Trauma Impacts ‘Hope’; Group Support Can Help
Tragedy makes humans innately want to gather. When you were a child, pain and suffering drove you to reach for your mother. As an adult, that same drive still exists to seek support of a loved one or trusted person when you are hurting. Human beings thrive in connection. And because we yearn to not feel alone, we do our best growth through vulnerability in relationships.
But what if as a child there were no reliable loved ones? Or what if the one you looked to for help and guidance was also the one who was harming you? What if you were a child praying night after night while the harm continued with no reprieve? You might start to wonder if anyone was really listening. The only way to have a dependable conscience is if someone demonstrated to you how that process works. You can only learn to rely on yourself if you had someone else to rely on. What if you were a child who was left to make sense of impossible situations? What if there was no safe person, no witness, no voice of reason?
As a child, you relied on only what you could see and access around you, and therefore if what was around you was not the nurturing you needed, you had to tell yourself it wasn’t as bad as it was. You did anything to survive, including creating a beautiful fantasy world to play in to take you away from the present, going inside your mind to dream, loving the people around you even if they were hurting you, and internalizing the leftovers. Children are remarkable storytellers.
Often, trauma survivors struggle with the idea of hope. ‘Hope' is designed to help and comfort a person during times of suffering. ‘Hope’ relies on an individual’s ability to tolerate pain in the present while relying on a certainty that the pain will eventually come to an end and be replaced with peace. ‘Hope’ infers that at some point in time you have had a safe person or place, even if momentarily. ‘Hope’ was possible because when the bad thing was over, your resilience would prevail, you could feel stronger that you got through something hard, and life would go on. For for a child with no demonstration with that process of resolution, ‘hope’ was lost.
Sometimes all children had was a dream and a vigorous quest for the truth. ‘Hope’ was just a concept that meant nothing. For trauma survivors, ‘hope’ became a distorted concept. Maybe there were tiny experiences of kindness or a joyful moment with the loved one who was also harming or neglecting you, a reprieve from the suffering, and it was these times that allowed for your fantasy to ignite; the fantasy that would teach you that you are not someone who can have it all, not just the love, but the love with the pain. This version of ‘hope’ taught you take the pain and wait for the tiny joyful moments. This version taught you how to enter into the world, unarmed, and walk towards harmful people in the name of love and ‘hope’ it will get better. For trauma survivors, ‘hope’ became an unreliable tool as an adult. ‘Hope’ became a distortion when the bad thing happened and life kept going as usual. It was at this time that a child loses the fight that it could and will ever be different or better.
Support in groups for adults with childhood trauma are a way to create a space for ‘hope’ and healing.
Why and how does this work?
Groups help you tend to and mend the wound. The wound is what you formed inside of you as a child as a reaction to being harmed. Throughout your life, you lived inside the wound and developed a hardened shell that was intended as a way to keep the bad from ever hurting you again, but instead, it kept the good from coming in, and set you up for seeking out situations that looked identical to the original wound you knew so well. Because of this, the life you built that included interpersonal relationships, communities, work environments, and anything that involved a social system, mirrored the system that surrounded the original wound and wounds to follow. Social relations such as these allowed you to keep that feeling of the initial pain alive, as if it was still happening, and therefore, no system anywhere felt safe, including the malfunctioning system of your human body. Here, in the wound, you have a belief that you are unlovable, responsible for the pain you endured, and should just keep quiet or something bad will happen.
Group support, little by slowly, allows for you to mend these old ways of living. Group recovery, by its very design, flourishes through boundaries and connection. Programs are most successful when you take the courageous steps to share the wounds inside of you and speak out. When you speak, not only are you repairing your silence as a child, you are making yourself vulnerable in a predictable, safe, and boundaried space. This vulnerability helps you grow. When you get the courage to share your thoughts and feelings, you are allowing for another member for learn that they are not alone in their experience. You are making a choice to rewrite your experience by investing in yourself. You are starting to believe in something bigger than yourself and the things that happened to you, and you are doing all of this inside a system that finally contradicts the system you knew so well. And this is a space that allows for authentic ‘hope’ to come alive after all these years. The evidence that you needed to finally start to believe in the ‘hope’ of a better life is all at work before you because you can feel it inside and see it in the members around you. Maybe for the first time, you begin to ‘hope’ that a different way of living is possible.
In an ideal group setting, it replicates a healthy family system that includes leadership, fellowship, rules, and a democracy that caters to the common good. In an ideal group setting, the system only works is everyone feels safe, and when it goes off the track, the group addresses it and mends it. This is a learning experience and promotes growth and healing. Often in groups there is sponsorship or mentorship that replicates parenthood, and comradery and support, even outside of the confines of the meeting space, that are reminiscent of sister or brotherhood. Groups are often an opportunity to learn what a healthy system looks as feels like.
As a psychotherapist, I am an large advocate of group support while involved in a psychotherapeutic treatment. Groups such as AA, NA, Alanon, Alateen, OA, MA, ACOA, ASCA, ACOA, grief groups, postpartum groups, motherhood groups, groups for divorce, groups for incest survivors, groups for adult children of sexual assault, groups for social skills, men’s groups, women’s groups, parenting groups, drama/art therapy groups for teens, domestic violence groups, chronic pain groups, groups for injury recovery. Regardless of the group, the goal is still the same: connection, togetherness, reparation, safety, and growth.
For more information on local group support that can help you, please click the button below to send me an email, and I am happy to talk more about this with you.
