Unfortunately, what happens makes it doubly hard to allow attachments to occur. The traumas plus the aband...
I think therapy works when the therapist can realise that abandonment is not a cognitive problem but a severe trauma/emotional problem which requires input from the therapist rather than cognitive restructuring. There is a good book called 'Why Therapy Works' by Loius Cozolino. After reading this book I wrote to the woman who is co ordinating services in this area. It is quite long but I think I wrote clearly and candidly and it gives a good representation of the distress I am experiencing. I post it here in the hope that it may be helpful to some of you reading this.
Dear......
I know that the diagnosis of me is that I had such massive early years trauma that my brain is just incredibly badly built. I get tripped into abandonment panic: I go back to the emotions of an infant who is in pain and feel that my attachment figures aren't there and worse, one of my attachment figures in real life, caused this life threatening damage and pain when I was six months old
. As an adult there is nowhere to run because the fear and distress is coming from within. Yet, still the desire to escape is overwhelming. (These experiences and the self injurious thoughts they trigger, are stored in subcortical and right-hemisphere-based brain regions.)
Abandonment for me triggers a post traumatic flashback of life threatening proportions. I become consumed and overwhelmed with fear and desperately try to stop my pain by reaching out (previously anorexia and extreme high achieving activity kept it more at bay). When my therapist and I are separated for longer than 15 days and I feel it is because he doesn’t care (like this deliberate unfeasibly long 25 day break) I have a catastrophic reaction to the separation and I get worse the more alone I am. I somehow feel under life threatening attack, I feel massively that I don’t matter and I feel in serious life threatening emotional danger. This was the chaotic emotional world of my early childhood. When he then says something – some interpretation like the one he did on Friday : ‘I believe you will be able to cope with losing me’ (his way of making himself feel better and not actually based on evidence or fact) I feel a huge negative emotional reaction. I feel anger and I feel furious and I feel that my distress is dismissed by him, my fears are dismissed by him and my genuine difficulty with dealing with abandonment is just brushed aside as insignificant. It immediately triggers a shift from frontal to subcortical (amygdala) dominance which of course manifests in huge emotional storms and visible regression.
It is a post traumatic reaction. I know that.
What down regulates this amydala activation and panic is warm
human affectionate loving connection
. Of course I
I feel
that connection
with him. This allows left cortical processing to become activated. But of course, when he leaves me, he is not there. I reach out and he is not there. He is gone. I can know in my adult self that he has gone and I have to wait but the brain goes into
the old traumas:
No one is there. Which is the reason I wind up rather than wind down. Now during this current break he thinks he did the right things but he choose to downplay the fact that it created a 25 day break which was, to everyone else professional, a very obvious danger warning flag. I began to feel distraught by last Tuesday. Which meant I had four days of signalling distress, signalling distress, signalling distress – and being met with silence. He would say he is too busy and he actually IS too busy. So again I feel unreasonable for feeling so ignored and abandoned by him. So I get more wound up as my feelings are not ‘appropriate’. But they are appropriate if you consider I feel three years old and no caregiver is bothering to turn up at the hospital to see how I am or comfort me. Or I am six months old and the same. Or I am nine years old and the same. So I just live a nightmare. I just feel a passive victim of implicit memories.
His job, as I see it, in our scheduled sessions, is to stay present for me when we have therapy and have the ability to stay focused on how I feel despite all the distractions: swearing at him; going mute with frustration, pain and anger at him; raging at him; putting the phone down on him etc. He is actually good at staying focussed on how I might actually be feeling behind all the acting out. When he does that, I can feel soothed. Even if I still hate him. Then if I feel soothed enough, I can feel the language pathways open up again which activate the left frontal neural networks which allows me to do some self reflection and this soothing inhibits the sub- cortical and right hemisphere networks which are causing the mayhem. This seems to allow me then to get the flashback and trigger states under conscious control. His soothing therapeutic interaction with me adds a cortical component to what was a primarily subcortical process. When he adds touch to that (a hug, a hand on my hand or shoulder or back) I feel my system mellow as the oxytocin kicks in.
Trauma is the gift that just keeps giving. I hate those sayings: ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ and ‘time heals all wounds’. What a load of bollocks. My traumas have created long-standing biological and psychological compromise. My traumas have produced chronic biological, psychological and social damage that interferes with many levels of my functioning. So in my case, it is more like ‘What doesn’t kill you, makes you weaker.’ And the more trauma I have experienced, the more likely I will be traumatised again. I have become more vulnerable to more traumatic experiences. The stress of all this decreases my immunological functioning making me more susceptible to physical illness like CFS/ME and other illnesses.
My prolonged and early years trauma have not been healed. They are still chronically disrupting my life.
We now know that early and severe trauma compromises the early construction of the brain, the healthy development of core neural networks. The most devastating of these early traumas are the ones that occur at the hands of caretakers. It was my nanny who left me to die under the scalding running water. It was my parents who could not cope with my distress and my inability to emotionally regulate myself when triggered or abandoned or frightened. It was my mother who was emotionally closed off and suffering attachment disorder herself. It was my father who was erratic, a bully, violent and unpredictable and who left when I was 15 to live in another continent without giving due regard to my distress. None of this even touches on the trauma of being sexually abused when I was a child or being physically abused or emotionally neglected and shamed.
This is why in therapy I repeatedly look to my therapist to attune with me emotionally and in focussing on my emotional signals he then soothes me. When he abandons me for very long periods of time, when he is not there for like 25 days ( beyond my present ability to tolerate about two weeks) , the distress winds up. I look to him to learn from him how to re wire my brain. He is doing that in sessions. It is working.
Then we add to the mix that he is bailing out of this therapeutic relationship early and admitting he is choosing to do this knowing the damage it will cause me. this means that the distress is kicking back in big time. Abandoment now plus future devastating abandonment looming. I find it impossibly hard to know that he is okay with doing this, with damaging the fragile neural pathways we have spent nearly six years forging. It seems such a tragic waste of good work. About 30% of it may remain but the rest will be shot to bits by his deliberate premature exit of the process.
I need to ask my therapist:
1. What support he has in place for me whilst I transition
to an new therapist after he has prematurely ended working with me
?
And
2. What new therapist is in place for when he goes?.
He seems to be resisting both questions whilst admitting his ending with me will be premature.
