The Whole World Disappeared

I have been reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD which is a fascinating look at trauma and PTSD through a neuroscience lens. The author was involved in the first PTSD studies through Harvard in the early 80s and he co-founded the National Child Traumatic Stress Network in 1999.

I am still processing a lot of the neuro aspects (boy does my frontal lobe needs some fine tuning), and I’m about to start reading the final section which guides you through the healing process. Before starting that final section, I’d like to share quoted excerpts about trauma and childhood sexual abuse that really stuck with me, to the point that I marked up a book for the first time in years. 

(As much as I would like to react to these quotes, that would take forever and would be quite draining. I think I should choose a few and write about them when I’m ready.) 

What has stuck with me the most? In the most simplistic terms, trauma basically rewires your brain, hormones, and often keeps you in a stunted state or constant adrenaline. It’s miserable and exhausting. It often slips through the cracks. Sometimes, it’s so dissociated to ensure daily familial protection that one doesn’t even remember it happened  

“Total memory loss is most common in childhood sexual abuse, with incidence ranging from 19% to 38%.” (192)

“Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies....The most natural way for human beings to calm themselves when they are upset is by clinging to another person. This means that patients who have been physically or sexually violated face a dilemma: They desperately crave touch while simultaneously being terrified of body contact. The mind needs to be re-educated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch.” (103)

“Our study showed that, on a deep level, the bodies of incest victims have trouble distinguishing between danger and safety. This means that the imprint of past trauma does not consist only of distorted perceptions of information coming from the outside; the organism itself also has a problem knowing how to feel safe. The past is impressed not only on their minds, and in misinterpretations of innocuous events, but also on the very core of their beings: in the safety of their bodies.” (129)

“Yet even though she’d drawn a girl who was being sexually molested, she - or at least her cognitive, verbal self - had no idea what had actually happened to her. Her immune system, her muscles, and her fear system all had kept the score, but her conscious mind lacked a story that could communicate the experience. She re-enacted the trauma in her life, but she had no narrative to refer to. (132)

“Our study also confirmed that there was a traumatized population quite distinct from the combat soldiers and accident victims for whom the PTSD diagnosis had been created....[people] do not necessarily remember  their traumas (one of the criteria for the PTSD diagnosis) or at least are not preoccupied with specific memories of their abuse, but they continue to behave as if they were still in danger. They go from one extreme to the other; they have trouble staying on task, and they continually lash out against themselves and others. To some degree their problems do overlap with those of combat soldiers, but they are also very different in that their childhood trauma has prevented them from developing some of the mental capacities that adult soldiers possessed before their traumas occurred.” (144)

(2 groups of 84 abused girls and 82 not abused girls studied over 20 years)  “Compared with girls of the same age, race, and social circumstances, sexually abused girls suffer from a large range of profoundly negative effects, including cognitive deficits, depression, dissociative symptoms, troubled sexual development, high rates of obesity, and self-mutilation. They dropped out of high school at a higher rate than the control group and had more major illnesses and health care utilization. They also showed abnormalities in their stress hormones responses, had an earlier onset of puberty, and accumulated a host of different, seemingly unrelated, psychiatric diagnoses.” (164)

“The sexually abused girls have a entirely different developmental pathway. They don’t have friends of either gender because they can’t trust; they hate themselves, and their biology is against them, leading them either to overreact or numb out. They can’t keep up in the normal-envy driven inclusion/exclusion games in which players have to stay cool under stress. Other kids usually don’t want anything to do with them - they simply are too weird. 

But that’s only the beginning of the trouble. The abused, isolated girls with incest histories mature sexually a year and a half earlier than the non abused girls. Sexual abuse speeds up their biological clocks and the secretion of sex hormones. Early in puberty, the abused girls had 3 to 5 times the levels of testosterone and androstenedione, the hormones that fuel sexual desire, as the girls in the control group.” (165)

And most infuriating of all....

“In 1974 Freedman and Kaplan’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry stated that ‘Incest is extremely rare and does not occur in more than 1 out of 1.1 million people. Such incestuous activity diminished the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world...The vast majority of them were none the worse for the experience.’” (190)