You are not an a**hole… when responding to trauma
Part Two: But your hardwired responses may make you seem like one
I sat on the couch in my living room with my phone on the coffee table in front of me. I clicked the home button for the third time in the past minute, waiting for the time to change from 11:59 am to 12:00 noon. It was time.
I dialed her number. After three rings, she answered. I said hello.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“You know what?” She paused.
“I don’t know how I feel…I know that I’m not okay.”
Inside my head my little hardwired warrior was shouting, “Tell her she’ll get through it!” “Tell her she’ll have learned so much from this experience!” “Tell her that it will make her stronger in the end!”
Instead I said nothing. I let the silence settle between us, seeing if there was more she’d like to share with me.
“What I do know is that I’m still here.”
I searched my mind for what to say.
“Yes, you are. You are still here,” I paused. “Sometimes that’s all we can be.”
“Mhm,” she agreed. “You’re absolutely right.”
We sat in the silence of recognition together. I heard her take a deep breath through the phone pressed to my ear.
“Sometimes it is.”
I volunteer as a crisis counselor for survivors of sexual assault. When someone presents at an emergency department, my organization is paged by the nurse and one of us is always on call to show up. We advocate for and support the survivor as they go through the process of being cared for in that initial visit.
After our time together in the hospital, they have the option of getting a follow up call from the advocate who was with them. The survivor and I agree on a day and time to check in and see how they are doing.
This call took place on a sunny summer Tuesday after one of my shifts.
Now let’s be clear, I don’t share this story to say, “Ta-da look at me! I am so great at having hard conversations!”
Not at all.
Even though I have training in how to respond to trauma, everything is different in the moment. I still need to actively engage with my internal emotions before I am able to respond in a way that acknowledges the survivor’s pain with care and support.
We all do.
So, why is responding trauma one of the harder emotional skills to develop?
Because it actually requires you to go around a hardwired response coded within you.
We’ve inherited innate subconscious programming from our ancestors that is meant to protect us in times of trial.
But as we evolve and our needs as humans and a society changes, these responses built to be beneficial to your survival, can instead hinder you rather than help.
“Fight or flight” responses are best known in the context of physical danger, but are just as applicable to what we perceive as “emotional danger” as well.
When it comes to responding to sexual assault, there are three responses that are proven to be very dangerous to a survivor’s healing:
- Blaming
- Minimizing
- Denying.
These responses happen as often as they do because they are each directly linked to a “fight or flight” emotional reflex within us. Being out of control and feeling acute emotional pain are two situations your internal wiring rejects. But when it comes to trauma, this reflex inhibits your ability to respond in a way that is helpful.
The Fight Response
Let’s start with the emotional “fight response” which gets activated by the feeling of being out of control. This response leads to blaming the survivor during disclosure conversations.
Life is chaos. This is an uncomfortable truth. For you to get through your day, your mind helps you navigate this world by fostering the belief that there is actually order in your life, and that you are in control.
Sexual assault is so inherently triggering for this exact reason. Hearing from a person you love that something terrible and completely out of their control has happened to them is a reminder that you also are not in control.
During a disclosure conversation, that vail of illusion is lifted, uncovering a chaotic truth that your mind continuously fights against.
So, your go into high alert.
You start firing off questions.
“Why did you go to that party?”
“Why did you drink?”
“Why did you talk to them?”
Your mind wants to find some detail that it can hold onto, some element of the survivor’s story that they had control over. Something that would allow you to feel assured that you could have had control over this same experience, and that such trauma could never happen to you.
Subconsciously, it allows you to justify the situation: “Okay. I don’t go to those parties.” Or, “I don’t drink that much.” You know that this has nothing to do with what actually occurred, but the reflexive response takes over.
We all fall victim to something known as the “Just World Phenomenon.” We want to believe that the world is Just, and that bad things can’t happen to good people. Because the people we care about don’t “deserve” to be assaulted, there has to be some other reason it happened.
By blaming the victim, our mind finds a way to make them responsible for the experience, to give them control over what happened so that we can keep believing in our own illusion of personal control.
But the truth is, we have no control. Our lives can be turned upside-down at any moment. One interaction. One phone call. One night can change everything. (Am I making you anxious? I’m making myself anxious, so I’m right there with you).
No amount of mental gymnastics will change that.
The Flight Response
The emotional “flight response” gets activated by our feeling acute pain, and manifests in two harmful ways during a disclosure conversation, minimizing and denying.
Minimizing most commonly looks like the “band-aid” approach to responding to someone in pain.
“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”
“You’ll look back at this in a few months and it won’t feel like such a big deal.”
“You should be over this by now.”
This is what I like to call the “emotional-jog version” of the flight response to pain. You try to sit with the pain, but still find ways to slowly distance yourself from it.
If your tolerance for emotional pain is low the day, the week or the year when your loved one opens up to you, you may just outright deny that the assault happened to them at all.
This is the “all-out-sprint version” of the flight response, not sitting in the pain even momentarily before attempting to run from it.
Sexual assault disclosures are triggering to you when it comes to pain for two reasons:
On the most basic level, feeling pain is unpleasant. We are hardwired to avoid feeling pain for any amount of time. So, we try to find ways to minimize it. But the person who is sharing this with you will keep experiencing pain regardless of how hard you try to shut it down.
Your minimizing response doesn’t do anything for them.
It’s only for you.
Secondly, pain related to trauma sparks another one of those uncomfortable truths about life. There is a particular kind of pain that exists in this world that that can be terrifyingly all-encompassing, a pain that offers up no expiration date.
The more painful we experience something to be, the faster we run from it, and the more adamantly we deny its existence.
To acknowledge that trauma exists exposes us to the uncomfortable depth of human’s capacity for pain, which can feel overwhelming and endless.
Use Your Fear as Fuel
Now that I have successfully bummed you out, let’s put a positive spin on this.
You have unconscious and human responses that, gone unchecked, can cause a lot of pain to others.
No matter how much you love the person who is sharing this information with you, your hardwired response may get the best of you.
But that doesn’t mean you are a bad person.
You aren’t.
The magic happens when you acknowledge these innate truths about yourself, your responses and the world we live in. You begin to understand why you think this way, or want to say these things and slowly, the power of those feelings and reactions lose their hold on you.
When you can, in real time, say to yourself, “Wow this is so hard to be hearing. I can feel in my mind and my body the urge to push it away by saying something to minimize the pain and I know that response is old and unconscious and wouldn’t actually be helpful in this situation.” Then, you can begin to respond differently.
That internal dialogue can take place in less than five seconds. And with it, you can look bravely at the person in front of you and respond in a way that is truly helpful.
A response that is helpful may be uncomfortable, and to allow a wound to be left open may not make a lot of sense at first. But as long as germs (other people’s bad responses) aren’t getting in, that is what allows trauma to heal over time.
Naming in your response — the hardwired fear you are experiencing — is the secret sauce to learning how to override those reflexes within you.
Instead of acting on your fight response (blaming to reassert a sense of control), you could say, “This experience that happened to you was completely out of your control. You didn’t do anything to deserve it and it still happened to you. That must be really painful and scary.”
Instead of acting on your flight response (minimizing or denying to distance yourself from pain), you could say, “I wish there was something I could do to take away this pain you’re in, but I can’t. So instead I am going to sit with you in this pain for as long as you need.”
Our initial responses may always be the one that shouldn’t be acted upon or put into words.
And that’s okay.
Free yourself from the false expectation that responding well to trauma should just be intuitive and easily accessed.
Be patient as you show up for something that is hard for all of us to do.
While these conversations challenge us to contradict some of our hardwired reflexes, in return, they open the space for a different hardwired need to be met; the yearning we all share to feel seen, connected, and heard.
Interested in an interactive exploration into trauma responses and disclosure? Empowered Conversation is now offering corporate trainings. If you would like to learn more, email training@empoweredconversation.com
