Wisdom from the Trenches

Unless you are the luckiest duck to ever walk this Earth, at some point, life rears its ugly head and backhands you hard enough to make your head spin in a way that forever changes who you are. Trauma. It comes in similar veins, but the details are different for every victim. Perhaps abused or neglected as a child, maybe married to a narcissistic abuser, a car accident, a terrorist attack, bullying, the loss of a loved one, or a medical emergency. Something rocks your world in a way that horrifies you and life is never really the same.

While the grief process is unique to everyone, it is not so much a ladder as it is a chaotic dance from one emotional step to another – and back again. Sometimes, we cycle quickly through emotions in the aftermath of a traumatic event. Other times, we are ruthlessly – or mercifully – in a holding pattern of a stage of grief. Many times, we repeat certain stages because new memories or our altered reality trigger us once again. Regardless of how we personally process grief, there are some very specific emotions that surface as we face painful situations…and they are common enough to label grieving as a process that takes time, sometimes never fully coming to a close.

I cannot walk you through emotions I felt when my very existence was shattered due to trauma because my world went dark. I do remember crying torrents of tears while in the shower in a desperate effort to cleanse my body of the overwhelming feeling that I was soiled, tarnished, dirty to the core of my being. But at some point on that first day after, I realized that no amount of scrubbing or dousing myself in water could ever cleanse me of the disgusting filth that was my new reality – and my mind was consumed by absolute shock.

I went numb. I felt nothing – not joy nor sorrow. I became like the walking dead. I lived, I breathed, I moved through my day, and I felt nothing every moment of every day…for fourteen years. Years.

Our brains are incredible machines. They calculate, store memory, recall information for us, control our bodily functions, emote, learn, grow, and mature. But, like an airbag deploying upon contact in an accident to save the person in a vehicle, when faced with something particularly painful, our brains react quickly to preserve life. Intense emotional responses can be excruciatingly painful to face while injured (whether emotional or physical wounding has occurred). Shock is often an immediate defense reaction to trauma. Memories of the trauma may disappear, but resurface later. They were never truly gone. The brain intrinsically seems to know that the memory is too painful to deal with at that moment and locks it away for processing at a later date – or never.

In place of active memory and normal emotional responses, all goes dark, silent, and numb. We may seem fine, but we are far from it. In fact, we are far from reality at all in a mindset I can only describe as resembling a free float in a metaphorical Dead Sea. It takes no effort to remain suspended there, surrounded by a virtual wasteland of completely devastated terrain. This place, this purgatory, keeps victims from experiencing pain but holds us hostage in the past, unable to feel any emotion. It might bring about an eerie sense of calm, but we are ultimately submerged in circumstances that have actively wiped out all that we hold dear. All is still, but not all is at peace. We float on, undisturbed by the hell that holds us captive.

Shock is necessary. Shock is useful. Shock is sometimes so blissful for victims, it often gives birth to full-fledged denial, but that is the topic of next week’s blog post. Shock is a state where a victim feels nothing, remembers very little, blocks the senses, pauses thought, seems to slow time itself. If strong emotion is a waterfall or a flood, shock is a megadrought. Many people might think of shock as emotional distress, but it is nothing of the sort. Shock is a lack of emotion. It is a vacuum, where emotion ceases to exist because blood flow is restricted to important body parts. Shock isn’t an emotion at all – it is a medical emergency. Shock is the body’s response to short-term preservation in the face of trauma. Shock can lead to death and if the painful memories are psychologically damaging enough, that death will be internal. Something can snap inside the mind and the person can become a shell of who they once were, a zombie, the walking dead.

As disturbing as shock is for others to witness in a trauma survivor, it doesn’t appear to concern those experiencing it. By that point, fear has left the building. The emotion ship has sailed and with it, their individuality…their true selves. Some describe it as a type of out of body experience. They can remember going through a painful experience, but the memory has no feeling attached to it. It is as if they are watching an actor suffer on stage. It’s meaningless, an act, fake. A numbness begins to set in. Life drains from them at an alarming rate, but they no longer care. They remain still, unfazed by the frenzy around them.

Coming out of shock, however, is brutally jarring because a victim must finally face the reality of all that has been lost. Forcing the issue before a survivor is ready to deal with reality is both retraumatizing (which can spiral them further into shock) and cruel. Numbness serves a very specific defensive purpose and should not be overridden by well-intentioned friends or family, especially in cases where the victim’s free will was subverted or blatantly ignored to give another human being satisfaction at the victim’s expense. The brain will remain in a numb state until it perceives a trauma victim is safe and ready to begin processing deep, difficult, and distressing emotions and memories.

So what can be done while a loved one struggles with emotional shock after a devastating and life-changing event? The most important thing a loved one can do around a survivor is create a calm, predictable, supportive, and safe environment so the wounded brain can begin the process of moving forward from the traumatic event at their own pace and on their own schedule.

Safety is necessary. Patience is key.

In all this, LOVE is imperative.