The ACOA Trauma Syndrome

by Tian Dayton, Ph. D.

  • They tend to have constructive attitudes toward

  themselves and their lives.

  • They tend not to fall into self-destructive lifestyles.

  Faith Based Communities: Spirituality,

  Strength, and Doggedness

  Faith-based institutions can be a nourishing and character-building experience for children. They provide community, values, stability, and safe haven if they are healthy. In a 2002 article in Christianity Today entitled “Want Better Grades? Go to Church,” Amber Anderson Johnson reported on a study conducted at an African-American Baptist church in New Orleans that continued to meet outdoors on folding chairs after the storm tore down the church building.

  Children who continued to regularly attend the church received the following benefits:

  • Access to material resources

  • Access to supportive relationships

  • Development of a desirable personal identity

  • Experiences of power and control

  • Experiences of social justice

  • Adherence to cultural traditions

  • Experiences of a sense of cohesion with others (Johnson 2002)

  Creating Resilience through Recovery

  Key to being a resilient person is realizing that many resilient characteristics are under our control, especially once we reach adulthood; we can consciously and proactively develop them. And the more we develop qualities of strength and resilience, the more insulated we are against the effects of trauma. It is entirely possible to go through painful life experiences and process as we go. When we do that, we actually build strength from facing and managing our own reactions to tough situations. Proactively building resilience includes processing what is in the way of it. (Crawford, Wright, and Masten 2005; Ungar et al 2007).

  Optimism: A Resilience Enhancing Quality

  In his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, psychologist Martin Seligman, one of the world’s leading scholars on learned helplessness and depression, urged psychology to “turn toward understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on healing damage” (Seligman 1998, 1999). That speech launched today’s positive psychology movement. Seligman also became one of the world’s leading scholars on optimism. Optimists, says Seligman, see life through a positive lens. They see bad events as temporary setbacks or isolated to particular circumstances that can be overcome by their effort and abilities. Pessimists, on the other hand, react to setbacks from a presumption of personal helplessness. They feel that bad events are their fault, will last a long time, and will undermine everything they do (ibid).

  Through his research, Seligman saw that the state of helplessness was a learned phenomenon. He also realized that un-helplessness could be learned as well. We could, in other words, learn to be optimists. He suggests that we learn to “hear” (and even write down) our beliefs about the events that block us from feeling good about ourselves or our lives and pay attention to the “recordings” we play in our head about them. Seligman also suggests we then write out the consequences of those beliefs—the toll they take on our emotions, energy, will to act, and the like. He suggests that once we become familiar with the pessimistic thought patterns we run through our heads, we challenge them (ibid). For example, we can challenge the usefulness of a specific belief and generate alternative ideas and solutions that might be better. We can choose to see problems as temporary, the way an optimist would, and that in itself provides psychological boundaries. This new type of thinking can stop the “loop” of negative tapes we run through our heads. Over time, this more optimistic thinking becomes engrained as our default position, and as we choose optimism over ­pessimism through repeated experiences, we are rewarded with new energy and vitality.

  On the surface, this approach may appear to go directly against what we need to do in trauma resolution—that is, revisit and reexperience the traumatic moment or relational dynamic. But actually, the goal of healing is to create a shift in the way we see something and to reorganize our perception of previous events by incorporating our new learning into it. With this shift in perception, we open ourselves to new interpretations and reframing of past events.

  Psychodrama, the type of role playing therapy that I specialize in, is a therapeutic intervention that can change the way we see things through working through personal stories. We play them out, reexamine the meaning that they had for us when we were helpless and create new meaning by looking at yesterday’s circumstance through our more open and mature eyes of today. We recognize that we have a choice as to how to see the situation within the context of our lives.

  Experiential therapy and 12-step programs help us to heal from emotional and psychological wounds, but this is not the whole story of healing. We also need to adopt the lifestyle changes that will make our gains sustainable and renewable.

  FOURTEEN

  Natural Highs: Bringing the

  Limbic System into Balance

  When I stand before thee at the day’s end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.

  —Rabindranath Tagore

  Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors all affect our body chemistry. And our body chemistry affects our emotions and behavior. Just climbing out of bed in the morning and getting into a hot shower or bath, for example, elevates our levels of serotonin—“nature’s natural antidepressant”—and makes it easier for us to get into a positive frame of mind. Here’s what our bodies’ natural antidepressants can do to help us to reduce stress and enhance health.

  Serotonin keeps our moods balanced and upbeat. It calms anxiety and improves our sleep. Hot baths or showers give us a shot of prolactin (and serotonin), which is associated with that serene state that nursing mothers enter. Touching releases oxytocin, a bonding chemical that mediates emotional closeness and nourishes our brain. Paradoxically, oxytocin both helps us to feel close and connected and set boundaries. These are some of nature’s mood stabilizers; they act in the brain and body in the same way that antidepressants act. They calm, soothe, and help us manage our moods.

  When we don’t make use of the medicine chest nature put inside of us and learn how to calm and soothe ourselves through daily, health-enhancing activities, we may want to turn to synthetic or artificial solutions to achieve a state of well-being. We might grab sugary or starchy foods or engage in compulsive sexual activities to get that dopamine release or use substances like alcohol or drugs to unwind, calm down, or de-stress.

  Natural mood management amounts to paying attention to all of those little things that make us feel good because they are releasing soothing body chemicals into our bloodstreams and systematically building them into our daily routine. Walk to work, exercise with a friend, take time to relax, and just be. Breathe. We all know intuitively that certain activities just make us feel better, that creating an environment in which we feel relaxed and cozy calms and soothes us, and that taking time to unwind and pamper ourselves improves our attitude and the way we feel about ourselves. When we intentionally make these sorts of activities part of our daily lives, we’re managing our moods the natural way and taking care of our mental and physical health. Rather than depending on synthetic mood managers that may be unhealthy or even self-destructive, we can depend on those that are natural, sustainable, and renewable to achieve and maintain emotional balance. So if you feel that you are doing all the right things and trying hard to understand your trauma issues but something just isn’t kicking in for you, consider making the kind of lifestyle changes that are body/mind building blocks to a healthier, happier you.

  Recovery, whether from a substance addiction, process addiction, or the trauma of being an ACoA, is about engaging in the kind of lifestyle behaviors that regulate brain and body chemistry. If you believe the ads on television, we should reach for a medication if we’ve been “
sad, anxious, or depressed for two weeks or more.”

  Recovery is more than recovering from past pain. It is preventative mental health care. It is action-oriented and exists in the present. It is consciously building qualities of strength and resilience. Learning the skills of emotional literacy and balance allows us to work toward optimal mental and emotional strength and fitness, to be proactive about our mental health maintenance. This lifestyle is our best preventative against getting lost in the kinds of self-destructive and self-medicating behaviors that can ­undermine our happiness and our personal and professional success.

  Processing old pain is only part of the puzzle of emotional wellness. Clients often feel that they are “working so hard” and have an improved understanding of their trauma-related issues—but they still feel stuck. This can be because their form of treatment isn’t allowing them to really get to their core issues and process them or because they are sabotaging their recovery by making poor lifestyle choices. In other words, they are doing the necessary therapy to understand their trauma-related issues, but they are ignoring the needs of their bodies and not balancing their daily stressors with support and stress relief. It is ­worthwhile to take a look at what we do each day that may either be helping or hurting our cause. We can take a daily inventory of how much exercise we get, how much sleep we get, our network of relationships, the meaning and sense of purpose that drives us, and the amount of stress we have. This inventory allows us to see if our lifestyles are supporting or undermining our ability to actualize positive change. Then we figure out how to adopt healthy daily routines to allow our new changes to gain traction. If we have a good life container, our inner changes will have fertile soil in which to take root and grow.

  Using the Body’s Medicine Chest

  to Maintain Emotional Balance

  Because human beings are always in a process of hurting and healing, nature has equipped us with a sort of self-care chemistry lab that’s built into our brain and body. Learning to use that lab is the key to maintaining both emotional and physical health. It is entirely possible to attain that “feel good” state in a natural and healthy way if we just adopt a few proactive habits and consciously discipline ourselves to stay with them. Regular exercise can be a powerful antidepressant and is linked with decreased anxiety, stress, and hostility (Otto and Smits 2011). Calming body chemicals like serotonin and dopamine are nature’s natural mood stabilizers; they calm us down, smooth out our rough edges, and help us to feel good. We can learn to use these chemicals of emotion to our advantage. Our brains produce more than fifty known active drugs that influence our memory and intelligence and act as natural sedatives. In other words, we can learn to adopt activities that stimulate these natural drugs in a way that enhance our health rather than undermine it. We can learn to self-medicate the healthy way!

  Brain Overload: Feeling Stressed

  and Self-Sabotaging Food Choices

  In the same way that our physical muscles get tired after a tough workout and require rest to recuperate, our mental muscles need rest and relaxation so that they can function optimally. Just as a bicep muscle has practical limitations, so does the muscle of the brain. If we ask our muscles to hold more weight than they are able to support, they will eventually give out.

  An interesting Stanford University study involving “brain overload” and described in a Wall Street Journal article may shed light on why we need regular breaks to stay resilient and make healthy choices. Several dozen undergraduates were divided into two groups; one group was given a five-digit number to remember while the second group was given a seven-digit number. They were then told to walk down the hall where they were given two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake, while the students given only five digits to remember (a more manageable load) were still relaxed enough to reach for the fruit they knew was better for them. Mental stress and the anxiety created by that bit of extra stuff to remember led straight to poor food choices. The reason, according to Professor Baba Shiv, who conducted the experiment, was that the extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain and became a “cognitive load” (Lehrer 2009). When we’re already feeling overwhelmed, we seem to continue on that path; the prefrontal cortex gets so overtaxed that all it takes is a few extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.

  In a 2002 experiment, led by Mark Muraven at the University at Albany, a group of male subjects was asked to not think about a white elephant for five minutes while writing down their thoughts. That turns out to be a rather difficult mental challenge, akin to staying focused on a tedious project at work. (A control group was given a few simple arithmetic problems to solve.) Then, Mr. Muraven had the subjects take a beer taste test, although he warned them that their next task involved driving a car. Sure enough, people in the white elephant group drank significantly more beer than people in the control group, which suggests that they had a harder time not indulging in alcohol (ibid).

  “A tired brain preoccupied with its problems is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need” (ibid). This kind of mental stress overload can affect all sorts of little choices that we make throughout our day that are related to self-medicating behaviors.

  Members of an alcoholic/addicted family carry a great deal of psychological and emotional weight that stresses our mental muscles. Denying is also stressful; as we try to figure out whether or not to deal with that “pink elephant in the living room,” our muscles for living “normally” lose their resilience and strength. This is why self-care and surrender are so important in recovery. We need to surrender to the recognition that we cannot carry more than we can carry and build back our resilience and strength in our mental and emotional muscles so that we can begin to make healthy, healing choices for ourselves.

  What Is Self-Care, Anyway?

  Our emotions and our bodies are so closely linked that taking care of the body is taking care of the mind, and taking care of the mind is taking care of the body. Both are crucial to emotional health.

  Trauma can undermine our motivation to take care of ourselves, particularly in the areas of hygiene, rest, good nutrition, and exercise. After a traumatic experience, people often lose some maturational achievements and regress to earlier modes of coping with stress. In children, this may show up as an inability to take care of themselves in such areas as feeding and toilet training; in adults, it is expressed in excessive dependence and in a loss of capacity to make thoughtful, autonomous decisions. (van der Kolk 1994). The recovery process can also put us under extra strain and at times be somewhat regressive. As we revisit childhood pain and vulnerability, we revisit our childhood states. For this reason, extra attention to self-care is an important part of getting back on track and staying on track. Adopting lifestyle changes that not only heal the body mind but also are strategies for sustaining mental and emotional health while processing painful situations as they occur—our ultimate goal in recovery.

  Why wait to get sick before we get help? We have learned that lowering our cholesterol reduces heart disease. There is such a thing as emotional cholesterol, too. Following are a variety of ways to keep our emotional cholesterol low so we can stay mentally and emotionally fit.

  Your Well-Being Checklist: Are You Getting Enough . . . ?

  • Good Food. Eat well: eat a balanced diet and stay away from excess sugar, white flour, and caffeine. Stress depletes dopamine and so does lack of sleep and poor nutrition. Alcohol, caffeine, and sugar all appear to decrease dopamine levels in the brain. Some foods, however, actually increase dopamine levels and get that magical medicine chest working in our favor. Foods like avocados, almonds, bananas, dairy products, pumpkin and sesame seeds, and legumes are the ones to reach for.

  • Exercise. Research studies found that exercisi
ng, such as brisk walking three to four times a week, can have the same mood-elevating results as medication when it comes to treating depression.

  • Sleep and Rest. Get enough sleep: we need sufficient sleep to give our nervous systems, muscles, and minds the rest they require to function well. Lack of proper sleep can exacerbate depression and anxiety and lead to low energy levels, mood swings, and a lack of ability to concentrate.

  • Oxygen. Breathe: scientists have discovered that oxygen is critical for the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a high-energy molecule that stores the energy our bodies need to do just about everything. ATP releases energy when it is broken down (hydrolyzed) into ADP (or adenosine diphosphate). Because this energy is used for many metabolic processes it is considered the universal energy currency for metabolism. Oxygen is the most vital component in ATP production. And if something goes wrong with the production of ATP, the result is lowered vitality, disease, and premature aging.[citation t/k from author]

  • Yoga/Meditation. Yoga exercises increase respiratory efficiency, normalize gastrointestinal functions, and increase muscle and skeletal flexibility and joint range of motion, and meditation trains us to calm the mind and body.

  • Sunlight. Get thirty minutes of sunlight a day. Sunlight, because it contains vitamin D, helps prevent cancer, bone disease, depression, and many other illnesses that are only now beginning to be understood. Also, because vitamin D can help lower and control insulin, sunlight may also play a role in helping us reach our weight-loss goals.

  • Connection: As Margaret Mead said, “Having someone wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night is a very old human need.” Humans are pack animals, and we apparently experience health benefits, including longer lives, if we have a network of supportive relationships. In a study done in Canada, a sense of community proved to have beneficial effects on people’s health. It was concluded that a sense of belonging might be part of health prevention (MacPherson et al 2006). This is currently an area of study and research and results may vary from study to study, gender to gender, and culture to culture, but across the board, relationships clearly play a role in longevity.