This is a triggering time for everyone. In what appears to be a never-ending loop, we continue to hear story after story of child sexual abuse in the news. Catholic Church: Child Sexual Abuse and Cover up, Penn State: Child Sexual Abuse and Cover up, Boy Scouts of America/Canada: Child Sexual abuse and Cover up, Horace Mann, Child Sexual Abuse and Cover up.
What previously happened to "other people" in "other towns" now hits home for many - because now it is someone in our family, in our church, in our alma mater, in our orgnization... It is someone we know, albeit, perhaps, tangentially.
For survivors, this can most definitely serve as a trigger - bringing back memories, flashbacks, putting us in a very uncomfortable space. We are quick to anger, bite back, lash out. As I'm sitting here now, I can feel in the pit of my stomach that churning, burning anguish, that sickening feeling all too familiar.
Defintion of "Triggering"
A trigger is something that sets off a memory tape or flashback transporting the person back to the event of her/his original trauma.
Triggers are very personal; different things trigger different people
[Excerpt from Dr. Judith Herman's book]
Sometimes situations of inescapable danger may evoke not only terror and rage but also, paradoxically, a state of detached calm, in which terror, rage, and pain dissolve. Events continue to register in awareness, but it is as though these events have been disconnected from their ordinary meanings. Perceptions may be numbed or distorted, with partial anesthesia or the loss of particular sensations. Time sense may be altered, often with a sense of slow motion,and the experience may lose its quality of ordinary reality. The person may feel as though the event is not happening to her, as though she is observing from outside her body, or as though the whole experience is a bad dream from which she will shortly awaken.
Books That Changed My Life - Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman In her diary, Swedishjewfish says the following:
[Excerpt]
Reading chapter 6 was a watershed moment for me. I literally burst into tears within the first few paragraphs-because for the first time, I had an explanation for what was "wrong" with me.
Throughout my life, I've had an alphabet soup of acronyms and stigmatized labels used to describe me: ADHD, OCD, ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder), Bipolar Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder-the mental health equivalent of leprosy. None of these labels ever seemed to fit (I was often told I had "atypical" presentations) and the treatments for them never seemed to work. As I learned in this chapter, my experience was not unique-in fact most trauma survivors who are involved in the mental health system are given a series of incorrect diagnoses. Their failure to respond to treatment often results in a hostile doctor-patient relationship, and accusations of malingering-in essence, they are told they must simply want to be sick. The natural tendency to blame the victim results in pejorative diagnostic labels-originally "Hysteria" was used as a catch-all, but this later evolved into "Personality Disorder". Patients with Personality Disorder are said to have an inherent defect in their character that has been there since early childhood and persists throughout their lives- a characterization that only reaffirms that innate sense of "inner badness" that many abuse victims carry with them.
Herman proposes that for patients who have survived prolonged and/or repeated traumatic experiences, a new diagnostic label-Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or C-PTSD.
The "Complex" in Complex Post Traumatic Disorder describes how one layer after another of trauma can interact with one another. Sometimes, it is mistakenly assumed that the most recent traumatic event in a person's life is the one that brought them to their knees. However, just addressing that single most-recent event may possibly be an invalidating experience for the C-PTSD sufferer. Therefore, it is important to recognize that those who suffer from C-PTSD may be experiencing feelings from all their traumatic exposure, even as they try to address the most recent traumatic event.
This is what differentiates C-PTSD from the classic PTSD diagnosis - which typically describes an emotional response to a single or to a discrete number of traumatic events.
Additional research:
In PTSD, a wide range of situations can trigger intrusive memories, including those that do not have an obvious meaningful connection with the trauma and those that the individual does not recognize as triggers. This has the effect that intrusionsmay appear to come ‘‘out of the blue.’’ Closer analysis of these situations shows that triggers often have sensory similarities with stimuli present shortly before or during the trauma
Trauma survivors with PTSD describe to a greater extent that their intrusive memories appear to happen in the here and now...Most dramatically, in a posttraumatic flashback people lose all contact with current reality and respond as if the trauma was happening at that moment
References.Ehlers, A. (2010). Understanding and treating unwanted trauma memories in posttraumatic stress disorder. Zeitschrift Für Psychologie/Journal Of Psychology, 218(2), 141-145. doi:10.1027/0044-3409/a000021
Finally, two fellow kossaks have written about this subject recently
JDWolverton: "We Don't Talk About It"...(emphasis mine)
[Excerpt]
The main reason people don't talk about child sexual abuse is because these very personal stories often screw up our relationships. The unscrupulous use our disclosures for their own needs. What was about the victim/survivor/thriver gets co-opted and twisted into something away from the original crime into a new drama or an excuse to isolate the abused. Why? I couldn't say, but it happens.
SallyCat:
"Shattered Soul" (emphasis mine)
[Excerpts]
But then - sometimes life conspires and all the betrayal happens at once. A sexual predator turns up in your own family.
The evil that lurks in one person permeates everything.
-It reaches into the heart of the family - tears it apart.
-It threatens every single stable part of 30 years of family - including marriages and parent / child relationships.
-And the one that fights for the children gets blamed for not helping to hide the evil that lurks within.
"the triggers have been debilitating... This soul is pretty cracked and ragged - but still intact... I am a survivor and will survive this - regardless of what happens but the pain may add to scars already there...
Some days I just have to remind myself to breathe in and breathe out. That's what I"m doing today.