The experience of trauma, be it abuse, combat, relational trauma or cult involvement, has a predictable effect on a person’s Central Nervous System (CNS). Experiencing either severe or prolonged threats to your safety (including psychological safety) recalibrates your nervous system towards a state of high alert. After all, threat has been present, relevant and important in your life, so your system reorganises itself to maximise the chances of survival.
This reorganisation is vital during the traumatic experience. If you are surviving with a coercive controlling partner, parent or group, you will need to modify your behaviour in order to survive. We have an instinctive understanding of this when we think about people surviving in places like prison, POW camps or fleeing their country as refugees; certain behaviours that don’t work well elsewhere will be needed to survive in those specific contexts.
We get that a soldier will have difficulty adjusting to civilian life, that a person in prison will need time to get used to the world most of us take for granted, but do we think the same way about survivors of domestic and family violence? Or those leaving cults (also referred to as high control groups)? And what about people who grew up with a psychologically abusive parent?
In fact these people face the same type of task when they find their freedom. First there is freedom from the abuser, then there is the long walk to freedom from the abuse.
One survivor I have supported in their recovery grew up in a house where everyone smiled and spoke kindly while the abuser was cruel and controlling, psychologically abusive and destructive. The abuser had tentacles in every relationship outside the family and controlled, through quiet, gentle persuasion, every family interaction and dynamic.
The nervous system triggers this person experienced after finding their freedom from the abuser included people being kind to them, people smiling and people being interested in what they were doing. These were all behaviours used by the abuser to gain information, to reassert control, to show dominance while portraying a facade of kindness.
Whenever this survivor encountered these behaviours in the real world, they experienced a quiet alarm inside their body as their system began to prepare to run or fight. But because neither of these strategies had been effective with the abuser, their system was conditioned to move quickly into a freeze response (better called immobilisation or collapse), leaving them tongue tied and stuck when these triggers were present.
The task of this survivor, as it is for us all, was to recalibrate their nervous system response in order to stop jumping at shadows. This work falls into two areas, which happen simultaneously but can be better understood if separated – learning to trust yourself and self-soothing.
Learning to trust yourself:
The central task of the abuser is to undermine the victim’s self confidence and to install themselves as the central authority in the victim’s mind and life.
I know best says the abuser…you’re not great at…you never really could…without me you wouldn’t be able to…
One of the effects of trauma that is rarely explained is that we lose trust in ourselves, not through some magical process but through the repeated violation of boundaries by and intrusive and abusive person. Another person, one with bad intentions, who is concerned with control, not with caring for you, asserts their authority over you and becomes, in your mind at least, an authority. That person then gaslights you into distrusting yourself.
This creates a (or reinforces) self-doubting thoughts while also strengthening a pattern of behaviour – when I am unsure, I consult the abuser because they know best. Humans are pretty poor at keeping score, at testing whether the advice given is actually proving helpful, so we default to the underlying belief in the authority and continue to trust them.
And (and this is the core) because that authority says that we can’t trust ourselves, we begin to hold that belief deeply. So even after the abuser is gone, we do not listen to or believe our own inner guidance, and we may even look for a replacement authority figure to give us a sense of certainty.
So part of survivorship is learning to trust again. This includes trusting our decisions in the world and trusting our body and nervous system to warn us of danger and keep us safe if something dangerous is happening. This sounds complicated and daunting, but it starts by learning to listen to your body, learning to pay attention to the signals it sends and starting to watch the mind and wonder about whether listening to that voice is serving you.
This is a slow, gentle process in which we (preferably with support) begin to listen to inner guidance and test, through experience, how different choices feel in real time.
For example, if you have escaped an abusive relationship and you’re re-establishing your old connections, you might notice an uncomfortable feeling during or after contact with a particular friend or family member. Your mind says they have done so much for you, they are so kind…but your body recoils at the thought of even speaking with them.
The old way was to look for an authoritative voice and now the voice in your head is standing in for the abuser. And yet something new is emerging, another voice from within that is wise and kind and quiet. Your heart whispers constantly of what you need and what doesn’t serve you and your body gives you guidance in real time while the mind only relies on memory and rote learning, regurgitating verbal rules from the past.
The work of trust is to become more and more sensitive to your moment to moment experience and to slowly let the information that comes from the body be digested. This becomes the compass for life direction, for which relationships are healthy or unhealthy, for what enriches your life and what depletes you.
And slowly you begin to trust your heart, your body, your deepest wisdom.
That is enough for now. In Part 2 we will explore the work of learning to self-soothe, but for now take a breath, hold yourself gently and rest.