Other Night Terrors And Link To Early Trauma?

[crazynightz]

Hi there.

I've been living with night terrors since a teenager and before that I remember horrible nightmares. These are the jump out of bed, scream, freeze in terror, hallucinate haunting figures/voices variety. Until discovering the term 'night terrors' I was beginning to think that there was some kind of intrusive psychic phenomena going on. I have almost rung the police so many times being sure of home invasion.

I would be so grateful for any feedback as I'm slowly tapping in trauma as a baby. I was induced, given eight transfusions (RH factor) and kept in an incubator without any motherly contact (separation anxiety). Prior to mid 80's surgery on babies was done without anesthetic, only a muscle relaxant (so one can only imagine the numbers out there carrying this kind of trauma).

Medical models of the time (still prevail today) believed once the pain was gone, the body would adjust back to normal. Wrong!

I went on to having a home life that could be pretty terrifying at times too.

So I'm quietly digging for answers & wondering if anyone has made similar links? I know that night terrors sometimes has genetic links (my brother has them at times), but I sense mine is connected to past trauma.

Thanks for any help on this.

 

[Hashi]

Hi crazynightz,

Welcome to the forum.

I had quite a similar birth trauma to yours, but instead of being induced I was born with jaundice. The rest was the same as you - blood transfusions, incubator and isolation (it was three days before my mother was even allowed to stand in the corridor and look at me through the window of the intensive care unit). I have no understanding of parent/child bonding or family ties. As far as I'm concerned, my parents might just as well have picked me up when they were out shopping, and then I had to live with them for 17 years. My childhood was not good, to put it mildly, so I have no affection for my mother but I think the feeling that my family are basically random strangers must come from my birth experience.

I've also had nightmares and hallucinations at night, but I think different from yours. It's been only occasional, and then my reaction has been to completely freeze in fear. I identified the hallucinations as something called hypnagogia in the sense that they happened when I was in a state of consciousness between being awake and asleep. However I suspect that for many people hallucinations have a basis in traumatic experiences, whatever it is that triggers them.

In my case I experienced a number of later traumas as well, about some of which I had selective amnesia. When I started working on the traumas generally I felt at risk of hallucinations and other weird experiences all the time, but I learnt to do visualisations for psychic safety, and that keeps me safe from them.

I'm not saying you necessarily have been affected by other traumas, although when you say your home life could be terrifying it sounds like perhaps you have. I'm sorry for that. If that's the case then you may well find you can't pick the trauma you want to work on at any time - your subconscious and central nervous system will present whatever needs to be addressed.

At any rate, I think you have a good point about the birth trauma. I've had craniosacral therapy and although my motivation for going was the other traumas, the birth trauma came up as well and I was really surprised to experience some sensory memories of it. It's deeply traumatic to go through something like that when you're at your most helpless. In fact, craniosacral therapy has a big focus on healing birth traumas.

It's difficult to address something like that through talk therapy, because it happened at a time before you could perceive things cognitively. Have you considered a somatic therapy (ie one that works with cell memory and the central nervous system)?

Take care,

Hashi

 

[crazynightz]

Dear Hashi,

It was so nice to receive your response! It's the first time I've had the opportunity to dialogue with someone who entered the world in a similar way :) That crucial early bonding time, was instead the experience of a multitude of hospital staff, face after face, coming into view, and the terror of the unknown, in theatre & the isolation of an incubator. I have some feeling for the experience you described as "just as well have picked me up when they were out shopping". I have never been close to my mother either, I wondered whether I was adopted, very painful. A feeling like that isolation of the incubator continued on.

One of my earliest memories was going nuts when visiting a plunket nurse. She wanted to put me on a weigh machine that had an enormous needle that registered the weight! I still remember the terror and panic and fortunately the wild animal in me prevented them from putting me on the machine.

Fortunately my night terrors come and go, sometimes with months in between. I'm still working out what triggers them off. Recently I had a speight of many nights in a row & on one night each time I went back to sleep I entered another night terror episode. I end up feeling pretty exhausted at the end of that week & needed a period of early nights to catch up. The visualisation for psychic safety sounds interesting. Would you be open to sharing a bit about that? I'm interested in trying a range of things to settle and heal this disturbance that seems deeply lodged in my pshche. I have been working for a while with counsellor who brings in a shamanic take on things too, which I find helpful.

Thankyou for your kind words re. trauma in the home. It sounds like you have been through a lot too. It is amazing how protective mechanisms come into play with things like dissociation and amnesia & then snipets may be recovered in their own time, sometimes unexpectantly. I have found that through a significant dream I was able to get in touch with something of my hospital trauma. It was during a recent period when I became particularly open to it. Like a window opened for a time and I was able to access something of the emotional ordeal.

I will definitely follow up on craniosacral and somatic therapy. This has been a big help. Thankyou so much!:tup:

 

[Hashi]

Hi crazynighz,

Just wanted to thank you for your reply and say I'll respond properly soon. I seem to suddenly have a lot coming up - good, but a lot - and I'm going to have to take a bit of time for that. But I was very interested in what you wrote, especially about your counsellor bringing in a shamanic approach. And i'm very happy to share about the visualisations I do.

So i just wanted to check in and say I'll respond properly soon, and in the meantime I'm glad to have "met" you here. I feel like this is really abrupt - I'm sorry! That's healing for you... but please know I want to respond and will do soon.

Hashi

 

[crazynightz]

Hi Hashi,

Thanks for your note, and quite understand when stuff comes up that needs to be attended to. This website will be around for a while I can imagine, so no rush. The most important thing is that you are okay. I look forward to hearing from you when the time is right for you. Take care, Carolyn.

 

[bitzer]

Prior to mid 80's surgery on babies was done without anesthetic.

That's horrendous. It's also a double whammy, because babies can't soothe themselves - the orbito-frontal complex is not developed for some time after the birth. Babies rely on Mother to do their soothing for them.

I sense [my night terrors are] connected to past trauma.

I think mine were.

 

[bitzer]

It's difficult to address [night terrors] through talk therapy ...

I wouldn't agree. I have studied somatic techniques, but I primarily still rely on "talking" therapy with my clients with implicit trauma. I use quotes around "talking" because very little of the meaning of a conversation is actually carried in the words (I think it's around 3%) - most of the meaning is in facial expressions and body language.

Besides, it isn't the therapist that cures the client. I believe all the therapist does is clear the blocks out of the way so the client can cure themselves.

 

[Anna]

Welcome to the forum :)

I also had a pretty rough birth as well. Induced, forcep delivery, have a strange bald patch on me head where the electrodes were. I also went into foetal distress.

Strangely I had these weird dreams of being crushed. Maybe you have them as well? Like I would see white and suddenly ink blots would fill up the white. I would feel crushed and then panic like I couldn't breathe. I had these dreams as a small child.

There is a section on sleep in the forum which is very useful. :)

 

[crazynightz]

So great to be dialoguing like this, thank you for your responses :0) Trauma and how it plays out is so profoundly personal, and until now I have kept a lot to myself, mostly because I couldn't make sense of it. Wow, re. babies being unable to soothe themselves. This is something I wish to understand better & the more I dig the more alarmed I become! Thanks bitzer for that and yes talking therapy I'm sure supports other more somatic approaches. It certainly has helped me when I've needed to talk out stuff that is hard to fathom. I'm a new counsellor myself, and what happens to me at night has given me, I think, a small window into what it might be like living with schizophrenic type symptoms. Not easy to make sense of. You say you have night terrors as well, possibly from past trauma?

Hi Anna, thanks for your response. I find how you described your dreams so interesting. Do you still get nightmares, or disturbed sleep? I will check out the sleep section, thanks for that. I remember as a child I was often blind, it was dementing as I was always trying to run away from something but often couldn't see what from and where the heck I was going! I think again that there are links to that early trauma, as we as babies couldn't escape what was being done to us. For me I've never been able to handle bright lights, so I wonder if the blind aspect may have some connection to the bright theatre lights I couldn't get away from.
I guess all we can work with is various hypotheses, waiting for further insights to become apparent and then further questions are unearthed!

 

[Hashi]

I wouldn't agree.

Hi bitzer, just to clarify - I wasn't saying it's difficult to address night terrors with talk therapy. I think it's difficult to address birth trauma with talk therapy,because of not having developed cognitive skills at the time. I didn't even have any direct memories until somatic therapy put me in touch with fragments of them, before that I had only the narrative my mother had told me.

I've had talk therapy alongside somatic therapy for traumas at an older age, and both have been necessary for me for that. But I'm not clear how talk therapy could have accomplished much in relation to the birth trauma. In fact I had talked about it when having counselling for depression, and there wasn't really anywhere to go with it after making the connection about lack of bonding. So that was more about the later effects than the birth trauma itself. Through somatc therapy I've experienced and processed it in a completely different way.

I'm puzzled by your "besides". The whole basis of craniosacral therapy is to facilitate our own healing - in fact, clearing the blocks away so the client can heal themselves. I don't think therapists cure us. Is that something you've picked up from your study of somatic therapy? It seems very confusing to me, not my understanding or experience as a client at all.

Anyhow, was just checking this thread and wanted to clear up what I meant. Perhaps you still hold a different view to me.

 

[bitzer]

Hi bitzer, just to clarify - I wasn't saying it's difficult to address night terrors with talk therapy. I think it's difficult to address birth trauma with talk therapy,because of not having developed cognitive skills at the time.

I don't agree. I specialise in infant trauma using "talking" therapy.

So little of what we "say" face to face is in the words (about 3%). We think we are communicating using words, but we're not. 97% of the meaning is in facial expressions and body language.

So little of what the therapist does has a direct impact - it's all in the way it is done and not in the doing. Research into long-term "talking" therapy shows that the modality (e.g. TA, gestalt, person-centred, psychodynamic, etc.) and the techniques used (e.g. CBT, two-chair, reparenting, etc.) are irrelevant. The quality of the relationship is the most important factor.

I'm puzzled by your "besides". The whole basis of craniosacral therapy is to facilitate our own healing - in fact, clearing the blocks away so the client can heal themselves. I don't think therapists cure us.

You are puzzled because you took it as read? So we are in agreement then?

 

[bitzer]

You say you have night terrors as well, possibly from past trauma?

I used to get them all the time and several times a night.

After hundreds of hours of therapy I'm down to about once a month.

I have both implicit and explicit PTSD, i.e. some traumas before I developed explicit memory and some traumas I have explicit memories of.

When we are born our brains are incomplete - for example we have no Orbito-Frontal Complex (the self-soothing centre) or Hippocampus (required for explicit memories).

We "remember" birth trauma because the Amygdala is present at birth; this part of the brain works with the fight/flight part of the brain stem, and gives us the knee-jerk response we experience with rejection, engulfment and/or confrontation (implicit memory).