You can take advantage of my years of work through personal consultation and treatment and/or through my distillation of these techniques into affordable self-help modules. A good starting point is to take my free online Trauma Test:
https://www.marksteinberg.net/trauma-test
Then click on the link:
https://www.marksteinberg.net/breakthrough-trauma-online
Conventional psychological theories hold that early childhood experiences are formative forces in our personalities and behaviors. Prominent among these theories is a belief that the maternal-child bond plays an essential and fundamental role in developing our capacity for the emotional attachment necessary for healthy relationships. The mother-child relationship sets the stage for brain development, especially in the areas of the growing child’s ability to self-soothe, feel safe, experience and express compassion and empathy, and view the world as nonthreatening.
When the mother (biological or surrogate) is physically absent, or emotionally unavailable, or neglectful, the child suffers tremendously. The nervous system goes into fight-or-flight mode and establishes a pattern of neuronal vigilance that prevents or limits trust and emotional regulation. Studies done on children in harsh orphanage conditions have shown that these children grow up with long-term emotional and behavior problems. They become hypervigilant, mistrustful, and have significant barriers to intimacy.
Despite our idealized models for intact families, dysfunctional families abound. This dynamic takes a heavy toll on human development. In contrast to the implications forecast by traditional psychological thinking, my colleagues and I have found that the traumas and negative effects suffered in childhood can be overcome through modern treatment techniques, notably EEG neurofeedback and Thought Field Therapy and Voice Technology. Other effective and transformative therapies can also bypass talk therapy and the arduous “uncovering” of repressed feelings and internal scripts.
We must recognize that traumas occur throughout life and can afflict with varying intensity and damage, depending upon the type of trauma and latent vulnerabilities of whom they victimize. We recoil at becoming aware of rapes, human trafficking, war invasions, genocide, torture, and the many forms of man’s inhumanity to man. Whatever one’s ranking system for horrific traumas, brains and souls cannot compete for whose trauma was worse. The reality is that a personally experienced trauma can be devastating, as its lasting effects are retained in the mind’s emotional memory and translate into neurophysiological dysfunction.
A trauma may result from the following experiences:
The traditional concept of trauma is predicated on an assumption of a catastrophic event outside the range of usual experience. However, trauma encompasses a much broader range of causal situations and is a very common occurrence.
Traumas are universal, and they occur intermittently in everyone’s life. Recovering from traumas is necessary for basic physical functioning and mental and emotional health, and can be accomplished routinely by most people (given the right tools, training, and support).
In order to understand these points, we must start with the assumption and recognition that we all have vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities make us physically and psychologically prone to attack and a breakdown from life’s events and forces.
As we accumulate experiences and get to know ourselves, we (ideally) identify (and often protect ourselves against) many of our own vulnerabilities. Certain vulnerabilities are genetically coded and specific. Vulnerabilities are the weak links that allow us to become ill or dysfunctional in a myriad of ways. For example, it is well known that particular diseases tend to run in families. A family history of heart disease, diabetes, depression, etc., doesn’t determine that we will be afflicted with these conditions, but it does influence the odds that put us at greater statistical risk.
Trauma occurs when we are caught in an “attack” on one of our “weak links,” whether the attack was intentional, random, or even imagined. The essence of trauma is that it penetrates defenses, seizes upon vulnerability, and leaves us feeling hurt and defenseless, and usually causes us to “relive” in some way the embedded traumatic experience. Common sense observation and our own experiences will confirm this cause-and-effect link.
After a vehicle accident or near-accident, many people habitually tend to tense up when reminders or even vaguely similar conditions present themselves, as if girding up for another accident. For example, suppose you were in an auto accident that really rattled you, perhaps even injured you. For a long time afterward, you might become anxious when approaching the scene of that accident. Or say the police were pursuing a speeding car that blew through a red light and almost hit your car. Subsequently, you might panic whenever you hear in the distance the sound of a police siren while you are driving. This reaction evokes physiological (fight-or-flight) as well as psychological / mental / emotional responses. The set of defensive responses to an anticipated offending event (in the absence of its presence or direct evidence that it will necessarily occur) is called perseveration: responding to an event that is no longer present.
Many forms of trauma occur when people are subjected to harsh conditions, abuse, overwhelming negativity, rejection, racism, isolation, poverty, and so forth. For many people however, it is overwhelming enough even to have to deal with the more mundane traumas that result from the daily interactions, demands, and conflicts typically associated with ordinary relationships.
When a spouse, boss, friend, child, relative, partner, teammate, or peer does not react in the way we want or expect, it can be emotionally traumatic. We need not be oversensitive or even know that the trauma is occurring. We can, however, tell by the aftereffects. Remember: the nature of trauma is that it causes us to relive or anticipate an event or reaction that previously left us hurt, shocked, exposed, or defenseless. So when we find ourself (or our relationship partner) revisiting the same conflicts, scripts, and (quickly accelerated) emotional responses to the faintest of cues, we will know that a trauma has been incited and activated.
For these traumas, we don’t require access to an emergency room or enter years of therapy. What we do need is the realization that we are probably reacting to some provocation that stimulates a less-than-conscious, unresolved emotional vulnerability that initiated a trauma. Such awareness will enable us to see our inner responses and our outward behavior as reactions to a trauma that we may perceive viscerally as necessary, but are neither a function of choice and clear thinking, nor conducive to planning, keen observation, evaluation, or problem-solving.
Emotional overexcitement and acting out are common accompaniments to trauma. Reenactment of troubling feelings can provide a modicum of temporary anxiety relief through expressing behaviorally or with dramatic emotional intensity the conflicts and anguish inside. Unfortunately, these expressions do nothing to resolve the ongoing issues while also fostering stress and conflict for the individual and the involved audience.
Some people seem to need drama—perhaps using it as a ploy for attention and/or a plea for reassurance and security. People who habitually inject drama into situations may be acting out their personality disorders. For them, ordinary life is a series of unmanageable crises. Beneath their flamboyant behaviors are undoubtedly painful and unresolved traumas. Sadly, such reenactments can revive and reinforce the latent traumas that quickly react to available stressful triggers and circumstances.
Though childhood adversity experiences predispose and predict eventual health problems and vulnerability to future trauma, we must look beyond a deterministic view of locked-in effects from past mistreatment.
Traumas may be random and unpredictable. Fortunately, there are protections and healing for trauma. Healthy lifestyles, building resilience, and taking advantage of natural, drug-free treatments go a long way toward trauma recovery. I have helped many people break free from shackling traumas using these techniques.
You can take advantage of my years of work through personal consultation and treatment and/or through my distillation of these techniques into affordable self-help modules. A good starting point is to take my free online Trauma Test:
https://www.marksteinberg.net/trauma-test
Then click on the link:
https://www.marksteinberg.net/breakthrough-trauma-online
Early experiences are formative, but they don’t have to seal inviolable patterns of emotional strangulation or dysfunctional behavior in our adult lives. Our parents can live in our heads through warm as well as unpleasant memories. They can also influence our own parenting practices and values and opinions. Many parents have sheepishly admitted to me their surprising experience by revealing, “Goodness, I sound just like my mother!”
Since the mother-child bond is so basic to emotional regulation, it’s not surprising that threats to one’s mother strike deep subconscious chords. We tend to be very protective of our mothers, and this goes hand-in-hand with our psychic structures as well as sociocultural imperatives about protecting women. Perceived threats to a mother can be traumatic because mother gave us birth and was primarily linked to survival. This vulnerability regarding the safety and integrity of one’s mother is innate regardless of how strong, capable, absent, inept, abusive, or otherwise she may have been. Any attack on or danger to mama inherently poses a subconscious threat and can rattle into trauma.
As I grew up in The Bronx, it was common among peers to engage in a game called Playing the Dozens. This was essentially a competition of put-downs and verbal one-upmanship to demonstrate dominance over a target. In this street game, players strutted in front of an audience, trading increasingly escalating and scathing insults about the other person’s mother. These were the infamous “Yo mama” jokes.
We called this verbal sparring “ranking out” and it required glibness, timing, thinking quickly, and prideful aggression. The goal was to claim superiority by embarrassing the opponent into quitting the game. The legions of these insults all start with, “Yo mama is so . . .”
In my puerile quest to gain recognition, playing the dozens was considered a normal rite of passage, especially for males. In retrospect, the practice is anything but normal (even if common). It is completely unkind, insensitive, and even sadistic. Because it taps into the aforementioned psychological sensitivity about mother-child attachment, it can indeed be trauma inducing or restimulating.
Yo mama jokes can sneakily and viciously undercut defenses and revive or cause traumas as they relate to one’s insecurities or childhood and developmental difficulties. Playing the dozens—in all its forms, including modern versions of dissing—prey upon inchoate sensitivities for the purpose of social dominance and control.
Broken or faulty mama bonds can set the stage for traumatic responses to the many misfortunes that befall in life. However, they are not the only source of traumatic occurrences or reactions.
Traumas of all kinds reside in the emotional brain and live in memories that are kept alive with negative thoughts and feelings captured in the mind as though they are still happening. They can cause recurring or continuing misery and hamper emotional stability, intimacy, and the health of self-image and relationships.
Traumas lay roots for anxiety, depression, and an assortment of physical and mental maladies. They intrude or lurk, shadowing confidence and stability, and detracting from emotional freedom and joy. They play out in dramas that impair coping and interpersonal relations. Many may originate with a fractured mother-child bond, but they carry forward with manifestations and reactions to life events that affect self-care along with many obstructed activities and relationships.
Yo mama carried you around inside her for months. Eventually, you broke free physically. Perhaps you’ve been carrying her around for years in your memory—the good and the wanting. It’s time to break free emotionally. Yo mama would want that for you.
The time is now.
— Mark Steinberg, PhD
Part of Dr. Steinberg’s trauma treatment resources.
