Supporting people with a lived experience of Trauma

@tyme I thought I would put this here to help you out (hopefully) with another conversation elsewhere (think it fits nicely with supporting people with a lived experience of Trauma also).

When we have experienced trauma at an early age, we can be mature for our years in our coping mechanisms. What trauma does, however, is stunt our emotional growth, leaving us with so many of those developmental milestones we would usually reach in childhood. This can lead to us needing more open validation, having abandonment issues, etc. into adulthood. It is not that we are not mature in our minds as we have had to deal with so much we should not have to deal with as children, it is more that we have not gone through those essential stages as children and we have to emtionally learn those strategies/mechanisms as adults.

Yes @Zoe7 , thank you. That's what I meant, but I didn't have the words. I was getting tangled in my own thinking.

See the above post @Birdofparadise8 @Captain24 @creative_writer about trauma if you think it is helpful. It's much better put than how I could put it today 🙂

Thanks @Zoe7

Not sure those members are all able to see the above @tyme Happy for you to copy and paste it across to the appropriate thread (might be better coming from you on that particular thread).

Good point @Zoe7 . I'll wait to see if they see it here. If not, I'll copy and paste it elsewhere. I didn't realise this was the Co-design hub until you indirectly pointed it out 🙂

LOL @tyme You must be tired. Look after yourself 💕

Hey @RachSANECEO I have two very opposing views here. The first one is that it is great having people who get it to be able to talk through things with. The other side is: sometimes by continuing to have these conversations, we get stuck in a loop and it can make things worse. I will expand on that a bit more. If we are constantly hearing other's stories as well as relaying our own, it can mean we are always on the merry-go-round in regards to trauma and sometimes that can prolong healing. Whilst everyone is at different stages and have their own experiences, sometimes it can be both triggering and frustrating when a member wants to relive their trauma over and over again but do not seem to be able to listen or make any grounds in respect to their own recovery.

As someone with a long history of so many traumatic incidents, I know how hard it is to even get to a place where I could deal with any of that history - but I wanted to get to that place. I see so many members who don't seem to want to get to that place themselves and blame everyone and everything for 'not getting better'. As a team (SANE staff, volunteers, forum members) we tend to enable that attitude and associated behaviours rather than having a clear approach and guidelines to assist with recovery.

So here is the dichotomy - everyone deserves support at all stages of their journey but that support can only be effective if the individual sees recovery as the end goal. There is often a very fine line between holding someone up and enabling.

I don’t really have anything to add.
@Zoe7 I believed has summed it up beautifully. Especially the part about members not willing to help themselves. You can’t help those that don’t want to be helped.

I think I get what you're saying, @Zoe7 , but also sometimes the situation is that the sufferer's problem isn't getting fixed, and so they have to keep repeating themselves hoping to get someone's attention this time. Recovery is still the goal, but unfortunately that recovery requires a lot of repetition.

This is no different to many other areas of the mental health system, where often you need to repeat yourself a thousand times to a doctor/therapist, and they still don't seem to have understood (or listened to) what you were saying.

So, I think that, in terms of looking at how to develop a solution to this sort of conduct, we need to remember that it's not the repetitious conversation that's the problem - it's the lack of any forthcoming solution. And I think we need to build strategies based around that idea.

Very much hearing you @chibam and value your opinion here with everything you have had to endure. I think we can divide this area into 2 separate scenarios - 1. is for those that the system obviously fails because it is not equipped to deal with complex MH and/or you (we) are not listened to. That then leads to not only frustration with the system but also anger that you are not being heard. One cannot truly be supported if one is not listened to.

The second is the other side - those that have all that support in place but will not do anything to help themselves. This can be for many reasons but ultimately it is they who need to do the work. This second scenario is where I am coming from in my previous post. As a community, we can talk through things over and over again - if a member needs this then that is okay but in some instances, those members will not do anything to help themselves and get caught on the 'merry-go-round of support'. By that I mean the more support they have to continue on in the same vain, the more they become reliant on that as external validation and the less they are likely to break free of whatever is holding them back and start that journey of recovery. I have been there so have some insight into this. Having such low self-esteem and such little value for my own self meant that anyone showing me even a little bit of attention (whether it was positive or negative) I held onto. I also did not believe in myself nor in my own ability to help myself (and quite frankly did not care or want to). Life was just a series of trauma, pain and disappointment - and it was not until I took some accountability for my own self that things (slowly) began to change. I am very fortunate that I found the right team to help with that - here I absolutely acknowledge that that is not the case for so many ....but I have also seen a similar level of support for some others but without them actually taking the steps needed, nothing changes.

@Zoe7Yes, I can see your point of view. I guess my main concern is, how do we tell one type from another?

Because if we don't have a good system for doing that, you could easily wind up with people with legitimate needs being ushered away from the help they really need.

I worry that it would be really easy for an outsider to confuse one type with the other. I was often accused of "not doing enough" of what my therapist wanted, even though my reluctance to obeying her was well grounded in her previous history of exploiting me, or legitimate scepticism about her questionable schemes, or sometimes simply the fact that she wouldn't even tell me what the hell she actually wanted me to do.

There's a gaslighting effect to that, too. Like even if it doesn't come from a trustworthy source, those accusations can have you doubting whether or not you are actually the bad guy, for not doing as your told; or for not understanding the ambiguous messages. So you might even get people unfairly mis-identifying themselves as people who aren't doing what their supposed to be doing for their recovery.