppy -- who needs to do Grief work, Trauma work, and oh-yeah-by-the-way, carry on with your job and your life and pay all your bills, all the while trying to avoid any secondary traumas on top of all this.

It all feels well nigh impossible...

Picture: http://www.fotosearch.com/photos-images/heart-arrow_3.html

Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, Dr. Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, Editors, pp. 136, 137 and 215.

Thursday's Therapy - Let Us Bury The Stages Of Grief -For Good! by Dr. Ursula Weide

Thursday's Therapy

Ways We Grieve

Part Eleven

Let Us Bury The Stages Of Grief -For Good!

by Dr. Ursula Weide




On April 17, 2007, one day after the Virginia Tech massacre of 32 students by another student, the Washington Post published an article entitled “Survivors of Shootings Grieve in Stages.” The author quotes an "educator" who counseled Columbine survivor families as describing specific, time-limited stages to occur in a particular order. The educator explained that in the first stage “the body shuts down in shock for seven days. It is a piercing grief; you stumble through what has to be done.” The second stage, beginning at about six months, “is defined by intense sorrow. You go back to doing normal things but everything is colored steel-grey.” One of my bereavement support group members pointed out that, apparently, the survivors cease to exist from day eight until the beginning of the second stage. And since she herself was just a few days beyond the six-month anniversary of the sudden death of her young husband and clearly able to perceive my fuchsia outfit while not seeing “steel-grey”, the group - facetiously - concluded that she must "not be grieving right." According to the educator, the third stage, “about a year after the event, is sadness tempered with joy at getting on with your own life.” None of us, past our first-year anniversary, recalled having jumped with “joy.” But there is hope: “You know that you’re there when it does not feel bad to feel good.” We are still waiting!

Needless to say, the above meaningless language is easily picked up by a society which itself wants to “be done” with death and trauma and thus is reassured that there is an orderly course of grief and that, yes, you will actually “get over it.”

But does this reassurance help the survivors? The so-called "stages of grief" theory originated in the 1980s when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had the temerity to put the subject of death, considered rather taboo until then, on the national agenda. While she deserves much credit, it is common knowledge by now among mental health experts that there is no particular sequence of "stages" as Kubler-Ross had initially postulated. Neither does a survivor experience all or necessarily even any one of them.

Kubler-Ross provided us with some early concepts of "grief responses" such as denial and acceptance which were helpful for further research but are not necessarily useful descriptions of a person's emotional responses. Neither are they necessarily concepts upon which grief therapy should be based.

The impact of a person having experienced traumatic death or violence belongs on a much higher-order level - that of the acute traumatic stress syndrome, occurring immediately after the event, followed by the post-traumatic stress syndrome if symptoms of trauma persist, as described in the DSM-IV.

Whether someone is a shooting victim, sibling or parent of a victim, or a witness; a soldier or journalist returning from duty in Iraq after exposure to violence and destruction; or has lost a loved one through traumatic death (defined as untimely, sudden, violent – an accident, suicide, homicide - , or the witnessing of and/or participation in terminal care), becomes irrelevant when looked at from this point of view.

What does matter is the combination and severity of the symptoms of trauma such as

• memory impairment,
• difficulty concentrating,
• irritability and anger,
• flashbacks and frightening dreams,
• hyper-arousal,
• insomnia,
• loss of interest in formerly pleasurable activities,
• dissociative symptoms.

Symptom combinations and severity depend on numerous individual factors, both situational and personal. What matters in addition is the degree of interference with daily functioning. Traumatic stress debriefing, conducted shortly after the events in a professional and carefully structured fashion (International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, www.icisf.org), helps with trauma prevention. This may be followed by

Trauma Therapy:

• supportive counseling,
• cognitive-behavioral therapy,
• psycho-dynamic work,
• survivor group support,
• relaxation techniques,
• desensitization,
• the development of coping skills to manage the course of grief over time, and
• any combination of the above.

The problem with postulating stages and time frames is that survivors are traumatized even more when they do not see themselves live up to what their environment apparently considers to be "normal” – universal emotional states resolving within a pre-determined, fairly short period of time.

Advice dispensed by the uninitiated adds to the trauma of now living in an unfamiliar and extremely distressing emotional dimension, unimaginable to those who have not been there themselves.

Attempting to focus on others presumed to be “worse off” or on “all the good things in life” has no effect whatsoever and hence induces even greater distress in the survivor.

As a psychologist and traumatologist, I regularly hear the question, "Am I going crazy?" The proper response is that the unfamiliar feelings, thoughts and behaviors occurring under traumatic stress are normal reactions to an abnormal experience. And that there is no “one size fits all” approach to grief therapy leading to a uniform outcome.

Traumatic stress produces neurophysiological and neurobiological changes. Imaging techniques such as functional MRIs and PET scans have shown a

• hyper-activation of the amygdala while
• the medial pre-frontal cortex, modulating the intensity of emotions by inhibiting the amygdala, is under-activated.
• In addition, the hippocampus, contributing to memory functioning, shrinks in size and responds abnormally to memory tasks.

So far, we have no studies indicating whether the original size is recovered after most symptoms of trauma have abated. What we do know is that prior trauma such as childhood abuse or adult trauma create permanent neural pathways, rapidly triggered by another traumatic experience and inducing more severe traumatic stress symptoms. Furthermore, we now can also demonstrate what we have known since Freud - that talking contributes to the “cure”: whenever the language centers are activated, amygdala activation and consequently emotional intensity are reduced.

One last word of caution: there are numerous, often commercial organizations, promising “certification in grief counseling” in four days to teach “anyone to heal grief, from the break-up of a romantic relationship to death” (in one single sentence!). None of these organizations would receive continuing education accreditation by the American Psychological Association or the American Psychiatric Association. Hopefully, the horrifying events at Virginia Tech will bring the country several steps closer to a better understanding of the burdens on the survivors of traumatic death and the highly specialized care needed to manage them appropriately.

Ursula Weide, PhD, JD, LPC, CT, Licensed Psychologist, Licensed Professional Counselor, Certified Thanatologist
 (Association for Death Education and Counseling)

http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Let_Is_Bury_The_Stages_Of_Grief_fFor_Good.html

www.coping-with-loss-and-grief.com

blog: griefhelpdoctorweide.wordpress.com