Trauma Responce

I want to expand a bit on what I wrote yesterday. Why were the nice words such a big deal. Maybe it seems a bit of an over reaction.  We have discussed this many times in Bridges.
When people have spent many years in a traumatic environment their mind and body becomes hard wired to expect more trauma. Especially if this is the only life a child has known. We get used the bad things happening, it is what we expect will happen. i.e. my impending doom. In essence we know how to deal with the bad stuff, we have learned coping techniques for this i.e. dissociation and splitting. They work very effectively and it becomes a natural process to deal with trauma.

 But when we are faced with something positive, like a compliment, caring words or even a hug, it can  have no place to go. We have a place to store and deal with trauma and insults, we even partially agree with them. But there is no where in our thought processes to deal with compliments. We have no box to put that in. We don't have the skills to deal with that. It is not something we are used to. Our internal system is built to deal with immense trauma and abuse, what do I do with something nice.

It is something that can take years of work to find a home for. To be able to accept and even expect positive things can take years. But it can be done. We are adaptive beings, and we are able to heal, and that is what it is, healing. We need to be able to find a place in our lives for the good and nice things of this life. As hard as it may seem.