The great irony of all this is that I happen to be an educator and public presenter about the brain and self-regulation. So I actually know all this stuff. But experiencing it in the first person is a bit different.
I recently listened to an audio series by Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, author of 'Waking the Tiger', and an expert on trauma and helping people through it. In that series, he shared a story of experiencing trauma first hand (I think a car accident) and how he still fell into the trap of denial and avoidance, even though he knew what to do, and had taught and guided hundreds of other people through the same process. Which is to stay with the shock and allow the traumatic energy to discharge. Even with all that knowledge and teaching, he still wasn't able to apply it for his own trauma.
Intellectual learning can sometimes give the illusion of practical competency. But for other tasks we don't make the same assumption, like learning to drive, playing a sport, riding a bike, learning to swim, playing a musical instrument, etc. Intellectual understanding and knowledge is important in those activities, but hands on practice, and making lots of mistakes is the 'emotional learning' process to gain practical knowledge and skill, eventually reaching some level of basic mastery...
Daniel Goleman covers some theories about Trauma and Emotional Relearning in Chapter 13 of his book 'Emotional Intelligence'. There are excerpts from that chapter already shared in a prior thread titled "Intrusive Recollections and the Amygdala", excerpt from that thread:
Reeducating The Emotional Brain
One of the most encouraging findings about PTSD came from a study of Holocaust survivors, about three quarters of whom were found to have active PTSD symptoms even half a century later. The positive finding was that a quarter of the survivors who once had been troubled by such symptoms no longer had them; somehow the natural events of their lives had counteracted the problem. Those who still has the symptoms showed evidence of the catecholamine-related brain changes typical of PTSD - but those who had recovered has no such changes. This finding, and others like it, hold out the promise that the brain changes are not indelible, and that people can recover from even the most dire emotional imprinting - in short, that the emotional circuitry can be reeducated. The good news, then, is that traumas as profound as those causing PTSD can heal, and the route to such a healing is through relearning.
One way this emotional healing seems to occur spontaneously - at least in children - is through games (that replay the trauma... sometimes with happy endings). These games, played over and over again, let the children relive the trauma safely, as play. This allows two avenues for healing: on the one hand, the memory repeats in a context of low anxiety, desensitizing it and allowing a nontraumatized set of responses to become associated with it. Another rout to healing is that, in their minds, children can magically give the tragedy another, better outcome... boosting their sense of mastery over that traumatic moment of helplessness.
I find that Dan Siegel is better at breaking down complex psychological jargon into more lay person language, though even he can be too technical at times.
He did write a book titled "Healing Trauma" in 2003, but I don't have a copy, so can't comment much about it.
Born out of the excitement of a convergence of ideas and passions, this book, edited by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., and Marion Solomon, Ph.D., provides a synthesis of the work of researchers, clinicians, and theoreticians who are leaders in the field of trauma, attachment, and psychotherapy.
As we move into the third millennium, the field of mental health is in an exciting position to bring together diverse ideas from a range of disciplines that illuminate our understanding of human experience: neurobiology, developmental psychology, traumatology, and systems theory. The contributors emphasize the ways in which the social environment, including relationships of childhood, adulthood, and the treatment milieu change aspects of the structure of the brain and ultimately alter the mind.
However for complex trauma, he has done a lot of research within 'Attachment Styles' theory, and has stated that 'Disorganized Attachment' types are most likely to have grown up within an abusive or traumatic environment.
Disorganized Attachment:
When a parent or caregiver is abusive to a child, the child experiences the physical and emotional cruelty and frightening behavior as being life-threatening. This child is caught in a terrible dilemma: her survival instincts are telling her to flee to safety but safety is the very person who is terrifying her. The attachment figure is the source of the child’s distress. In these situations, children typically disassociate from their selves. They detach from what is happening to them and what they are experiencing is blocked from their consciousness. Children in this conflicted state have disorganized attachments with their fearsome parental figures.
-- source:
http://www.psychalive.org/what-is-your-attachment-style/
He describes how Disorganized Attachment can form in this video:
This video he goes into some depth about how emotional triggers work to activate a 'Low Road' vs. 'High Road' response when one 'flips their lid':
