The ACOA Trauma Syndrome

by Tian Dayton, Ph. D.

  Avoidance/Tendency to Isolate

  People who have been traumatized may avoid feelings that threaten them. Because they fear re-experiencing feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, rejection, or rage, they feel safer avoiding the kinds of honest exchanges that might be part of intimacy with themselves and others. They reason that by avoiding honest and authentic connection they will avoid being hurt, and so they isolate or significantly limit direct honesty. They avoid parts of themselves and parts of relational closeness (van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisauth 1996). Unfortunately social connectedness, though natural to our species, still needs to be learned and practiced. The more we isolate, the more out of practice we become at making connections with people, which can further isolate us. Support groups like 12-step programs are a godsend for those who fear direct connection as they do not require a formal “joining” and do not insist that people play a particular role. You are as welcome in the rooms as any other person in them and can participate at whatever level you choose.

  Shame

  Shame is a natural response to feeling that one is somehow in the wrong. Darwin observed it as a part of all cultures, both primitive and advanced, and one can identify it even in animals. For the person growing up in an addicted environment, shame becomes not so much a feeling that is experienced in relation to an incident or a situation—as is the case with guilt—but rather a basic attitude toward and about the self: “I am bad” as opposed to “I did something bad” (Bradshaw 2005). Shame can also be a condition imposed culturally from without or by living in a family that does not accept who you are as an individual or is ashamed of itself within the larger community. Shame can be experienced as a lack of energy for life, an inability to accept love and caring on a consistent basis, or as a hesitancy to move into self-affirming roles. It may play out as impulsive decision-making or an inability to make decisions at all (T. Dayton 2007).

  Loss of Trust and Faith

  When our personal world and the relationships within it become very unpredictable or unreliable, we may experience a loss of trust and faith (van der Kolk 1985) in both relationships and in life’s ability to repair and renew itself. This is why the restoration of hope is so important in recovery (Yalom 1980). It is also underscores why having a spiritual belief system, such as that in 12-step programs or faith-based affiliations, can be so helpful in personal healing and in restoring a sense of belonging to a community where one can easily access support and friendship. Having a spiritual belief system can play an important role in personal healing by providing both hope and a sense of security despite any ongoing familial and intrapsychic chaos. It can also help the person in pain to reframe suffering and give it positive meaning, which develops resilience. A spiritual belief system can put pain in perspective and give it meaning and purpose (T. Dayton 2007).

  Distorted Reasoning

  Watching someone we love slowly become someone we cannot make sense of can shake us to the core. It can be disturbing, humiliating, and frightening. Family members may twist or distort their own reasoning in order to make this destabilizing experience easier to manage or less “real.” Distorted reasoning can become intergenerational as children absorb, model, and live out their parent’s way of thinking about and handling distressing situations, and it can affect the health of relationships. Denial of someone’s behavior—for example, a distortion of the truth—is excessive minimization or rationalization. When we attempt to make distorted behavior seem somehow normal, we have to twist our own thinking to do so. Also, as children we make sense of situations with the developmental equipment we have at any given age; when we’re young, we either borrow the reasoning of the adults around us or make our own childlike meaning.

  Survivor’s Guilt

  The ACoA who “gets out” of an unhealthy family system while others remain mired within it may experience what is referred to as “survivor’s guilt” (T. Dayton 2000; Lifton 1986). This is a condition wherein a person may see himself as having done something wrong by thriving when others were less able to. Survivor’s guilt can lead to self-sabotage or becoming overly preoccupied with fixing one’s family. ACoAs may seesaw between wanting to cut off their family—because being close makes them feel that they are sliding “backward”—and wishing to reconnect with their family so they do not have to tolerate their painful feelings of separateness and guilt. Over time, ACoAs need to learn what children who grew up in healthy families learned: how to be separate and stay connected in ways that allow them to maintain an autonomous sense of self.

  Complicating survival guilt can be families who are still “in their disease” and who may feel threatened by those who are blowing the whistle. These family members may collude in blaming the whistle-blower, seeing that person as problematic or disloyal and even marginalizing or rejecting him or her. In this case, the ACoA benefits from creating strong bonds with other family systems, friends, and 12-step or healing ­communities.

  Conflated Inner Imagery/Fused Feelings/

  Behavior and Boundary Issues

  Traumatic imagery and the feelings associated with them become conflated in our inner minds. Layer upon layer of experience and emotion from a variety of incidents and sources fuse together and become a well of stored, trauma-related experience that can get triggered when we are in range of something that is reminiscent of what hurt us or a relational cue that stimulates those memories. This type of conflated inner material can become sticky, leaky, and hard to “hold.” Our inner boundaries around it can therefore become shaky and tenuous. Fused and conflated imagery and feelings can contribute to the emotional enmeshment that is so common with codependency when we have a hard time distinguishing our inner world from someone else’s (van der Kolk 1987).

  Feelings and imagery can get fused together along with behaviors in the mind/body when the emotional heat of trauma has helped to sear them together. For example, closeness can get fused with compliance, caring with control, love with fear, or sex with submission or rage.

  Inability to Receive Caring and Support from Others

  The numbing and the emotional constriction that are a natural part of the trauma response may influence our ability to take in care and support from others. Taking and giving support requires a level of trust and safety within the family system that trauma erodes. Also, fear sets in. We reason “What if I let support feel good? Then it will hurt all the more if and when it disappears again.” So we push it away. And in dysfunctional families support can feel out of sync, because it is based on another person’s needs rather than our own.

  High-Risk Behaviors. Adrenaline is highly addictive to the brain and may act as a powerful mood enhancer. Speeding, sexual acting out, spending, fighting, drugging, working too hard, or other behaviors done in a way that put one at risk are some examples of high-risk behavior. Also, trauma can engender a flattened, emotional world. High-risk behaviors can be seen as an attempt to jump-start a numbed inner world by overstimulating the nervous system and body through excitation (van der Kolk 1987, T. Dayton 2007).

  Traumatic Bonding

  As the family members’ fear increases, so does their need for protective bonds, because as the victim’s dependency grows through abuse, so does his or her need for perceived protection. The intensity and quality of connectedness in families that contain repeated painful interactive patterns can create the types of bonds that people tend to form during times of crisis, referred to as traumatic bonds (Carnes 1997).

  Alliances in dysfunctional families may become very critical to one’s sense of self and even to one’s survival. One parent may co-opt a child and form a bond against the other parent. Additionally, children who are feeling hurt and needy and who lose access to their parents as a source of reliable support may turn to each other to fill in the missing sense of security. This can develop into a traumatic sort of bond among siblings. Traumatic bonds formed in childhood tend to repeat their quali
ty and content over and over again throughout life (T. Dayton 2007).

  One can feel subjected by another person in a trauma bond and lose his sense of autonomy and personal choice. The nature of the victim/aggressor relationship can mean that one person consistently bends to the will of another and feels that he must simply go along with what the more aggressive, powerful, or older person expects of him. In this kind of bond, saying no can feel impossible, and setting boundaries can feel somewhat unthinkable. There can also be a feeling that one has to be loyal and protective of the abuser or the “other” no matter what, secrets must be kept, and if there is abuse, it cannot be talked about.

  Rigid Psychological Defenses

  People who are consistently wounded emotionally and are not able to openly and honestly address or process what’s hurting them may develop rigid psychological defenses to manage or ward off pain. Examples of such defenses include:

  • dissociation (remaining physically present but inwardly absent)

  • denial (rewriting reality to be more palatable)

  • splitting (seeing life and people as alternately all good or all bad)

  • repression (pushing feelings down out of consciousness)

  • minimization (minimizing the impact of situations or behavior)

  • intellectualization (using thinking to rationalize and analyze in order to avoid feeling)

  • projection (disowning one’s own pain by projecting it outwardly)

  • transference (transferring old pain into new relationships)

  • reenactment patterns (continually re-creating dysfunctional patterns of relating whether or not they prove successful or healthy)

  Repetition Compulsion/Cycles of Reenactment

  Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which we repeat the emotional, psychological, or behavioral aspects of a traumatic event over and over again without awareness, re-creating pain from yesterday in relationships and circumstances of today (Freud 1922). Partnering and parenting are particularly common ways of passing on this type of pain, as those relationships so closely mirror the family dynamics in which we may have modeled behaviors. Cycles of reenactment can take the form of repeatedly re-creating or reenacting the painful, warded off, or feared contents of the traumatic relationship dynamics, or putting oneself in situations where the

  dysfunctional dynamics or similar events are likely to happen again. For example, a man whose mother was an alcoholic may continually project onto his wife the disappointment and mistrust that he “warded off” experiencing toward his mother, being suspicious of her and expecting her to disappoint him.

  The characteristics of relationship trauma we have discussed in the last chapters are those that CoAs learn by modeling ­family behavior and internalizing as their own. When they become ACoAs, these characteristics influence how they create and settle into their own adult lives and relationships. Luckily this story is not one-sided, as ACoAs also learn powerful skills of resilience and can be very ingenious and purposeful people as a way of mending and making sense of their past. Breaking out the kinds of characteristics that may have negative impact will helpfully help ACoAs become aware of potential pitfalls of growing up with addiction and/or family abuse and avoid playing them out blindly. “Awareness is prevention“ (A. Dayton 2012).

  The Codependency Connection:

  Neurobiological and Trauma-Related Factors

  that Contribute to Codependency

  Codependency can be seen as the predictable set of qualities directly arising from how the brain/body processes fear and trauma.

  Children’s powerful need to attach is a primary piece of the codependency puzzle. Attachment is key to our survival, and we need it for our sense of well-being, so pathologizing attachment behaviors can be a slippery slope. But attachments that become traumatized can give rise to what we often call codependent tendencies. Codependent behaviors are more or less natural and attuned behaviors that have been stretched out of shape. The following neurological findings create a picture of the forces that may drive codependent behavior.

  Fear-based relating. The prefrontal cortex is where we make decisions and long-range plans; it is where we form the mental templates that predict the future, tell us what to expect next, or how to lay out a task. It is also where we predict the behavior of those around us. When we freeze in fear, our ability to make these sorts of mental projections and leaps is affected. Trauma can cause us to overread or underread social or relational signals and lose our relational footing.

  We look at other people’s expressions to come up with ideas on what to think, feel, and do. Our frozen thinking combined with our hypervigilant or heightened ability to scan the environment can affect our ability to make clear and autonomous decisions.

  Sense of Self. It is a gift of the prefrontal cortex that we can do something as abstract as imagine a sense of self. Our sense of self is under constant construction. We are always editing and adapting our self-concept—our “self-picture.” For CoAs who are regularly in a mild to intense state of fear, the shutting down of this picturing and organizing aspect of the brain can significantly impact their ability to sustain their own concept of “self” and “self in relation”; thinking may feel frozen or confused, and emotions may feel enmeshed and indistinct.

  Individuation can be tough for those who lack a clear sense of self. They may feel that if they pull away from their attachment figures they will disappear or will not have enough “self” to sustain them. Or they may fear that if they don’t placate and “take care of” other people, no one will like them.

  Hypervigilance. Because of the way the brain processes trauma, cumulative trauma can make us hypervigilant (van der Kolk 1987); we become hyperresponsive to stimuli that might make us anxious that we will be hurt, rejected, or disappointed, and we constantly scan our environment for signs of some form of relational threat.

  For CoAs, this can mean becoming hyperfocused on other people’s expressions, expectations, needs, and possible next moves so that we can steer clear of trouble. This little fact is codependency in the making. We start to base our behavior on what we believe will fit best into the situation that we fear.

  Chronic Stress. Because it causes the constant release of the stress hormone cortisol, chronic stress can get us stuck in our fight/flight/freeze response. Too much cortisol can cause stressful relating to morph into codependent relating by undermining the cortex’s ability to regulate fear signals coming from the amygdala. Too much cortisol also partially shuts down the hippocampus, the part of the brain that helps us to accurately perceive and read our environment. The hippocampus’s job is to provide context, to tell us what is scaring us and just how scared we need to be, and to ground us in our present-oriented environment. When this part of the brain is not functioning correctly, we can feel lost in space, and we feel like our anxiety, along with our need to control and fix, gets bigger.

  So when the amygdala is firing too many fear signals and the hippocampus and cortex aren’t working properly, we become simultaneously stressed out and unable to regulate our overwhelming stress. We can get stuck in the stress inside of us and unable to put what’s us triggering into context in order to manage it. We overread or overreact to signals like mood shifts, change in vocal tones, or even another person’s momentary insecurity. So we rush in to help, fix, control, or manage the person who is making us anxious. We mood manage them instead of ourselves in the mistaken perception that if we can just get them to change, we will feel calmer and less anxious.

  Intimacy can get stuck right here. When partners, for example, are simultaneously in this state, no new information can get in and the “stuck place” that they’re in can’t get processed and put into context. Everything they feel is “about” someone else and they do not reflect on their own behavior, nor do they “hold” the couple dynamic in their minds very well.

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sp; Projecting Our Disowned Feelings onto Others. ­Codepen­dency is not the same as selflessness. Selflessness is a choice. Parents are often called on to be selfless, putting their children’s needs before their own, recognizing that their child’s state of development requires this. But codependency is not a putting aside or postponing of personal need; it is a projection of personal need that we do not recognize within ourselves onto another person. It is a reaction to and a projection of the state we enter when we’re anxious and hypervigilant. There is an old joke that goes, “A codependent is someone who puts a sweater on someone else . . . when they feel cold.” In other words, codependents identify their own feelings in other people rather than within themselves and then they set about taking care of in another person what they truly need/want taken care of within themselves. In a sense, it’s easier to focus on another person’s ­feelings than their own. Codependents may have trouble identifying and owning their own feelings because they have had little practice or encouragement in doing so. Needless to say, this habit of identifying our own feelings in someone else while disowning them in ourselves complicates intimacy and parenting.

  Boundaries: The Urge to Merge

  It’s difficult to have good boundaries when we’re more aware of another person than we are of ourselves, or when we project our pain rather than own and process it. When we are more focused on scanning another person’s emotional state than our own, we do several things: we may misread their emotions because our fear mind is the mind doing the reading. We may also have trouble distinguishing them from us; we feel not “for” them but “as” them. We tune in so much to the other that we lose ourselves in that person’s feelings. We get confused, and when CoAs get confused, we don’t like it and we want to fix it, fast! Unfortunately, this rarely works because as long as we’re hypervigilant in our “reading” of another person, we are not clearly seeing them or ourselves.