A Hidden Superpower of Trauma

There’s a concept I learned from Janina Fisher, a brilliant therapist, who spoke at a trauma conference I attended: that our capacity to dissociate from our traumatic emotions is a superpower. This really kind of shocked me. I harbored a lot of guilt about how I powered through things in my life without truly feeling my grief and other big emotions. I felt damaged; that my ability get sh*t done even with devastating things going on in my life meant a part of me was broken. Like the time I was at work and my mom called to say my dad had died. And I teared up, told my medical assistant, and said I would finish seeing the next two patients, then leave. And she said, “Don’t you want to just… go home now?” And I was like, wait, I can do that?! And I thought something was seriously broken in me to NOT have thought of that to begin with. But another thing that I learned from Janina was that my automatic response was normal  - this getting sh*t done part of me acts on instinct. It didn’t present as a decision. Another time I was diagnosed with kidney cancer that only had a 5% five-year survival rate and I barely took time off after my surgery. My “get your shiz together” self stepped in without me even thinking about it, and I was back in my graduate program, determined to graduate on time. We’ve all likely experienced this to some degree, even as children. Like when we felt a big emotion like rejection or shame, or we experienced some kind of abuse or violence. The way we dealt with might have been to check out. We pretended to fall asleep, or we forgot the memory (or didn’t even allow ourselves to make a memory). We might also just drop into our thinking mind and hyper-intellectualize something. Explain it away. So how is all this a superpower? Because when we can access this, NOW there’s a part of us as a child that can continue to grow and develop relatively normally. That’s how we can have a traumatic experience and still go to school. And as adults, still go to work to pay the bills. The problem later in life is we’ve taken the part of us that was in deep suffering and we “other” them; we make them NOT a part of us.  Janina calls this self-alienation. But our capacity to get shit done through this self-alienation helps us adapt to trauma. It’s wild. And it’s also amazing what we’re able to do to survive. Right? But whenever these big feelings come up now, instead of comforting ourselves and showing self-compassion and love for that younger version of ourselves, we often criticize or shame ourselves. We self-judge and self-hate. As a result of this alienation from our true selves, we may also intellectualize, or numb out our feelings.  Or we might get overwhelmed and hijacked by emotion, not having access to our rational mind at all.  We might also avoid taking ownership over our harmful, unskillful behavior. Or maybe we don’t see it at all.  There are a several reasons we self-alienate, even though it can cause us so much suffering: For one our brain is set up for it. The two biggest structures in the brain are the left and right hemisphere. The left is very analytical, focusing on things like planning, organizing, and executive function. And the right is emotional and intuitive. It’s more closely associated with the limbic system. As kids, we are more right-brained, and the left brain develops more slowly. They’re split with a line down the middle where the corpus callosum is. This structure helps those two sides communicate. BUT that middle structure develops very slowly. So here we have our sensing emotional brain on the right, and our thinking, verbalizing, logical brain on the left, and the two don’t actually speak to each other for man