Perhaps because I am getting older, I have been thinking about my life and the people that have influenced me to be what I have become. I have thought about my childhood and the influences that shaped my life.
My thoughts have been partly inspired by reading The Myth of Normality by Gabor Mate. It is a fascinating book, and he communicates the insights of Psychology in a way that is relatively easy to understand. The book is mostly about trauma and its consequences.
Trauma
I am not sure how useful the word trauma is because it has taken on such a broad range of meanings. Our English word comes from the Greek word for “wound”. Its use was originally limited to physical wounds. Surgeons use the word trauma to describe a person with multiple injuries from an accident, such as fractured bones and damaged organs.
Psychologists have extended the meaning of the word trauma to include emotional wounds. They see trauma as a deeply distressing and disturbing experience. Gabor Mate gives the following definition,
"Trauma" is an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events. By this definition, trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them; it is not the events themselves. "Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you" is how I formulate it. Think of a car accident where someone sustains a concussion: the accident is what happened; the injury is what lasts. Likewise, trauma is a psychic injury lodged in our nervous system, mind, and body, lasting long past the originating incident(s), triggerable at any moment.
Psychological trauma is what happens to the person, not the event that causes it.
Small-t Trauma
I have never experienced intense trauma of the type described above. However, Gabor Mate defines a different type of trauma that he says is ubiquitous.
There is another form of trauma—and this is the kind I am calling nearly universal in our culture—that has sometimes been termed "small-t trauma". I have often witnessed what long-lasting marks seemingly ordinary events—what a seminal researcher poignantly called the "less memorable but hurtful and far more prevalent misfortunes of childhood"—can leave on the psyches of children. These might include bullying by peers, the casual but repeated harsh comments of a well-meaning parent, or even a lack of sufficient emotional connection with their nurturing adults.
Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents. Trauma of this kind does not require overt distress or misfortune of the sort mentioned above and can also lead to the pain of disconnection from the self, occurring as a result of core needs not being satisfied (p.23).
As I think about my childhood and the experiences of other people that I know, this “small-t” trauma is far more common than we realise. And its effects often linger with us beyond childhood.
Response Flexibility
When an event affects us in a significant way, it is stamped more indelibly on our memory, if it is accompanied by intense emotions. For example, if the event causes us to feel strong fear, it will be stored in our memory in a way that is different from the more normal events that we remember. These memories do not fade away, but they remain at the top of our memory, ready to pop out when we experience a similar event or an associated emotion. This prompts us to take the same action as we did the first time, even if we know it was wrong.
Gabor Mate describes the way that trauma affects our behaviour.
Before the mind can create the world, the world creates our minds. Trauma, especially severe trauma, imposes a worldview tinged with pain, fear, and suspicion: a lens that both distorts and determines our view of how things are. Or it may, through the sheer force of denial, engender a naively rosy perspective that blinds us to real and present dangers—a veneer concealing fears we dare not acknowledge. One may also come to dismiss painful realities by habitually lying to oneself and others.
Gabor Mate says that trauma disrupts the development of “response flexibility”,
...the ability to choose how we address life's inevitable ups and downs, its disappointments, triumphs, and challenges... Response flexibility is a function of the mid-frontal portion of our cerebral cortex. No infant is born with any such capacity: babies’ behaviour is governed by instinct and reflex, not conscious selection.
We learn response flexibility as we grow through childhood.
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight, " wrote the psychologist Rollo May. " Trauma robs us of that freedom.
The intensity of a disturbing memory means that when we encounter a similar situation and experience the same emotion again, the memory pops out and causes us to behave in a similar way to the way we responded the first time. If we have similar experiences and emotional responses quite a few times, the behaviour becomes a habit. Experiencing the intense emotion again triggers the learned response. Gabor Mate writes,
Our memories show up every day in our relationship to ourselves and others, if we only know how to recognize them. Every time we are triggered—which is to say, caught up suddenly in an unwanted puzzlingly overwrought emotional reaction that is the past showing up: an echo of our childhood as we actually experienced it.
The intensity of the emotion attached to the experience means that we often behave in the same way when we experience that emotion again, even if we know that our response was wrong.
Memory, Emotions and Behaviour
Gabor Mate explains something important about the way our memory works.
“For efficiency, the brain is designed to form clusters in our neurophysiology and mind—connections among certain memories, emotions, ways of perceiving the world, and behaviours—which stay together as internal units that can be activated when needed”.
I created the following diagram to illustrate what Gabor Mate is explaining.
In our memory (shaded circle), we often cluster events, perceptions, feelings and behaviours together.
Our perceptions and thoughts about an event influence our behaviour, but they are not always remembered clearly.
Our emotions/feelings often dominate the memory (over our rational thoughts). Strong feelings (particularly negative ones like fear, shame or anger) give the event a stronghold in our memory. If there are no strong emotions during the event, it will go into a weaker place in memory and will be quickly forgotten.
Our behaviour/actions will often be motivated by the emotions we feel. The more intense the emotion, the stronger will be the response/behaviour. That is good if we need to respond powerfully, but it can also cripple us.
In response to intense emotional events, we often make decisions/vows about what we will do in the future, eg “I will never do that again” or “I will never speak honestly to my father again”. We are often not always aware that we have made these decisions, and they do not always go into our memory with the event, but these vows significantly constrain our future behaviour.
Strong emotions will automatically produce the same behaviour during subsequent events, even if the situation is different. A powerful feeling prompts the behaviour that is clustered with it in our memory.
My Experience
I had a very happy childhood. Growing up on a farm in New Zealand was an idyllic experience. We had a huge area in which to play games, build roads and bridges, and ride bikes. The river that ran past our house was wonderful for swimming in the summer and launching rafts and boats during the winter. A hill beside our house was great for riding down at high speed on bikes and the various wooden carts that we had built. We had to help with farm work from time to time, but took pleasure in contributing to something important (apart from shifting “stake and netting fences”, a task which I hated).
I belonged to a large family and attended a small school where I always felt safe and respected. Yet despite this happy childhood, I remember intensely a few childhood experiences that did shape my life.
Fear
When I come under pressure in a situation outside my normal experience, I often feel an intense fear (not panic), that makes it difficult for me to act. Over the years, I have learnt to deal with it, but I can still remember the first time I felt it.
Until I reached seven years of age, our house did not have an internal flush toilet. We had to go out through a wooden gate and down an earthen path to a little shed in the trees about fifteen meters from the back door. We referred to the area of trees and undergrowth beside a small creek as “The Jungle”. The outhouse stunk during the day and was dark and gloomy at night.
When I was about five years old, I woke in the night with my bowels needing to move. When I called for help, Dad responded. That was unusual because Mum usually got up to us when we needed help in the night. Maybe she was tired or unwell, but I never knew.
Dad called this area “The Jungle” because it was a jungle of weeds and rubbish and big old pine trees. I grew up loving a book with stories about wild animals, so for me, “the jungle” was a scary place where children got lost and young animals were frequently killed by dangerous animals.
Dad took me out into the outhouse in the jungle. He came with me, but I was absolutely petrified. I was so afraid that it took me ages to do what I needed to do, but I was so shut down that I could not say anything. The intense fear that I felt remained real for all of my childhood and my early adult years.
In addition to the fear, another thing happened. When I pondered the experience, I believed that if Mum had responded to my call, she would not have made me go out into the jungle. She would have found a different solution. I assumed that Dad did not understand my needs, so I resolved that if I was in trouble, I would not ask him for help (more on this later).
Dad’s Perspective
Telling the story from my childhood perspective makes it sound like a terrible thing to do to a child, but now, as an adult, I see it differently. Dad remained outside the outhouse, the entire time, watching over me to keep me safe. I didn’t realise it, but my fears were unjustified.
Dad had had a tough childhood, so he didn’t want us to grow up soft. He wanted us to learn how to deal with difficult situations. He wanted us to grow up with the ability to face tough problems without being defeated. This was a gift to me, although I did not realise it back then.
I now realise that Dad had no conception of the fear that I felt. He had grown up in the dark, so he was not concerned by darkness. There was no electricity in the district until he was an adult, so darkness was the norm during his childhood. If they had to go outside at night to attend to animals or feed the horses, they could light a lamp, but this was a fiddly task, so if there was a bit of moonlight, they would not bother. In the house, they mostly used candles, but parents did not like children taking candles into bedrooms due to the fire risk, so they would mostly go to bed in the dark.
Given his experience during childhood, Dad was totally unaware of the fears of the night that I felt, having grown up with electric light being normal.
Again
I remember feeling that intense fear again several times during my childhood when I was placed in a situation where I did not know what to do. In each case, the fear was so strong that I was frozen and could not take any action.
When I was in my first year of high school, I biked to a sports event at Ashbury Park in Timaru, where I was at school. When I put my bike in a bike stand, I inadvertently knocked over a bike that was parked next to mine. Three older boys came and growled at me for damaging their bike. All I could do was lie and claim that I had not touched the older boy’s bike, which was a bit stupid because it was obvious that I had.
After making me stand the bike up again, they disappeared. For them, it was a trivial incident, but I remember feeling the same fear that I had first experienced when I was five years old. (And I picked up the habit of lying to get out of trouble when I was afraid).
Independence
My mother had six children, so her life was very busy. Dad was busy with farm work, so she did most of the child-raising. She had to cater for shearers and other people who came to work on the farm. Mum was also busy with many community and church activities in the district where we lived. When I was about nine or ten, I became aware of how busy Mum was, and how much responsibility Dad put on her.
One day when I saw Dad dumping one of his problems on her, I decided it was wrong. I could not change what he did, so I resolved that I would not unload any of my problems onto Mum, but would manage them myself. This chosen independence affected me later in life.
I understand the situation that Mum and Dad faced better now. Dad was dealing with a terrible depression that crippled him and made it hard for him to work. He had experienced terrible (real) trauma as a young boy, so it was not surprising that he had emotional issues to deal with. (Later, he received an amazing healing and was set free from depression).
I did not realise that Mum was glad to take on an extra burden to help him through his time of trouble, while protecting her children. I did not have a clue about what was really going on, and would have thought differently if I had.
When I was old enough to go to high school, I was sent to a boarding school in Timaru so that I could get a better education. Unfortunately, I hated life at the boarding school (more on this below). However, perhaps due to my unspoken vows, I could not say anything to Mum or Dad. For the entire three years that I attended the school, I remained silent about my concerns and fears.
Later when I had left school and was working on the farm with my father, I came to realise that I did not enjoy the farming life, and did not want to be a farmer. It took me about a year to pluck up the coverage to tell Mum and Dad. Unfortunately, by then, I was deeply embedded in the business, and it was more difficult to get out. I could not tell my parents what I felt until I was desperate. I believe this inability to speak was partly due to the vow I made during my childhood.
Lack of Emotional Support
When I read Gabor Mate’s argument that even people who claim to have had a happy childhood might still have experienced traumatic experiences of the “small-t” type, it rang a bell for me. He has a question that he poses to clients and participants who claim to have had a happy childhood, but are confronting chronic illness, emotional distress, addiction, or struggles to be authentic.
When I felt sad, unhappy, angry, confused, bewildered, lonely, bullied, who did I speak to? Who did I tell? Who could I confide in? Notice your answer, and also your feelings around it”. If the answer is "No one”, an early disconnect was surely at play.
He says that if we cannot remember the presence of a consistently available adult, then something is seriously deficient in our childhood experience. Gabor Mate argues that the absence of emotional support from a person who they trusted to nurture them during a troubling experience can be debilitating for a developing child. I presume that I experienced that in a minor way.
Boarding School
Boarding school was an odd place for a young person to live. A small group of popular boys really enjoyed it (it is hard to say what made them popular). Another group of boys really hated it because they were bullied intensely; usually because they were a bit different. I was in the large middle group who got by without being noticed. However, I understood how easy it was for a boy to drop into the bottom group, so the middle group was a precarious place to be.
The bullying was mostly low-level. Verbal insults were frequent. Sometimes when you went to bed and night, you would find that someone had put leaves or branches in your bed. Occasionally, an older boy would thump you on the shoulder while you were waiting in line to enter the dining room. I was good with words, so I probably deserved some of the stuff that happened when I was smart to bigger boys.
I coped with life by taking refuge in the school library and spending all my free time there. I loved reading and found an endless supply of good books to read. The “tough boys” did not go near the library, because they were scared of books, so it was a really safe to be. However, by escaping in this way, I probably cut myself off from other people and became a bit of a recluse.
This isolation was extenuated when I spent the next five years working on our farm. Most days, I would be working with sheep or driving a tractor, so on many days, I would not talk to anyone other than my family. Later, studying at university, I was also quite isolated, as I was three or four years older than most of the other students.
At primary school, I was comfortable talking to people, but during the next ten years of relative isolation, I lost that skill. I found it particularly hard talking to girls. During my three years at an all-boys school, the girls that I knew well at primary school had changed into different people.
I presume this learned inability to connect with people was one reason why I struggled to be a pastor. It was not until I started work in a statistical office and was given the responsibility of leading a team that I redeveloped my natural skill at talking to people.
Strategic Survival
I recently heard Nick Duffell talk about Boarding Schools and Strategic Survival Personality. He was explaining how many politicians like Boris Johnston lost their empathy by being sent to Eton at the age of 8 or 9. His talk rang a bell with me. I took the following notes
When a boy goes to boarding school, his relationships with parents, siblings and friends are broken.
He leaves a place of safety,
a cocoon of peace
and is forced to be independent.
He develops a pseudo-self-sufficiency.
He makes all decisions, and solves all problems himself.
I made decisions about subjects to study, joined the pipe band, and dealt with a creepy piano teacher without talking to my parent.Boarding school is a precarious place.
You never know when bullies will hit.
They are insecure, so they find a place by striking out at those who are weak.The way to be safe
is to be untouchable.
Boys learn quickly not to show any vulnerability;
don’t show any weakness;
don’t show any vulnerability;
don’t show any anger,
because that encourages the bullies.
Don’t let them know that they have got at you.
Shut down your emotions.I put a hard shell around my heart.
(That is probably why my heart bangs now).Many lose any ability to have empathy,
which makes them bad leaders.
(this did not happen to me because I found an escape).I escaped to the library.
I read book after book after book.
Bullies never went there,
so the library was my safe place.Friendships at boarding school are shallow
but there is safety in numbers.
I had three friends.
We walked to class and assemblies together
waited in line for meals together
because it kept us safe (that was unspoken).
But we never shared our fears, or our dreams,
because that would be too risky)
so my friendships did not last beyond school.
Duffell put survivors into three categories.
Compliers – they say that boarding school was the best years of their lives. The self-sufficiency and emotional detachment got them to where they are, so they will not criticise the place that gave it to them.
Crushed – Some children are badly damaged. They were often emotionally or physically abused.
Rebels – They tend to become anti-establishment.
I think that I fall into the rebel category. I never accepted the authority of the housemasters and prefects, because I did not respect them. I am not sure how much anti-establishment baggage I still carry.
Small T
Going back to Gabor Mate, I would say that most of this was Small –T stuff. I never experienced any real trauma when I was growing up. Looking back, I remember a happy childhood, and I have few regrets about it. I don’t judge my parents for their actions; I just want to understand myself better.
Some of the events described above had a deep effect on my life and contributed to me being the person that I am. The hardest one to deal with was the fear. I was well into adulthood before I could shake that one off.
What Gabor Mate explains has a wider application, especially for Christians. In the following sections, I will explain his suggestions for escaping our past.
Growing Up
Paul said that when he was a child, he thought and behaved like a child.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me (1 Cor 13:11).
When he had grown to adulthood, Paul stopped thinking and acting like a child.
Two changes should occur when we become adults.
Our understanding of the world in which we live will become more realistic. We should attempt to eliminate distorted thinking about events we have experienced and learn to see the world more accurately.
The way we respond to events should change too. Children have very few options in times of stress. Adults can learn to respond to traumatic events in a range of different and better ways.
1) Understanding
Children often have a flawed understanding of their world because they misunderstand the behaviour of the people around them. They have strong expectations of the people who are supposed to love them, so they are disappointed if they don’t receive the love they presume that they are entitled to receive. When they are the victims of traumatic experiences, they do not understand why people around them do what they do.
A child tends to assume that they are wrong and that the other person is right. Sensitive children who experience trauma usually assume that it is because they are bad. This perspective is usually incorrect. It is more likely that the fault rests with the person whose behaviour produced the trauma. Gabor Mate explains,
When a young person’s universe is in turmoil, there are two working theories the child could adopt. One is that her little world is terribly awry and misshapen, her parents incapable or unwilling to love and care. In other words, she is unsafe. The other, which wins out virtually every time, is that she—the child—is flawed. It is her fault.
Children are the centre of their own world. They don’t understand the motivations and reactions of other people. They see the world from their perspective, so if something bad happens, they assume that they have caused it. They blame themselves and take on shame. In contrast, adults understand that the fault usually lies with the people who created the turmoil.
When the child grows to adulthood, they will usually develop a broader and more realistic understanding of their childhood experiences and the people that hurt them. If the child is a Christian, they will also discover the influence of characters in the spiritual realm on harmful events.
If they were let down by their parents, as an adult, they might gain a greater understanding of the pressures that their parents were living under. The parents might have experienced crippling trauma when they were growing up. They might have been going through a very hard time that they could not tell their children about. They might be under attack by the spiritual powers of evil. These things might explain why the parents were not as supportive as the child expected. I understand my parents' situation far better now than I did when I was growing up.
If parents or siblings tended to dominate and control them, they will realise when they have grown up that the person who controlled them also had serious problems. They might have had a parent who dominated them too.
An adult might realise that this person needed to control all the people around them, because they did not trust God to work out his purposes for their life. This is a scary place for anyone to be. Looking back, the victim of control might have some sympathy for the person stuck in a place where they did not trust God, while not condoning their controlling behaviour.
An adult might come to realise that the person who caused them grief was being harassed by another person. They might have been attacked by evil spirits. None of these are excuses for the behaviour that caused trauma, but they might help an adult to a better understanding of events they experienced as a child.
Common misunderstandings of life often persist from childhood into adulthood. Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn provide a partial list of Common Cognitive Distortions in their book Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (2012). Many of these were learned during childhood.
Fortune-telling. You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”
Catastrophizing. You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
Labelling. You assign global negative traits to yourself. “I’m undesirable,” or “I am a rotten person.”
Discounting positives. You claim that the positive things you do are trivial.
Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me.” “I always fail.” “I always get the blame”.
Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality, when your emotions only tell you about how you are feeling about that reality.
Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts.
They suggest that when we notice ourselves falling into wrong thinking about events that we are experiencing, we should carefully describe the facts of the situation and consider alternative interpretations and choose one more in line with those facts. They say that our emotions will follow the new interpretation, and in time, this process will become automatic.
2. Adult Responses
Very small children have very little control over their lives. Older children gain more freedom, but they are still constrained by their parents, siblings, teachers, schoolmates and leaders in the various groups to which they belong. We can unwittingly carry these constraints over into adulthood if we don’t understand how they influence us. An important aspect of becoming an adult is making decisions in terms of our current situation, rather than remaining constrained by limits placed upon us in our childhood.
Many of the constraints that were placed on us by parents and teachers were good, but we need to internalise them and make them our own. If some of the constraints they placed on us were wrong, we need to deliberately shake them off, and not feel bound by them. Assessing what we have been taught and deciding what aspects of it we will continue to observe and what parts we will reject is an important part of growing up.
The goal is to gain control of our lives, rather than being pushed around by events, or behaviours we picked during our childhood. Greg Filipovic writes,
Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life—to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean—are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.
In the 1950s, Julian Rotter explained that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.
Looking Back as Adults
We can review the significant and repeated events from our childhood, along with the emotions associated with them in our memory, in light of who we have become. The diagram explained above can help us respond to our growing awareness. Every aspect of an event will need to be reassessed.
Thoughts/Perspective
How do we feel about the event now, looking from an adult perspective, or having become a Christian?
We should ponder whether our thoughts and perceptions of the event were correct. As noted above, the perception of a child will usually be incomplete, or wrong. If an event was traumatic, then a child’s perception of the event was almost certainly incorrect. The other person was almost certainly wrong in their behaviour. The people who should have protected them might also have been at fault. If we review the event from an adult/Christian perspective, our perception of what happened will likely differ.
We might need to ask God how he understood the event. Then, ideally, we should modify our perception of the event to align with how he saw it. I realise now that I was safe while sitting in the dark in the “The Jungle” because God was looking after me. His Holy Spirit was there with me, even though I did not discern his presence.
Emotions/Feelings
We can also review our emotional response in light of who we are now. An emotion is never right or wrong. It was what it was. However, we can think about what our emotional response would be to a similar event now, especially with a different perspective on what was happening. We might realise that we are now a different person and that our emotional response would be different too.
We might need to ask God to remove the emotional response from our memory, because we want to respond differently now. Having a memory of our emotional response is different from having the actual emotion in our memory ready to pop out again when triggered. For example, remembering that I was angry at the time differs from still feeling angry when I think of the event.
In this consideration, we should remember that emotions are not right or wrong. They are just a reflection of how events are affecting us.
Actions/Behaviours
We can review the behaviour that the event and our emotional response to it produced. We should understand that a child’s response will always be self-protective, so this means that it is never wrong. It was the right thing to do at the time if it kept the child safe, even if an adult might think the child should have behaved differently. Gabor Mate explains,
Everything within us, no matter how distressing, exists for a purpose; no matter how troublesome and debilitating it may be. The truth is, these disturbers of our peace have always been friends, strange though it may sound. Their origins were protective and beneficent and that remains their current aim, even when they seem to go about it in a misguided way. I call them stupid friends.
If the child believes that an action was necessary to keep themselves safe, (even if that was not strictly true), they have no choice but to act according to their perception of what was happening. Therefore, what they did was not wrong. For example, suppose an adult told the child at the time that their outburst was terrible. The adult is mistaken because every child is entitled to do what they think will keep themselves safe (even if they responded with an emotional overreaction).
We should reflect on how we would behave in response to a similar event now, or how we should respond now that we have more wisdom than we had as a child. Possibly a different response would be wiser. It might involve speaking up about our perspective on the event and challenging the other person's actions.
Of course, it is not always safe to speak up, even when we are mature adults. If the relationships have not changed, remaining silent might still be safer. However, we should understand that choosing to stay silent to keep the peace is quite different, and far better than keeping silent because we believe that we don’t have the right to speak. The former is a proactive response by a person who understands the situation, whereas the latter devalues us as a person.
Even if the understanding/perception of the child was correct, their behaviour might have been inappropriate. However, a child is not responsible for solving every problem that they face. Parents are usually responsible for resolving serious issues between siblings. If they fail to do that, the responsibility should not be dumped on a sensitive child.
We might need to ask God to break the link between the emotion and the behaviour so that the feeling does not always trigger the behaviour. The ideal outcome is that we can act on that particular emotion with various responses depending on the event.
Decisions
We can review carefully any decisions that we have made. If we have vowed not to do something, that is constraining our behaviour unnecessarily. We should agree with God that we are not bound by the vow that we made when we were in a stressful situation that we did not fully understand. He will set us free from it.