A psychotrauma can be displaced from consciousness. Nothing seems easier than turning off the light of consciousness when reality becomes unbearable. But we can't get rid of our traumatized body. There, all trauma experiences become visible even though pain, fear, anger, disgust or shame are no longer part of our conscious experience because they have been split off or numbed. In a medical operation it seems to be the same: It is an illusion to believe that the body does not have a traumatic experience simply because our consciousness is switched off due to the anesthesia. The fact that it is switched off is not certain either, because it happens that people can remember conversations in the operating team while they themselves were under anesthesia. You could therefore say: The body has stored the truth about our life experiences. The body does not lie!
If a traumatization has caused the consciousness to retreat to the top floor so that it only functions from the cerebrum, the body is exposed to conflicting forces in terms of who controls it. In this way, the body can become a puzzle of individual areas to which the traumatized parts are displaced (e.g. an inflamed toe that doesn't get better). In this case, the various survival parts fight for the first right to be able to use the whole body for themselves.
As long as people are trapped in their trauma biography, they live under high pressure. It's often surprising to see how much some people can physically endure under such circumstances. But this endurance comes at a price:
- The cardiovascular system is constantly under high pressure and can suddenly break down.
- Muscles and bones ache and deform due to the strain created when adapting to the traumatizing conditions.
- Tooth grinding at night destroys teeth when the traumatizing situation recurs in your sleep.
- In the digestive system, there is a lack of knowledge to distinguish between what nourishes the body, what needs to be excreted and what still needs to be used.
- The organs eventually fail under the toxic stress.
- The immune system can no longer distinguish between foreign and own, and it begins to attack its own body.
- The nervous system can break down under this sustained stress, and even the brain can eventually lose its function, leading to dementia.
- Through poor nutrition, medication and drugs, the body becomes more and more poisoned.
The deeper someone is stuck in their trauma biography, the more physical symptoms may become visible. Some signs of distress are very specific and show a direct link to a trauma situation (e.g. inflammation in the abdomen). Others, on the other hand, are very non-specific and give signals in different parts of the body (e.g. if childhood physical violence was ignored or denied). Behind every bodily symptom lies a piece of life history. "Diseases" are often just the tip of the iceberg.
The ACE study
It has long been known and researched that trauma can make people physically ill (Maté 2011). For example, in a study, Vincent Felitti, Robert Anda and others looked at the health of 17,500 predominantly white and highly educated patients in an obesity clinic. At the same time, they asked about events from childhood as defined in Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)2. These include: physical, emotional or sexual abuse, neglect, parents with mental illnesses, drug addiction or imprisonment, parental separation and divorce, and domestic violence.
The results were unequivocal: The higher the ACE a person had, the worse their physical condition was. 67% of those surveyed had at least one ACE, 12.6% more than four. Those who had endured more than seven ACEs in their childhood had a three times higher risk of lung cancer and a 3.5 times higher risk of heart attack. Even if the people surveyed had no additional risk behaviors such as smoking, poor diet or little exercise (which is also just a trauma survival strategy), they still had a higher disease risk. According to the authors, it was the toxic stress that destroyed their health (Felitti, Anda et al. 1998).
Further research has confirmed this result: childhood trauma leads to an increased risk of mental disorders and physical illnesses and reduces life expectancy. The body is unable to forget the violence it has suffered. Childhood trauma remains stored in the body. Time does not heal trauma wounds. On the contrary: The older we get, the weaker our powers of repression become, the less effective our survival strategies are and the more visible our wounds become.
A long-term study at Harvard University, already 75 years old and ongoing, of American men from both the lower and upper classes confirms that it is not cholesterol levels, but safe and supportive relationships that keep us physically and mentally healthy in old age. Living alone and isolated, on the other hand, makes you sick.
"I don't feel traumatized!"
An essential feature of psychotrauma is that it is denied both on a personal and societal level (Broughton 2013). Here is an example:
Maria M. (22) goes to the doctor because of a bladder infection. The doctor asks her if she has experienced a trauma. Maria M. answers no to the question, but after talking to her foster mother, she later provides more information and says that she was given to her foster parents when she was 2 years old. Her mother was a heroin addict and had used drugs while pregnant with Maria. With this knowledge, the doctor advises her to see a psychotherapist.
The therapist Maria goes to first thinks that she doesn't need to be worried, that she's a healthy young woman who hasn't been traumatized. Although she's relieved to hear this, she becomes unsure and comes to me to ask what I think about the situation. When she tells me that she was born with a very low birth weight, I congratulate her on the fact that she has managed to survive despite, in my view, massive traumatization in her mother's womb. After birth, she didn't receive any love and care and was probably completely overwhelmed by such a situation as a newborn. "But I don't feel traumatized!", she replies. Her bladder infection has been treated with antibiotics.
My answer is that it is her decision alone whether she wants to work through her early life story or not, i.e. whether she wants to approach topics such as a possible abortion attempt, lack of care, poisoning during pregnancy, lack of maternal love and the experience of being abandoned as an infant. In that case, it would perhaps be appropriate to take a closer look before she herself becomes a mother and has children. This argument seems to convince Maria, because she has a friend who also entered foster care at an early age, and for her, both pregnancy and birth have been a nightmare.
According to the experiences of both myself and the people I work with therapeutically, the following applies: Psychotraumas are repeated until they are understood, felt and thus resolved!
Prof. Dr. Franz Ruppert
