Denial and Other Escapes Part III

*Trigger Warning: This article contains references to and graphic descriptions of self-harm,

consensual sex and sexual abuse; reader discretion is advised.

The Boil-Down: This is the third segment in a series of entries about avoidance tactics used by virtually all humans at one time or another, to escape untenable realities or accountability for hurtful or perceivably unfair actions against others. While denial often introduces itself involuntarily to the suffering human mind, it can also be tactically developed by a person initially as a lie more palatable than an unpleasant truth--a lie which the author herself eventually begins to believe. This entry will examine two common attachment grief avoidance tactics used by survivors of trauma early in the journey to recovery: reenactment and undoing. These strategies are both self-empowering to the survivor and self-harming, and are maintained by denial and other defense mechanisms.

The Details: In his 2001 book The Trauma Model, Colin Ross describes ways that trauma survivors attempt to deal with the bad things that never should have happened to them. He prefaces his description by emphasizing that any strategy not designed to help the survivor face what happened to them and grieve the resultant attachment trauma is grief avoidance. The Trauma Model does not place alcohol and substance abuse in a separate category from tactics that don't rely on external chemicals; it's all avoidance. All such strategies are escapes designed to take us from here (where the pain is unbearable) to over "there" (where there is relief, albeit with side effects and accrued interest in pain in the long run).

Reenactment and undoing are two other strategies used by the traumatized mind to escape the pain caused by psychological trauma and its locus of control shift, which in the victim's mind (often thanks to projection inherent in the perp's words and actions) removes blame from the perp and places blame on the victim. All of this pain feels unmanageable to the child victim, who eventually makes strides over her sense of helplessness by trying to "undo" the trauma. In fact, the locus of control shift is in itself an undoing: "Dad isn't bad; he loves me but he harms me because I am bad. All I have to learn to do is be good enough and I can make my dad love me right." The victim "undoes" the bad father by exchanging it for the mythical bad self, which (in the child's mind) ends the helplessness and gives her a sense of control over the crisis.

As another example of undoing, a girl who was raped over and over by her stepfather from ages eight to eleven might undo her trauma by loathing sex and avoiding intercourse in adolescence and adulthood. Or she might undo her perp by experimenting sexually outside the home at age twelve (which reenacts the traumatic component of having sex prematurely given her age) while avoiding having sex with partners who remind her of her stepfather--for instance, only having sex with female partners. A third undoing strategy might be running away at age fourteen to stay with various older men who remind her of her stepfather and who still sexually exploit her. This tactic reenacts her sexual abuse while giving her a feeling of empowerment because she is choosing her perpetrators, thereby undoing the trauma in her mind. Fourth, she might reenact the abuse by engaging with a safe chosen partner in the same sexual behaviors her perp forced her to perform; or she might undo the abuse by forbidding sexual behaviors, positions and words used during the act that might remind her of her trauma.

As a survivor engages in reenactment and undoing, he will be immediately presented with information to make him aware that it is harmful; this is the case whether he realizes he is reenacting and undoing past trauma or not. Strategies of reenactment and undoing--drinking, abusing street drugs or prescriptions, staying with abusive partners, using tension-reduction behaviors (TRBs) such as cutting or burning the skin, spending Christmas at the home of his family of origin, where a perp is likely to groom or reabuse the victim--such decisions will have unpleasant side effects including reinforcing negative beliefs about the self. What will make it easy to keep such unhealthy habits? Denial, justification, apathy, and other defense mechanisms. "At least I'm not suicidal as often as I used to be." "She doesn't treat me as badly as Mom used to." "Pills are not the problem...men are the problem! Xanax is my friend."

These are not the only means of reenacting and undoing the past. Traumatic history tends to repeat itself; when we carry an unresolved conflict from one developmental stage into the next, there is high risk of a crisis in that next developmental stage. "Do you see the way Luna's husband never spends any time with her? It's as though she married her father." And everyone notice's that Damon's girlfriend controls and henpecks him the way his mother consistently did. While not consciously so, Luna and Damon can be described as reenacting previous attachment trauma by the adult relationships in which they find themselves. But some kinds of reenactment or undoing which originate as trauma-driven phenomena do not have to be outwardly destructive. Leticia painfully loses her beloved grandmother to a brain tumor when Leticia is nine years old. She works her way through medical school to become a top-notch brain surgeon. It can be said that Leticia's career path is undoing grandmother's death by way of a traumatic promise to do everything in her power to save every patient that arrives on her operating table. In trauma therapy it is revealed that Leticia still magically blames herself for Grandma's death. She forgot to say prayers the night before Grandma died in brain surgery, and mythically concluded that she "killed" Grandma. This kind of magical thinking is not uncommon as a child's inner response to a traumatic event. Thankfully, Leticia's trauma therapy reverses this locus of control shift, and she continues her heroic career "off the triangle," having fully let go of her self-blame.

Let's next consider Girard, who was violently and routinely spanked by his mother well into adolescence. At age fifteen, he would still be required to pull his pants down to his ankles, exposing his genitals during the punishment. Then he would have to lay across his mother's lap while she beat him with implements until the pain was unbearable and there were welts and bruises all over his legs and buttocks. Occasionally, the stimulation of his exposed penis against his mother's thighs would cause him to ejaculate, prompting his mother to shame and demean him, then beat him some more. Ten years later in the context of a loving monogamous relationship, Girard has a tendency to ask his older female partner to spank his bare buttocks until he ejaculates. However, when the partner asks him to act out her own sexual preferences, Girard struggles to perform, usually failing to maintain an erection or ejaculating prematurely (his urologist tested him and reassured him there was nothing medically wrong). In virtually all other areas of relationship, Girard is a faithful, reliable, hard-working partner. But when his therapist asks him to evaluate his own sense of self, Girard expresses the consistent belief that he is a worthless, inadequate partner, a failure. Trauma therapy guides Girard in processing the traumatic events suffered at the hands of his mother. With past trauma resolved, he continues to be a loyal, loving partner, and now he can fully perform in the bedroom, able to fulfill his partner's fantasies as well as his own. He may still desire the spanking reenactment or he may not; either way, Girard consistently believes he is a worthy, capable person and partner. He is no longer reenacting his mother's abuse for the purpose of undoing.

What You Can Do: As the reader, you can become increasingly aware of reenactment and undoing in your own life. If the related habits of thought or behavior seem self-harmful or self-defeating and are difficult to stop, you can reach out to a trauma therapist to resolve the habits and grieve the attachment trauma prompting those thoughts and behaviors, thereby ending reenactment and undoing, or at least taking those behaviors off the PVR triangle. (If your habit is one of primary substance abuse, it will be important to complete a properly robust course of substance abuse recovery before entering trauma-focused individual or relationship therapy.) Such recovery will be a giant leap for your mental and emotional health.

*The concepts of reenactment and undoing and other concepts to follow will be used in the Eyes Wide Open project to help the reader to identify the impact of previously "invisible" forces upon individuals and groups, see past related human tactics, and gain a more effective understanding of events in the family, the government and other institutions, in the media and in politics.