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“Our brokenness summons light into the deepest crevices in our hearts.”
“We remember the people who show up in our darkest hours.” ― Shauna L. Hoey |
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Courtesy The Traumatology Institute
Treating Trauma Within The Family
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Trauma & The Family
If there's a single piece of information that I'd like to put down for families to consider, it's that the reality of trauma and it's after-math has a goal: To tear your family apart. It's the nature of the symptoms of the beast to try to do that to us. Word from one who's been there now twice: Don't let the trauma win! |
Trauma can destroy families, no question. But, recovery together from traumatic experiences, PTSD, Depression, Addictions, and other illnesses has the power to unite us and make us together as a family STRONGER for the experience. I encourage all in the family to review this information to plant a seed of hope inside that is all about the potential for trauma experience in your family to grow into being all-about: Post Traumatic Growth.
It is so very true; When one member of the family is suffering through trauma issues, the entire family suffers too, When right help isn't accessed in a timely way, due to any number of reasons, trauma can morph itself into PTSD. Due to non-access to services, by choice, or, for instance, due to the cost of care being for some-out of reach:
Serious damage to familial relationships can devastate any process for recovery for all. I know not one person I've met who's in this boat express themselves any differently: We want recovery. I think we all, deep-down, all wish an experience of full recovery, with recovery for family members included, could come fully true. We want this for ourselves, and for any in our lives who've been wounded in sharing with us of our trauma experience and resulting illnesses. Once trauma lays it's roots deep-enough to grow the tree that is mental health struggle (inability to solve the issues when we're dealing with PTSD, Depression, Substance/Alcohol Use Disorder): Not only is the one diagnosed with issues in need of professional support, support needs to be accessed by all in the family.
I'll personally dance a jig when the day finally rolls around that our care systems get-it where trauma and these conditions are concerned. I'll know we've achieved an evolutionary leap, when we can all look at mental health as being on the same tier of importance as we view physical health issues.
For policy-makers in Canada, and for leadership in those professions where the potential for traumatic stress injury is high, I stand with British MP and advocate, Norman Lamb, who had this to say during a mental health conference held in Victoria BC in the fall of 2016:
"It's not only MORALLY WRONG. It's economically stupid for governments (and leadership) to not put mental health care on the same tier as physical health care."
I'll be full of glee when all of society stops stigmatizing any issues of the human condition that we judge, wrongly, as abnormal. Given that there are an estimated 280, 000, 000 (4% of the world population) that's diagnosed with PTSD, the issue of psychological trauma in humans is quite high.
Trauma is part of the human condition. The outcomes of trauma are what happens. Therefore, there is nothing abnormal about any of it-we've simply learned too little about these issues we humans face. Rather than learn about these issues, we've ignored them. In doing so, we've deceived ourselves into believing when we're personally hit with trauma issues, we're somehow weaker than any other might be.
With this self-deceit, we are accepting the default societal positions that stigmatize without challenging ourselves to change-which can come for us by accepting the challenge trauma puts upon us to learn everything we can about the issues we're dealing with. Issues for us that we'll be facing alongside our fellow 280, 000, 000 world citizens who are in the precise same boat.
This is society here I'm speaking towards too. I know I'd accepted the misinformation about mental illness along with many, prior to my own diagnosis, having taken in much misinformation over the years. I've learned that's why we end up considering suicide-stigma is the cause, and depression fuels suicidal thinking using all the negative information it can find to trip us up.
I attempted suicide 3 years ago. We've lost too many in Canada to suicide due to trauma issues. At the core of my on suicide attempt in 2015, I was accepting these struggles and illnesses as the worst thing I could ever end up with. I judged myself-condemned myself even, having accepted both stigma's and depression's lies. Stigmatization is inappropriate, toxic-shaming. It's bullying others when we stigmatize them. It's the inner-bullying we get via self-stigmatization (fueled by depression) that will push us into a decision, more times than once, that intends to cause our death by our own hand.
I look at it this way today:
Because I know that traumatic stress chemistry in the body injures the brain; and now that I know that PTSD is a negative outcome that happens when treatment is delayed or mismanaged; and because I now view PTSD, not as a mental illness, but rather as an issue with our entire nervous system in the body-a central nervous system condition that equates to what is, in fact, a dysfunctional, human-stress-response:
I stigmatize myself far less in measure than I once did, and I accept little stigmatization from society anymore.
I stopped bullying myself any further when I woke up after my attempt in 2015. Facing near death, I chose to stop believing any lies my own depression still hopes to tell.
I no longer believe a single lie that depression and stigma hopes to tell.
It's said we avoid seeking help due to the self-imposed stigma. Reality-Check-Symptom Number One of PTSD is-'avoiding reminders of the trauma'. That's what I believe is the issue when we won't seek help, much more-so than it being about stigma. But the two issues combine inside in ways that the voice of depression can be far too convincing.
Do you have PTSD already? Are you dealing on top of that with Depression? Maybe too, Substance/Alcohol Use issues?Do you want to end the suffering? Is suicide a thought you deal with from-time-to-time?
Seek help. And, seek help, as well, for your entire family. Don't let the trauma win by allowing it to destroy it all, when today, with treatment available, that need not happen in our time anymore at all. I can't stress this strongly enough:
I lost two very important partner relationships due to these illnesses and the behavioural symptoms these illnesses generate. I've coached now family members and I've heard from them how devastating it is to watch a loved-one struggle with so much seeming un-fixable emotional pain. I've heard from others in my peer-group who've lost family to trauma as well. All family stories are unfortunately not that different from one another when trauma wins.
Too many of us take our own lives.
I've heard now too, enough stories of how strong families can become when we REFUSE together to allow trauma issues to rip us apart, family-limb from family-limb. I've also witnessed in those families that held it together how powerfully supportive our families can be. I've witnessed in stricken families, outcomes of post-trauma growth that recreated the family to be more-highly resilient to stress.
Because of the strength that can come when the full-outcome for us is post traumatic growth, I share for all visiting here, the rising hope within myself, as I've witnessed how powerfully positive a PTG outcome can be.
I embrace that sense of growth now every time, like now, I've achieved a remission. When depression tries to steal it all away (remission) I now simply thank it for showing up again to remind me how precious my life is.
My mentor, Dr. Baranowsky, in her Community & Workplace Traumatology course, taught me that traumatic experiences are like pebbles that are dropped into a pond. My lived experience aligns with much Dr. Baranowsky shares. The one stricken is the first in the pond to take a hit from the rock of truamatization that hits the pond. Once hit, the ripples of the rock hitting the water of the pond, spread outward. This spreads the impact of suffering towards family across the landscape of family life. This impact of trauma spreads into family when the issues go unchecked and untreated. Thus why ALL need to be included in treatment right out of the gate when trauma strikes the family, the sooner, the better for all.
How else do we stop the ripples from causing others unnecessary harm? If we're all wandering through trauma's aftermath literally blind due to lack of provision of constructive, supportive psycho-education: Frankly family left to ourselves don't really have a chance of holding it together. Why? Because we don't have the information we need to understand what's actually happening to us all. With the intensity of trauma's symptoms behaviourally, it's easy to moralize the one suffering, judging behaviour that without trauma activating symptoms of PTSD etc: The one stricken wouldn't behave in any way that deserves moral judgement from anyone.
Without family therapy, and without the first-stricken getting help as immediately following trauma as is possible-the outcomes of familial self-destruction speak pretty clearly for themselves. When we're empowered to seek help and treatment as soon as we can once we understand that we're dealing with the outcome of traumatic stress injury in our lives:
In seeking that help, we seek help for our families as well, if we're wise that is. If we're deeply committed to staying together, rather than allowing fear and frank denial to maintain a battle at home among us that quite simply won't do a thing to help anyone, it's with such commitment in play that we'll be empowered with the strength to do all we must to challenge these conditions rightly.
Another mentor of mine, Dr. Jonathan Douglas, once shared this my way, and I agree with him:
"When Right help is granted, people will get well. When right help is denied, by self, or by still-weak-systems of care, people don't get well."
I may be repeating myself here, but that's how important sharing this information is to me. Families are destroyed by trauma. I sincerely want any others reading my words to hear this:
The culprit that might seem to be all about behaviour, past hurts, wounding via dysfunctional communication, and separation from one another as the family member stricken retreats into apparent isolation: It is the TRAUMA and the symptoms of these illnesses that is the true problem-child, playing as any bully might choose to do, dysfunctionally with us in our personal, family sand-box.
Trauma in the family sand-box is the bully none of us invited-in to play.
In those professions where traumatic experiences infiltrate the human brain and psyche at very high-levels, in policing, paramedicine, corrections services, emergency services dispatch, the military, other ems operation centers, and frankly all other care-professions we can count: It's becomes seriously important for our families to understand what we're ALL getting ourselves into when we sign up to serve our country, provinces, communities, and humanity.
My own family was blind-sided by the issues of trauma I brought home from the work. Add to this very serious consequence of service the high-level duty-commitment that all who serve bring to the dinner-tables in our homes each day (with this sense of duty causing enough stress for the family all-on-its-own) family-life can morph negatively over time into a situation that puts us all as a family in serious jeopardy.
I think it's time this country of citizens gets-it along with those of us who've had to face this monster: Not only are WE, the cop, the dispatcher, the paramedic, the fire fighter, the corrections officer, dispatcher, or the soldier serving humanity in these professions. OUR FAMILIES are serving humanity along with us. As much as our care and protection of society matters, ourselves and our families matter too when things go so desperately wrong.
What is our family's pay for their contribution to the services our entire families provide to communities? For many of us tied to long-hours, shift-work, over-time, and too-often workaholism, driven by this high-inner-sense of duty: Our families PAY in dramatic and painful ways, not only when we come home messed-up from trauma, they PAY every day we're not able to put our families first.
I missed so much family-time committing to a life as a rural, so-called part-time paramedic serving in my home community. Tied to a pager more often than not, my family lost me from many family functions, including birthdays with my kids, celebrations at Christmas, school functions and the like. I'm still dumb-struck looking back upon the life I brought into my family-space that I was so in denial about. I lost them to the stress of both the work itself, but also to the trauma I brought into the family home that I wasn't able to resolve, regardless of my own best efforts, simply due to the fact that right, trauma-informed help for my generation of Canadian First Responders wasn't readily available.
That's not the case today. Search for help using these two sources in BC, specify in the search that trauma is the issue, and we find many now serving as counselors and psychologists with the specialized skill needed to help us ALL through the experience.
Those in the general population living with trauma, PTSD and co-morbid mental health issues, know VERY WELL how impacting we, the stricken, can be towards our families too. When one is stuck in a state of constant fight-or-flight, the behavioural symptoms we present often are frightening, confusing, and challenging for our family members to say the least.
First of all for ourselves, but for every other important person we have in our lives: Symptoms of illnesses we don't have the information we need to understand what's going on, keep the struggles in a state of flux, with tensions rising in the family home as these illnesses, untreated, go on-and-on. As this progresses, things go-on to leave behind an incredible mess-a mess so often overwhelming, none of us know where to start to clean the mess back up.
With the go-to response to troubling behaviours being for family members to judge the person presenting these off-the-wall behaviours, which is a valid response-without question: The potential for what I refer to as 'trauma-drama' in the family home is significantly and destructively very high.
What is 'trauma-drama'?
I look at it as the stage-play WE, the one stricken, create with our behaviours in family. I personally didn't get any answers clinically in my own experience until years after my family had self-destructed. The drama at home consisted of me KNOWING I was not the man I promised both of my life-partners I would be, as I went about doing things, blindly hoping to help us all. Taking certain actions along the way, that I'd hoped would get rid of the emotional upset I was then feeling every minute of the day, simply caused more harm than many of these steps did any good for any of us.
In my first marriage, I was not the Dad I'd promised to be bringing children into our lives. I knew that-as did my wife and kids. As my illnesses took over my being, I came up with all variety of reasons as to WHY I felt the way I did-ill with both PTSD and Depression nearly from day-one serving as a paramedic. Every step I took, not only didn't resolve the pain, some of those steps were frankly ridiculous looking back at myself and my struggling for answers during that time.
To spare myself the shame of it all again, I'll not rehash all the monstrous details. I'll just say that I put both my first wife and my latter in life second partner through hell. I put my children through hell. I put my extended family and closest friendships through hell.
Not to leave anyone out, I put myself through unnecessary hell as well.
Trauma-injury, and resulting illness put us all through hell-like a stone in a pond, our own pain ripples towards everyone around us.
I share this to validate for others that trauma in one, spreads across the pond. It spreads to all closest to us. First in family, but also to peers and trusted friendships. I've lost many to this beast living inside of me. I now more compassionately understand why others need to sometimes give up on us in order to hold-on-to themselves.
For a very long time, I thought I'd been taken over by a demon. I know this isn't factual. But I most certainly found myself not living anything BUT darkness in my life for far too long a time. Darkness-and facing it, however: This too has the potential to bless all in this boat. My sojourn into my dark-side (Jung calls this 'The Shadow') became for me another valued teacher.
"Knowing your own darkness, is the best method for (dealing with it) (and) for dealing with the (evident) darkness in others."
~ Carl Jung
Too many fellow-humans wish to continue on in life denying they have a shadow at all. Which is sure folly. We can only maintain denial of such things for so long. According to Jung, we're best to work with help to reconcile our better-self with our shadow-self. Integrating the two sides of our human nature is a gift that I believe too many of us (trauma in our lives or not) are afraid to open. When trauma strikes, for me, I had no choice but to ultimately go into myself as deeply as I could stand.
For many of us, we know trauma as a moral injury. No more evident is the outcome of moral injury than in family.
The moral injury of traumatic stress and resulting mental health issues, comes for some of us, like in policing, when we are confronted with loss of other-human-life that a cop, doing her job, has been forced to take.
In medicine, there's a sense of moral injury that comes over those we could not save.
For others of us, both in service professions and in those that struggle from general society, the moral injuries come in the form of our behaviours (symptoms or otherwise). As our negative behaviour starts taking over in our lives, behaviour that makes others with us question what's happened to our character and values:
Our behavourial symptoms that challenge us so deeply as they present to us, end up being judged. It's important to stick to keeping a conscience alive that knows right from wrong. However, once we KNOW what the problem actually is, trauma and resulting conditions have a clinical description. From there, these conditions are best kept, from that point forward, by all in the family-understood through clinical eyes.
With misinformation floating around in the society at at large, too many stick to using this misinformation rather than informing ourselves. It's this misinformation that generates judgement. In society, it's this judgement, formed with untruths, that comes at us through stigma. In facing stigma the entire society seems to turn on us.
High levels of stigma compounds our issues, causing for the stricken one of the most devastating moral injuries of all.
If we've lived as children through a too-highly moralized upbringing, the information of that upbringing will be filtering our perceptions of ourselves too. We all know what 'good' behaviour and 'bad' behaviour looks like. We're often in such a state, once sick, trying to live-up to the moral expectations of our upbringings becomes more and more impossible. The demon-wrestling this ignites with trauma, leaves us sensing that we no-longer understand those past family-values we once leaned-on any longer at all.
Before trauma came along to destroy our own sense of our personal character and inner-moral-fiber: Unless we are one of the identified 1% of the human population that are true psychopaths or sociopaths, when we see our own once supportive value-system falling apart, therein lies the 'moral' part of the injury. Society stands ready to reinforce any false-beliefs we carry that family and societal beliefs about the so-called mentally ill drilled into us all. To recover, in my experience, takes a challenge towards our belief-system-given that what we think we've learned correctly about these so-called mental illnesses prove themselves as wrong the more right information we receive to support more supportive beliefs.
Immorality isn't attached to any of the trauma-induced sicknesses themselves. The sources of trauma certainly often have collapsed morality attached to them. I'm now fully informed, and absolutely now accept, that the trauma of often horrific Adverse Childhood Experiences can haunt us and live inside, unresolved, for entire life-times. The issue of Adverse Childhood Experiences, with all the rank elements of all kinds of abuse in too many children's lives when we were growing up, do, in fact, as the science now makes very clear-cause us so much harm that the trauma carries on in our lives as adults when we've not had opportunity to deal rightly with trauma issues.
This issue of the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences negatively impacting adult-life is highly evident in Canada for First Nations people who've suffered the damage of trauma delivered to them growing up in Residential Schools. The trauma of colonialism is STILL causing First Nations families, and I'd argue, our society on the whole, much suffering that now needs truthful acceptance. On the part of those of us living off-reserve today as descendants of settlers, living main-stream in settler society, what's needed now is frank repentance if we wish to heal the wounded historical spirit that is our Canada today.
One of the issues I think it's important for us all to understand: Children who've had to grow up in a family home with a family member struggling with mental health and/or addictions issues: This is listed as an issue that is identified as an Adverse Childhood Experience. All the more reason to seek help early on, and to seek help for every family member as an act of self-defense.
For those reading here who are the primary person in the family with mental health issues related to trauma, I share what I've written here to persuade those who may still be too fearful to enter into treatment to do so, as soon now as you can. The reality is, particularly when we end up dealing with addiction on-top of the other issues with depression and PTSD, some of us find ourselves living lives in response to our illnesses that generate inside nothing but inner-toxic-shame. The shame is toxic because it gets in the way of us reaching out for help soon-enough to protect ourselves from full-demise or the demise of our family.
Toxic-Shame is misplaced shame. It is USELESS shame. Shame itself is a useless construct. It teaches us nothing about ourselves and it's a contributing factor as to why too many who are traumatized fail to expose those toxic-secrets that traumatized us. It's due to toxic-shaming of the self that too many pull-away from opportunities for right treatment.
What, with any illness, does anyone have to be ashamed about? Not a thing. Please reflect on that fact. Illness is nothing to be ashamed of.
I admit I was behaviourally a literal twit in my family home, hoping to hold up a falling sky when I was most sick and extremely confused. I started hiding away in my basement, knowing I was hurting my wife and kids. Ashamed that I was failing everyone as our family life started to feel as though I couldn't handle it, I hid away. I knew I was falling apart, and in retrospect, I was also isolating because I KNEW how I was hurting my first wife and my children. The rage I could express towards my kids, rage at them often (anxiety driven) over them only being kids (too loud etc):
Looking back this breaks my heart.
The blame I leveled upon my wife as though SHE was my problem: Looking back on the damage that blame did to my wife, breaks today my heart too. The blame I put upon my last partner for needing to ditch to save herself from my addictions: Today I can only again feel remorse for putting her through that and her kids.
The shame I feel is today more about remorse, far more often than shame. I refuse to beat myself up any longer for not understanding soon enough, or learning fast enough, all that I needed to learn to have hope to recover and hold either family together.
My suicide attempt in 2015 did serious damage in my last relationship and to my family, my sons, my mother, and extended family. The reality is, suicide is the end-game for us when we've run out of supportive people and options for recovery remain too far away. Or, for many of us stricken, poverty and lack of trauma-informed clinicians in our publicly funded healthcare systems make it so that HELP is not available at all.
It is very real, I assure you, the struggle for those of us who've ended up as ill as we have due to work-caused legitimate injury and illness. It's very real, the struggle, for any and all in society who need to face these illnesses and the daunting challenges we face hoping to be well.
For those reading who've suffered traumatic stress injuries in vocation, when the response towards us is a self-protective slaughtering of our ability to support ourselves with compensative income, this only reinforces the trauma more-deeply. For those of us struck in employment, therein lies the frank abuse against our families that comes in the form of 'Sanctuary Trauma'. It's this additional trauma that almost ensures a family dealing with these issues will ultimately fall completely apart, or that the one stricken will take her own life.
As I shared recently with a Director (leader) with my past employer I'll meet with finally to share what I've learned with his management team next month (Sept. 2018):
"Do you want to ensure our death to suicide? When any first responders working for you hit the wall over traumatic-stress injury and PTSD: By all means, keep participating in taking our access to money away. I GUARANTEE, if that's what you continue to do, knowing what could be the outcome for your worker's families, eventually, and rightly, that participation WILL come back around and bite you, as a leader, HARD, upon your own being ultimately."
My point is: In Canada, for a very long time, it's been legislated to be the employer's responsibility to keep their workers safe from injury, resulting harms, both mentally as well as physically. Should an employer fail in this duty, in Canada today, such inaction to protect the life and well-being of workers is now rightly considered a criminal matter:
Rather than state the reality here, I'll simply refer readers to the provisions put down to ensure protection of workers that is in Canadian Law, The Westray Act.
I'm still struggling to understand, as you can tell reading, how anyone working as our employers could choose to not support anyone injured working in public safety when we are traumatically injured and go on to develop illness as a consequence. At the level of Government and Compensation Law, Canada is now catching up to reality on many fronts. This movement forward on these issues has resulted finally in many moves in Provincial Legislatures to amend Compensation Legislation.
Coming soon, as I see it, coast-to-coast, our employers will find themselves legislated into accepting traumatic stress injury and resulting illnesses as work-caused. This is long over-due. This is something I personally fought for in British Columbia for 13 years. With the help of many, we finally achieved this change in here in April.
Law that governs our compensation systems need to empower employers and the compensation system itself to make decisions that cause no, egregious, additional harm to ourselves and our families (in their own chosen responses to trauma and mental health issues) and the issue of sanctuary trauma, with these changes, we hope now might be mitigated entirely.
"Sanctuary Trauma". I've touched on this issue across this site. No more harm is there evident in the impact of sanctuary trauma than has happened too often in the past, put upon already struggling families by those compensation systems we all assume are in place to protect us. Nowhere have we who've given our lives in service to our country experienced the compounding impact that sanctuary trauma puts upon us, then through the actions, or inaction, of employers, compensation systems, or through the mistakes made by those therapists who try to treat us without the right education to do so.
Sanctuary Trauma: Dr. Sandra Bloom, M.D. I ask that all visiting here, and your families if you're struggling, give this a read.
This is where I'm at, and forgive the stronger language:
None of the confusing feelings, judgments, and expressions from stigma that shame us can do a God-damned thing that's healing or constructive. In order to offer up to any of us who've had our families fall apart any opportunity for relationship repair, we must agree to seek help together, and we need strong, trauma-informed systems of care to respond appropriately when we do. Trauma, managed wrongly, steals away from us one of the most precious gifts we're granted as human beings:
TRUST in one-another. When our developing issues go for too long not, or improperly treated, trust will break-down insidiously over time. With right help and understanding of our issues clinically, we're better empowered to not lay on one-another any additional judgments that will only serve in getting us nowhere as family. We need to trust our employers and systems of care to be able, and willing, to do all that can be done to assist us out of our trauma experience.
Once trust is broken enough times in family, and in employment relationships, there's no amount of sorry one can express to bring that trust back into the relationship now destroyed. Moral injury, discussed earlier, comes through loss of trust too.
In family, loss of trust results in loss of intimacy, and of mutually shared respect. When we understand that it is all-about a misunderstood illness, though not easy, given past indoctrination, this makes it at least possible to learn to not take symptom-driven outbursts with one another personally-which is something that needs to be learned as the family commits to recovery together. Family can't learn this stuff if we choose to keep away from trauma-informed care.
To survive today, and to move forward, I personally can not, and no longer will, judge myself for the symptoms of my illnesses, for the injury, for my suicide attempt, nor for my addiction. I will not judge myself for being injured on the job and ending up so desperately ill. I accept I'm one in the world of 280.000.000 others who are dealing with these issues along with me.
I own, however, and accept all the way: Others were hurt by trauma, PTSD, Depression, and Substance Use Disorder having entered our shared lives in ways that continue to demand from me sincere remorse for those behaviours I presented that hurt.
What troubles me most of all is:
If I'd known then what I finally know today, much of what my families went through didn't need to happen for any of us at all.
Thus my focus here on sharing how important for us in recovery for our families to become, and to remain with us, as highly informed about the issues as we all can be.
Without our families remaining in our lives and fully informed along with us so they're all comfortable remaining in our court, recovery is simply that much more arduous, long, troubled, and extremely lonely to get through alone.
We can't get through any of what we must face due to traumatization in life without social supports. Our families, for those of us in care-professions and public safety/military professions, are, in fact, our first line of defense. Our families will see change in us before we'll begin to drop our own denial enough to see the negative changes happening to us. Our families will express that change they see in us our way, sometimes clearly, sometimes through dysfunctional communication until we all learn better, but they will tell us what's going wrong often before we see it in ourselves.
My advice for visitors here. Advice hard-won, as the lessons delivered into my own being came from the teachers that run the School of Hard Knocks:
LISTEN TO THEM. HEAR YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS WHEN THEY TELL YOU THINGS ARE GOING WRONG.
We may not like what they have to say, but, please trust me on this, our families need not be destroyed through being hammered themselves by us failing due to these illnesses. With immediate help in the after-math of trauma, all that this trauma-thing longs to destroy, with RIGHT CARE out of the gate, need not happen.
I'm pretty sure all can agree: We love our family. More than for some of us than family members were able to see anymore from us. As much as the symptoms of trauma wish to suggest to us directly that we're personally now worth-less, and as such, must now take our own steps to die sometimes-to that, these days, I'll share this new-word I've somehow picked up to use lately:
BOLLOCKS. (I love that word).
WE ARE ALL precious human life. OUR FAMILIES ARE precious human life. The way we keep that all together is to work together facing the reality of these issues together, agreeing to walk through our recovery process as a family, together, hand-in-hand.
I can say today that I heard from my partners EVERY WORD they often threw at me to wake me up. My own denial for a very long time was deep. I knew I was struggling. In my first marriage, my wife kept telling me so, as did the faces of hurt upon my sons when I'd lose it their way. I knew I wasn't living up to neither my own values as a family-man, nor was I living up to my family's expectations on-the-whole.
And, I recall clearly, making promises to be the best I could be to my first wife on my wedding day.
For too long, I simply didn't know what to do, once trauma hit me and illness took hold. The choices I made hoping to end my pain, only delivered more pain, on-top-of-pain, for my now highly confused family-relationships to live with or understand.
Trauma-Drama: This is the stage-play that comes into view when families are not supported directly along with us through recovery. With us all finding through family-treatment efforts the right information we need, much family grief can be avoided.
First-and-foremost, in order to approach our crumbling situation as a family with dignity and right-mind:
We all need the same right, trauma-informed, clinical support as the family member directly stricken needs to have if we've any hope of recovery from traumatic stress injuries at all.
I share this take on trauma & the family for a single purpose: My own families were completely destroyed due to us all not having the information we needed for our family to survive. In my first marriage, the employer MY FAMILY SERVED UNDER, left out any thinking towards the impact to my family when they then made decisions to throw us all under the bus to protect the employer's money, rather than stepping up, honourably, to protect us.
Compensation Systems? I won't go there any further. I remain very angry at these systems functioning in Canada today. I'll only say that even today, these systems, on behalf of First Responder Families, and I'm learning now the problem issues in these systems are Canada-Wide-Systemic, and are evident across all industries where workers are injured or made sick in any line of work:
These systems for compensation and safety, for employers and workers alike, remain in a state of arbitrary dysfunction.
Family to these compensation systems, still today, after 13 years watching for, and hoping they will change, demonstrate consistently still that family means little to nothing to those making claims decision on our behalf at all.
What do families most need? When trauma hits and illness develops?
First and fore-most, we need the opportunity to heal. We can't do that if we are unable to continue working, and with that outcome, we've no income to support the family as we engage in what can often be a long recovery process through to resolution.
What do families need?
Education. That's really what we all need, and education is the ONE THING that we can approach safely on our own.
What do families need?
Relationship with trauma-informed therapy. I now sincerely believe, it's with this kind of help alone that many of us will find hope.
Just like we have a doctor, a dentist, a massage therapist, a physio-therapists, and/or clergy-persons in our lives for certain supports, to quote my friend in the cause and mentor, Syd Gravel: 'We need a therapist in our back-pocket just as we need all these other health-professionals in our lives to support us'.
There is, and I'm going to use again strong words here, NO GOD-DAMN REASON that's valid for us to ignore our mental health in this society anymore. No reason at all that's rational. Other than the fact that we've allowed ourselves to stigmatize mental illness over physical illness, even within ourselves, there's not a thing stopping us from learning about the conditions we're diagnosed with once they strike.
Does your family need to learn about Traumatic Stress?
Google it. You will find the information you need.
Does your family need to learn about PTSD? Same here. As it is for depression, bi-polar disorder, substance/alcohol use disorder, general anxiety, social-phobias and the like: GOOGLE, fellow-recovery-journey-persons, is, in fact, our best friend today.
Regardless of how much disdain our physicians may carry towards ourselves as patients when we find information on the evil internet that our medical education system has denied even psychiatry (trauma) let-alone our GP'S who are our family physicians: To hell with them and their disdain for us finding what we need to know and learn to help ourselves by. I encourage everyone to learn everything there is to know about what you're dealing with via online sources, and by-pass the nonsense that doctor-egos too often throw-up in our face like so-much unnecessary self-defense.
It is our physicians JOB to work on behalf of us all, and themselves. Doctors take an oath to serve humanity by offering their very best skills to help us heal. Google is a kind replacement for psycho-education when our doctors let us down by choosing, yes choosing, NOT to get themselves up-to-speed on our behalf as our front-of-the-line care-provider when our illnesses are mental health related over physical.
For Doctors and Psychiatry: Google's there for you too-and it's there for you to use to provide us with any missing education you might discover we and our families might need. If I've any rebuke yet to share to the masses: It's a rebuke towards the medical system that still needs to catch-up, as I've shared with my own physicians now many times.
"It's not only MORALLY WRONG. It's economically stupid for governments (and leadership; and our medical systems) to not put mental health care on the same tier as physical health care." ~ Norman Lamb, British MP and Advocate
What does family need most of all to support us with a right foundation that provides initial safety and security to do so?
Income supports to make it through recovery unimpeded. From there, we'll need individualized, trauma-informed help to protect our family from vicarious trauma. We can't access the help we need without an income to support ourselves through. If we wish that family are protected from ending up in the boat along with us, as the one stricken we need empowerment to commit to treatment. We need such financial help for as long as any individual recovery might take.
Once we find our way together as a family through the initial phases of recovery in treatment, we are then at the 'reconnection' phase (tri-phasic trauma therapy): All in the family will here perhaps need a process in recovery with right supports to reconnect with lost intimacy, trust, and care-for-one-another that trauma and these conditions hoped to steal away.
This world? Is far from perfect. Families? Not anywhere near perfect at all.
Current systems of help? All remain on a learning curve, but I'm growing more grateful as I see the growth in understanding of these issues which indicates to me that we're finally on course. Movement forward in the society remains slow, too slow for my liking. But there is evidence of movement, and for that, I becoming daily that little-bit-more grateful.
Change needed still will take time, but change will come as more and more across society get caught up to reality about these issues. If we can start together, or continue to agree to do all we can to become as informed about issues of mental health and trauma as we can, change will come now for us all over time.
As our helping professions push away their own denial, and learn along with us that trauma, ptsd, depression, addiction, and secondary traumatic stress (compassion fatigue) in ourselves, our peers, and in many living among us, can be pretty fully today understood, change will come, and quite joyfully, I can't wait.
Our families DESERVE the same level of care as does any-and-all in society when physical illness and disease threatens the well-being, or life of a family member. We families in Canadian society, over time, will find ourselves far more easily supported when we end up challenged to deal with issues that traumatic stress injury levels upon us in this life, once all the now bubbling-to-the-surface right information enters into, and remains, main-stream.
I'll conclude this piece with one last bite of advice for families: "Love one-another." As unconditionally as you can.
It's completely valid to challenge an ill-family members troubling behaviour lovingly:
Just ALWAYS remember: Traumatic Stress injury and resulting illnesses are medical problems, just as any other medical problems might be. Judging a family member who is legitimately ill, or judging yourselves, even judging the stricken-one's often troubling behaviours to a degree that might be perceived as feeling like abuse-in the end, this will only serve to tear you all apart.
What is the goal of trauma recovery?
It's just what it says it is: The goal is TO RECOVER. TO RESTORE.
We who are stricken can't do that alone-we need our families, more than my own past may have allowed my own family to know.
WE ALL in family need a relationship, as early into our own struggles as we can get there: With Right, family-therapy help, from those clinical professionals who provide today, trauma-and-violence informed, clinical care for trauma issues.
For access to right help, see the links below for those living in BC.
For others in the country: Follow This Link To Badge-of-Life Canada/Therapists (There's a drop-down menu linking to those serving in other Provinces in Canada).
For information on specific mental health conditions that trauma creates, follow this link to "Here To Help BC".
There you can review the signs and symptoms of PTSD, Depression, Substance Use Disorder, Alcohol Use Disorder, and any other mental health conditions that impact family in our times.
Knowledge is power. Fostering a sense of becoming as brilliantly self-aware as we can allow ourselves, this is what I've learned the hard-way I needed once this beast came into my own and my family's lives.
Be bold. Be Brave. Be good to yourselves: Find out everything you can-the effort, I near-guarantee, as one who's lived this thing, every effort made to learn about this stuff takes much of it's negative power to destroy us all away.
Be Well.
Choose that. Choose to be well.
That's the prayer I'll leave behind for any who are family who continue to hold-tight to the love inside of you, still strongly enough that you wish to overcome this thing, as much as your stricken family member wants healing for herself.
See the links below to search for a trauma-informed, specialized counselor or psychologist in BC.
Look down the page for links to other resources and videos for more information.
Best to you all who visit here. I applaud you for seeking out what you hope to learn. Love one-another, and embrace this experience as an opportunity, rather than a curse. Try to accept the opportunity with this experience that has the power to transform yourself, as well as your family.
I'll leave these words for encouragement:
"The cave you fear to enter, holds the treasure that you seek." ~ Joseph Campbell
"All we have to fear, is FEAR itself." ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” ~ Elbert Hubbard
Accept this experience as an opportunity for all in your family to experience the blessing that is Post Traumatic Growth.
Cheers.
Darren Michael Gregory; Curator-The Trauma Recovery Blog
It is so very true; When one member of the family is suffering through trauma issues, the entire family suffers too, When right help isn't accessed in a timely way, due to any number of reasons, trauma can morph itself into PTSD. Due to non-access to services, by choice, or, for instance, due to the cost of care being for some-out of reach:
Serious damage to familial relationships can devastate any process for recovery for all. I know not one person I've met who's in this boat express themselves any differently: We want recovery. I think we all, deep-down, all wish an experience of full recovery, with recovery for family members included, could come fully true. We want this for ourselves, and for any in our lives who've been wounded in sharing with us of our trauma experience and resulting illnesses. Once trauma lays it's roots deep-enough to grow the tree that is mental health struggle (inability to solve the issues when we're dealing with PTSD, Depression, Substance/Alcohol Use Disorder): Not only is the one diagnosed with issues in need of professional support, support needs to be accessed by all in the family.
I'll personally dance a jig when the day finally rolls around that our care systems get-it where trauma and these conditions are concerned. I'll know we've achieved an evolutionary leap, when we can all look at mental health as being on the same tier of importance as we view physical health issues.
For policy-makers in Canada, and for leadership in those professions where the potential for traumatic stress injury is high, I stand with British MP and advocate, Norman Lamb, who had this to say during a mental health conference held in Victoria BC in the fall of 2016:
"It's not only MORALLY WRONG. It's economically stupid for governments (and leadership) to not put mental health care on the same tier as physical health care."
I'll be full of glee when all of society stops stigmatizing any issues of the human condition that we judge, wrongly, as abnormal. Given that there are an estimated 280, 000, 000 (4% of the world population) that's diagnosed with PTSD, the issue of psychological trauma in humans is quite high.
Trauma is part of the human condition. The outcomes of trauma are what happens. Therefore, there is nothing abnormal about any of it-we've simply learned too little about these issues we humans face. Rather than learn about these issues, we've ignored them. In doing so, we've deceived ourselves into believing when we're personally hit with trauma issues, we're somehow weaker than any other might be.
With this self-deceit, we are accepting the default societal positions that stigmatize without challenging ourselves to change-which can come for us by accepting the challenge trauma puts upon us to learn everything we can about the issues we're dealing with. Issues for us that we'll be facing alongside our fellow 280, 000, 000 world citizens who are in the precise same boat.
This is society here I'm speaking towards too. I know I'd accepted the misinformation about mental illness along with many, prior to my own diagnosis, having taken in much misinformation over the years. I've learned that's why we end up considering suicide-stigma is the cause, and depression fuels suicidal thinking using all the negative information it can find to trip us up.
I attempted suicide 3 years ago. We've lost too many in Canada to suicide due to trauma issues. At the core of my on suicide attempt in 2015, I was accepting these struggles and illnesses as the worst thing I could ever end up with. I judged myself-condemned myself even, having accepted both stigma's and depression's lies. Stigmatization is inappropriate, toxic-shaming. It's bullying others when we stigmatize them. It's the inner-bullying we get via self-stigmatization (fueled by depression) that will push us into a decision, more times than once, that intends to cause our death by our own hand.
I look at it this way today:
Because I know that traumatic stress chemistry in the body injures the brain; and now that I know that PTSD is a negative outcome that happens when treatment is delayed or mismanaged; and because I now view PTSD, not as a mental illness, but rather as an issue with our entire nervous system in the body-a central nervous system condition that equates to what is, in fact, a dysfunctional, human-stress-response:
I stigmatize myself far less in measure than I once did, and I accept little stigmatization from society anymore.
I stopped bullying myself any further when I woke up after my attempt in 2015. Facing near death, I chose to stop believing any lies my own depression still hopes to tell.
I no longer believe a single lie that depression and stigma hopes to tell.
It's said we avoid seeking help due to the self-imposed stigma. Reality-Check-Symptom Number One of PTSD is-'avoiding reminders of the trauma'. That's what I believe is the issue when we won't seek help, much more-so than it being about stigma. But the two issues combine inside in ways that the voice of depression can be far too convincing.
Do you have PTSD already? Are you dealing on top of that with Depression? Maybe too, Substance/Alcohol Use issues?Do you want to end the suffering? Is suicide a thought you deal with from-time-to-time?
Seek help. And, seek help, as well, for your entire family. Don't let the trauma win by allowing it to destroy it all, when today, with treatment available, that need not happen in our time anymore at all. I can't stress this strongly enough:
I lost two very important partner relationships due to these illnesses and the behavioural symptoms these illnesses generate. I've coached now family members and I've heard from them how devastating it is to watch a loved-one struggle with so much seeming un-fixable emotional pain. I've heard from others in my peer-group who've lost family to trauma as well. All family stories are unfortunately not that different from one another when trauma wins.
Too many of us take our own lives.
I've heard now too, enough stories of how strong families can become when we REFUSE together to allow trauma issues to rip us apart, family-limb from family-limb. I've also witnessed in those families that held it together how powerfully supportive our families can be. I've witnessed in stricken families, outcomes of post-trauma growth that recreated the family to be more-highly resilient to stress.
Because of the strength that can come when the full-outcome for us is post traumatic growth, I share for all visiting here, the rising hope within myself, as I've witnessed how powerfully positive a PTG outcome can be.
I embrace that sense of growth now every time, like now, I've achieved a remission. When depression tries to steal it all away (remission) I now simply thank it for showing up again to remind me how precious my life is.
My mentor, Dr. Baranowsky, in her Community & Workplace Traumatology course, taught me that traumatic experiences are like pebbles that are dropped into a pond. My lived experience aligns with much Dr. Baranowsky shares. The one stricken is the first in the pond to take a hit from the rock of truamatization that hits the pond. Once hit, the ripples of the rock hitting the water of the pond, spread outward. This spreads the impact of suffering towards family across the landscape of family life. This impact of trauma spreads into family when the issues go unchecked and untreated. Thus why ALL need to be included in treatment right out of the gate when trauma strikes the family, the sooner, the better for all.
How else do we stop the ripples from causing others unnecessary harm? If we're all wandering through trauma's aftermath literally blind due to lack of provision of constructive, supportive psycho-education: Frankly family left to ourselves don't really have a chance of holding it together. Why? Because we don't have the information we need to understand what's actually happening to us all. With the intensity of trauma's symptoms behaviourally, it's easy to moralize the one suffering, judging behaviour that without trauma activating symptoms of PTSD etc: The one stricken wouldn't behave in any way that deserves moral judgement from anyone.
Without family therapy, and without the first-stricken getting help as immediately following trauma as is possible-the outcomes of familial self-destruction speak pretty clearly for themselves. When we're empowered to seek help and treatment as soon as we can once we understand that we're dealing with the outcome of traumatic stress injury in our lives:
In seeking that help, we seek help for our families as well, if we're wise that is. If we're deeply committed to staying together, rather than allowing fear and frank denial to maintain a battle at home among us that quite simply won't do a thing to help anyone, it's with such commitment in play that we'll be empowered with the strength to do all we must to challenge these conditions rightly.
Another mentor of mine, Dr. Jonathan Douglas, once shared this my way, and I agree with him:
"When Right help is granted, people will get well. When right help is denied, by self, or by still-weak-systems of care, people don't get well."
I may be repeating myself here, but that's how important sharing this information is to me. Families are destroyed by trauma. I sincerely want any others reading my words to hear this:
The culprit that might seem to be all about behaviour, past hurts, wounding via dysfunctional communication, and separation from one another as the family member stricken retreats into apparent isolation: It is the TRAUMA and the symptoms of these illnesses that is the true problem-child, playing as any bully might choose to do, dysfunctionally with us in our personal, family sand-box.
Trauma in the family sand-box is the bully none of us invited-in to play.
In those professions where traumatic experiences infiltrate the human brain and psyche at very high-levels, in policing, paramedicine, corrections services, emergency services dispatch, the military, other ems operation centers, and frankly all other care-professions we can count: It's becomes seriously important for our families to understand what we're ALL getting ourselves into when we sign up to serve our country, provinces, communities, and humanity.
My own family was blind-sided by the issues of trauma I brought home from the work. Add to this very serious consequence of service the high-level duty-commitment that all who serve bring to the dinner-tables in our homes each day (with this sense of duty causing enough stress for the family all-on-its-own) family-life can morph negatively over time into a situation that puts us all as a family in serious jeopardy.
I think it's time this country of citizens gets-it along with those of us who've had to face this monster: Not only are WE, the cop, the dispatcher, the paramedic, the fire fighter, the corrections officer, dispatcher, or the soldier serving humanity in these professions. OUR FAMILIES are serving humanity along with us. As much as our care and protection of society matters, ourselves and our families matter too when things go so desperately wrong.
What is our family's pay for their contribution to the services our entire families provide to communities? For many of us tied to long-hours, shift-work, over-time, and too-often workaholism, driven by this high-inner-sense of duty: Our families PAY in dramatic and painful ways, not only when we come home messed-up from trauma, they PAY every day we're not able to put our families first.
I missed so much family-time committing to a life as a rural, so-called part-time paramedic serving in my home community. Tied to a pager more often than not, my family lost me from many family functions, including birthdays with my kids, celebrations at Christmas, school functions and the like. I'm still dumb-struck looking back upon the life I brought into my family-space that I was so in denial about. I lost them to the stress of both the work itself, but also to the trauma I brought into the family home that I wasn't able to resolve, regardless of my own best efforts, simply due to the fact that right, trauma-informed help for my generation of Canadian First Responders wasn't readily available.
That's not the case today. Search for help using these two sources in BC, specify in the search that trauma is the issue, and we find many now serving as counselors and psychologists with the specialized skill needed to help us ALL through the experience.
Those in the general population living with trauma, PTSD and co-morbid mental health issues, know VERY WELL how impacting we, the stricken, can be towards our families too. When one is stuck in a state of constant fight-or-flight, the behavioural symptoms we present often are frightening, confusing, and challenging for our family members to say the least.
First of all for ourselves, but for every other important person we have in our lives: Symptoms of illnesses we don't have the information we need to understand what's going on, keep the struggles in a state of flux, with tensions rising in the family home as these illnesses, untreated, go on-and-on. As this progresses, things go-on to leave behind an incredible mess-a mess so often overwhelming, none of us know where to start to clean the mess back up.
With the go-to response to troubling behaviours being for family members to judge the person presenting these off-the-wall behaviours, which is a valid response-without question: The potential for what I refer to as 'trauma-drama' in the family home is significantly and destructively very high.
What is 'trauma-drama'?
I look at it as the stage-play WE, the one stricken, create with our behaviours in family. I personally didn't get any answers clinically in my own experience until years after my family had self-destructed. The drama at home consisted of me KNOWING I was not the man I promised both of my life-partners I would be, as I went about doing things, blindly hoping to help us all. Taking certain actions along the way, that I'd hoped would get rid of the emotional upset I was then feeling every minute of the day, simply caused more harm than many of these steps did any good for any of us.
In my first marriage, I was not the Dad I'd promised to be bringing children into our lives. I knew that-as did my wife and kids. As my illnesses took over my being, I came up with all variety of reasons as to WHY I felt the way I did-ill with both PTSD and Depression nearly from day-one serving as a paramedic. Every step I took, not only didn't resolve the pain, some of those steps were frankly ridiculous looking back at myself and my struggling for answers during that time.
To spare myself the shame of it all again, I'll not rehash all the monstrous details. I'll just say that I put both my first wife and my latter in life second partner through hell. I put my children through hell. I put my extended family and closest friendships through hell.
Not to leave anyone out, I put myself through unnecessary hell as well.
Trauma-injury, and resulting illness put us all through hell-like a stone in a pond, our own pain ripples towards everyone around us.
I share this to validate for others that trauma in one, spreads across the pond. It spreads to all closest to us. First in family, but also to peers and trusted friendships. I've lost many to this beast living inside of me. I now more compassionately understand why others need to sometimes give up on us in order to hold-on-to themselves.
For a very long time, I thought I'd been taken over by a demon. I know this isn't factual. But I most certainly found myself not living anything BUT darkness in my life for far too long a time. Darkness-and facing it, however: This too has the potential to bless all in this boat. My sojourn into my dark-side (Jung calls this 'The Shadow') became for me another valued teacher.
"Knowing your own darkness, is the best method for (dealing with it) (and) for dealing with the (evident) darkness in others."
~ Carl Jung
Too many fellow-humans wish to continue on in life denying they have a shadow at all. Which is sure folly. We can only maintain denial of such things for so long. According to Jung, we're best to work with help to reconcile our better-self with our shadow-self. Integrating the two sides of our human nature is a gift that I believe too many of us (trauma in our lives or not) are afraid to open. When trauma strikes, for me, I had no choice but to ultimately go into myself as deeply as I could stand.
For many of us, we know trauma as a moral injury. No more evident is the outcome of moral injury than in family.
The moral injury of traumatic stress and resulting mental health issues, comes for some of us, like in policing, when we are confronted with loss of other-human-life that a cop, doing her job, has been forced to take.
In medicine, there's a sense of moral injury that comes over those we could not save.
For others of us, both in service professions and in those that struggle from general society, the moral injuries come in the form of our behaviours (symptoms or otherwise). As our negative behaviour starts taking over in our lives, behaviour that makes others with us question what's happened to our character and values:
Our behavourial symptoms that challenge us so deeply as they present to us, end up being judged. It's important to stick to keeping a conscience alive that knows right from wrong. However, once we KNOW what the problem actually is, trauma and resulting conditions have a clinical description. From there, these conditions are best kept, from that point forward, by all in the family-understood through clinical eyes.
- Clinical signs and symptoms of PTSD.
- Clinical signs and symptoms of Depression.
- Clinical signs and symptoms of Addiction.
With misinformation floating around in the society at at large, too many stick to using this misinformation rather than informing ourselves. It's this misinformation that generates judgement. In society, it's this judgement, formed with untruths, that comes at us through stigma. In facing stigma the entire society seems to turn on us.
High levels of stigma compounds our issues, causing for the stricken one of the most devastating moral injuries of all.
If we've lived as children through a too-highly moralized upbringing, the information of that upbringing will be filtering our perceptions of ourselves too. We all know what 'good' behaviour and 'bad' behaviour looks like. We're often in such a state, once sick, trying to live-up to the moral expectations of our upbringings becomes more and more impossible. The demon-wrestling this ignites with trauma, leaves us sensing that we no-longer understand those past family-values we once leaned-on any longer at all.
Before trauma came along to destroy our own sense of our personal character and inner-moral-fiber: Unless we are one of the identified 1% of the human population that are true psychopaths or sociopaths, when we see our own once supportive value-system falling apart, therein lies the 'moral' part of the injury. Society stands ready to reinforce any false-beliefs we carry that family and societal beliefs about the so-called mentally ill drilled into us all. To recover, in my experience, takes a challenge towards our belief-system-given that what we think we've learned correctly about these so-called mental illnesses prove themselves as wrong the more right information we receive to support more supportive beliefs.
Immorality isn't attached to any of the trauma-induced sicknesses themselves. The sources of trauma certainly often have collapsed morality attached to them. I'm now fully informed, and absolutely now accept, that the trauma of often horrific Adverse Childhood Experiences can haunt us and live inside, unresolved, for entire life-times. The issue of Adverse Childhood Experiences, with all the rank elements of all kinds of abuse in too many children's lives when we were growing up, do, in fact, as the science now makes very clear-cause us so much harm that the trauma carries on in our lives as adults when we've not had opportunity to deal rightly with trauma issues.
This issue of the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences negatively impacting adult-life is highly evident in Canada for First Nations people who've suffered the damage of trauma delivered to them growing up in Residential Schools. The trauma of colonialism is STILL causing First Nations families, and I'd argue, our society on the whole, much suffering that now needs truthful acceptance. On the part of those of us living off-reserve today as descendants of settlers, living main-stream in settler society, what's needed now is frank repentance if we wish to heal the wounded historical spirit that is our Canada today.
One of the issues I think it's important for us all to understand: Children who've had to grow up in a family home with a family member struggling with mental health and/or addictions issues: This is listed as an issue that is identified as an Adverse Childhood Experience. All the more reason to seek help early on, and to seek help for every family member as an act of self-defense.
For those reading here who are the primary person in the family with mental health issues related to trauma, I share what I've written here to persuade those who may still be too fearful to enter into treatment to do so, as soon now as you can. The reality is, particularly when we end up dealing with addiction on-top of the other issues with depression and PTSD, some of us find ourselves living lives in response to our illnesses that generate inside nothing but inner-toxic-shame. The shame is toxic because it gets in the way of us reaching out for help soon-enough to protect ourselves from full-demise or the demise of our family.
Toxic-Shame is misplaced shame. It is USELESS shame. Shame itself is a useless construct. It teaches us nothing about ourselves and it's a contributing factor as to why too many who are traumatized fail to expose those toxic-secrets that traumatized us. It's due to toxic-shaming of the self that too many pull-away from opportunities for right treatment.
What, with any illness, does anyone have to be ashamed about? Not a thing. Please reflect on that fact. Illness is nothing to be ashamed of.
I admit I was behaviourally a literal twit in my family home, hoping to hold up a falling sky when I was most sick and extremely confused. I started hiding away in my basement, knowing I was hurting my wife and kids. Ashamed that I was failing everyone as our family life started to feel as though I couldn't handle it, I hid away. I knew I was falling apart, and in retrospect, I was also isolating because I KNEW how I was hurting my first wife and my children. The rage I could express towards my kids, rage at them often (anxiety driven) over them only being kids (too loud etc):
Looking back this breaks my heart.
The blame I leveled upon my wife as though SHE was my problem: Looking back on the damage that blame did to my wife, breaks today my heart too. The blame I put upon my last partner for needing to ditch to save herself from my addictions: Today I can only again feel remorse for putting her through that and her kids.
The shame I feel is today more about remorse, far more often than shame. I refuse to beat myself up any longer for not understanding soon enough, or learning fast enough, all that I needed to learn to have hope to recover and hold either family together.
My suicide attempt in 2015 did serious damage in my last relationship and to my family, my sons, my mother, and extended family. The reality is, suicide is the end-game for us when we've run out of supportive people and options for recovery remain too far away. Or, for many of us stricken, poverty and lack of trauma-informed clinicians in our publicly funded healthcare systems make it so that HELP is not available at all.
It is very real, I assure you, the struggle for those of us who've ended up as ill as we have due to work-caused legitimate injury and illness. It's very real, the struggle, for any and all in society who need to face these illnesses and the daunting challenges we face hoping to be well.
For those reading who've suffered traumatic stress injuries in vocation, when the response towards us is a self-protective slaughtering of our ability to support ourselves with compensative income, this only reinforces the trauma more-deeply. For those of us struck in employment, therein lies the frank abuse against our families that comes in the form of 'Sanctuary Trauma'. It's this additional trauma that almost ensures a family dealing with these issues will ultimately fall completely apart, or that the one stricken will take her own life.
As I shared recently with a Director (leader) with my past employer I'll meet with finally to share what I've learned with his management team next month (Sept. 2018):
"Do you want to ensure our death to suicide? When any first responders working for you hit the wall over traumatic-stress injury and PTSD: By all means, keep participating in taking our access to money away. I GUARANTEE, if that's what you continue to do, knowing what could be the outcome for your worker's families, eventually, and rightly, that participation WILL come back around and bite you, as a leader, HARD, upon your own being ultimately."
My point is: In Canada, for a very long time, it's been legislated to be the employer's responsibility to keep their workers safe from injury, resulting harms, both mentally as well as physically. Should an employer fail in this duty, in Canada today, such inaction to protect the life and well-being of workers is now rightly considered a criminal matter:
Rather than state the reality here, I'll simply refer readers to the provisions put down to ensure protection of workers that is in Canadian Law, The Westray Act.
I'm still struggling to understand, as you can tell reading, how anyone working as our employers could choose to not support anyone injured working in public safety when we are traumatically injured and go on to develop illness as a consequence. At the level of Government and Compensation Law, Canada is now catching up to reality on many fronts. This movement forward on these issues has resulted finally in many moves in Provincial Legislatures to amend Compensation Legislation.
Coming soon, as I see it, coast-to-coast, our employers will find themselves legislated into accepting traumatic stress injury and resulting illnesses as work-caused. This is long over-due. This is something I personally fought for in British Columbia for 13 years. With the help of many, we finally achieved this change in here in April.
Law that governs our compensation systems need to empower employers and the compensation system itself to make decisions that cause no, egregious, additional harm to ourselves and our families (in their own chosen responses to trauma and mental health issues) and the issue of sanctuary trauma, with these changes, we hope now might be mitigated entirely.
"Sanctuary Trauma". I've touched on this issue across this site. No more harm is there evident in the impact of sanctuary trauma than has happened too often in the past, put upon already struggling families by those compensation systems we all assume are in place to protect us. Nowhere have we who've given our lives in service to our country experienced the compounding impact that sanctuary trauma puts upon us, then through the actions, or inaction, of employers, compensation systems, or through the mistakes made by those therapists who try to treat us without the right education to do so.
Sanctuary Trauma: Dr. Sandra Bloom, M.D. I ask that all visiting here, and your families if you're struggling, give this a read.
This is where I'm at, and forgive the stronger language:
None of the confusing feelings, judgments, and expressions from stigma that shame us can do a God-damned thing that's healing or constructive. In order to offer up to any of us who've had our families fall apart any opportunity for relationship repair, we must agree to seek help together, and we need strong, trauma-informed systems of care to respond appropriately when we do. Trauma, managed wrongly, steals away from us one of the most precious gifts we're granted as human beings:
TRUST in one-another. When our developing issues go for too long not, or improperly treated, trust will break-down insidiously over time. With right help and understanding of our issues clinically, we're better empowered to not lay on one-another any additional judgments that will only serve in getting us nowhere as family. We need to trust our employers and systems of care to be able, and willing, to do all that can be done to assist us out of our trauma experience.
Once trust is broken enough times in family, and in employment relationships, there's no amount of sorry one can express to bring that trust back into the relationship now destroyed. Moral injury, discussed earlier, comes through loss of trust too.
In family, loss of trust results in loss of intimacy, and of mutually shared respect. When we understand that it is all-about a misunderstood illness, though not easy, given past indoctrination, this makes it at least possible to learn to not take symptom-driven outbursts with one another personally-which is something that needs to be learned as the family commits to recovery together. Family can't learn this stuff if we choose to keep away from trauma-informed care.
To survive today, and to move forward, I personally can not, and no longer will, judge myself for the symptoms of my illnesses, for the injury, for my suicide attempt, nor for my addiction. I will not judge myself for being injured on the job and ending up so desperately ill. I accept I'm one in the world of 280.000.000 others who are dealing with these issues along with me.
I own, however, and accept all the way: Others were hurt by trauma, PTSD, Depression, and Substance Use Disorder having entered our shared lives in ways that continue to demand from me sincere remorse for those behaviours I presented that hurt.
What troubles me most of all is:
If I'd known then what I finally know today, much of what my families went through didn't need to happen for any of us at all.
Thus my focus here on sharing how important for us in recovery for our families to become, and to remain with us, as highly informed about the issues as we all can be.
Without our families remaining in our lives and fully informed along with us so they're all comfortable remaining in our court, recovery is simply that much more arduous, long, troubled, and extremely lonely to get through alone.
We can't get through any of what we must face due to traumatization in life without social supports. Our families, for those of us in care-professions and public safety/military professions, are, in fact, our first line of defense. Our families will see change in us before we'll begin to drop our own denial enough to see the negative changes happening to us. Our families will express that change they see in us our way, sometimes clearly, sometimes through dysfunctional communication until we all learn better, but they will tell us what's going wrong often before we see it in ourselves.
My advice for visitors here. Advice hard-won, as the lessons delivered into my own being came from the teachers that run the School of Hard Knocks:
LISTEN TO THEM. HEAR YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS WHEN THEY TELL YOU THINGS ARE GOING WRONG.
We may not like what they have to say, but, please trust me on this, our families need not be destroyed through being hammered themselves by us failing due to these illnesses. With immediate help in the after-math of trauma, all that this trauma-thing longs to destroy, with RIGHT CARE out of the gate, need not happen.
I'm pretty sure all can agree: We love our family. More than for some of us than family members were able to see anymore from us. As much as the symptoms of trauma wish to suggest to us directly that we're personally now worth-less, and as such, must now take our own steps to die sometimes-to that, these days, I'll share this new-word I've somehow picked up to use lately:
BOLLOCKS. (I love that word).
WE ARE ALL precious human life. OUR FAMILIES ARE precious human life. The way we keep that all together is to work together facing the reality of these issues together, agreeing to walk through our recovery process as a family, together, hand-in-hand.
I can say today that I heard from my partners EVERY WORD they often threw at me to wake me up. My own denial for a very long time was deep. I knew I was struggling. In my first marriage, my wife kept telling me so, as did the faces of hurt upon my sons when I'd lose it their way. I knew I wasn't living up to neither my own values as a family-man, nor was I living up to my family's expectations on-the-whole.
And, I recall clearly, making promises to be the best I could be to my first wife on my wedding day.
For too long, I simply didn't know what to do, once trauma hit me and illness took hold. The choices I made hoping to end my pain, only delivered more pain, on-top-of-pain, for my now highly confused family-relationships to live with or understand.
Trauma-Drama: This is the stage-play that comes into view when families are not supported directly along with us through recovery. With us all finding through family-treatment efforts the right information we need, much family grief can be avoided.
First-and-foremost, in order to approach our crumbling situation as a family with dignity and right-mind:
We all need the same right, trauma-informed, clinical support as the family member directly stricken needs to have if we've any hope of recovery from traumatic stress injuries at all.
I share this take on trauma & the family for a single purpose: My own families were completely destroyed due to us all not having the information we needed for our family to survive. In my first marriage, the employer MY FAMILY SERVED UNDER, left out any thinking towards the impact to my family when they then made decisions to throw us all under the bus to protect the employer's money, rather than stepping up, honourably, to protect us.
Compensation Systems? I won't go there any further. I remain very angry at these systems functioning in Canada today. I'll only say that even today, these systems, on behalf of First Responder Families, and I'm learning now the problem issues in these systems are Canada-Wide-Systemic, and are evident across all industries where workers are injured or made sick in any line of work:
These systems for compensation and safety, for employers and workers alike, remain in a state of arbitrary dysfunction.
Family to these compensation systems, still today, after 13 years watching for, and hoping they will change, demonstrate consistently still that family means little to nothing to those making claims decision on our behalf at all.
What do families most need? When trauma hits and illness develops?
First and fore-most, we need the opportunity to heal. We can't do that if we are unable to continue working, and with that outcome, we've no income to support the family as we engage in what can often be a long recovery process through to resolution.
What do families need?
Education. That's really what we all need, and education is the ONE THING that we can approach safely on our own.
What do families need?
Relationship with trauma-informed therapy. I now sincerely believe, it's with this kind of help alone that many of us will find hope.
Just like we have a doctor, a dentist, a massage therapist, a physio-therapists, and/or clergy-persons in our lives for certain supports, to quote my friend in the cause and mentor, Syd Gravel: 'We need a therapist in our back-pocket just as we need all these other health-professionals in our lives to support us'.
There is, and I'm going to use again strong words here, NO GOD-DAMN REASON that's valid for us to ignore our mental health in this society anymore. No reason at all that's rational. Other than the fact that we've allowed ourselves to stigmatize mental illness over physical illness, even within ourselves, there's not a thing stopping us from learning about the conditions we're diagnosed with once they strike.
Does your family need to learn about Traumatic Stress?
Google it. You will find the information you need.
Does your family need to learn about PTSD? Same here. As it is for depression, bi-polar disorder, substance/alcohol use disorder, general anxiety, social-phobias and the like: GOOGLE, fellow-recovery-journey-persons, is, in fact, our best friend today.
Regardless of how much disdain our physicians may carry towards ourselves as patients when we find information on the evil internet that our medical education system has denied even psychiatry (trauma) let-alone our GP'S who are our family physicians: To hell with them and their disdain for us finding what we need to know and learn to help ourselves by. I encourage everyone to learn everything there is to know about what you're dealing with via online sources, and by-pass the nonsense that doctor-egos too often throw-up in our face like so-much unnecessary self-defense.
It is our physicians JOB to work on behalf of us all, and themselves. Doctors take an oath to serve humanity by offering their very best skills to help us heal. Google is a kind replacement for psycho-education when our doctors let us down by choosing, yes choosing, NOT to get themselves up-to-speed on our behalf as our front-of-the-line care-provider when our illnesses are mental health related over physical.
For Doctors and Psychiatry: Google's there for you too-and it's there for you to use to provide us with any missing education you might discover we and our families might need. If I've any rebuke yet to share to the masses: It's a rebuke towards the medical system that still needs to catch-up, as I've shared with my own physicians now many times.
"It's not only MORALLY WRONG. It's economically stupid for governments (and leadership; and our medical systems) to not put mental health care on the same tier as physical health care." ~ Norman Lamb, British MP and Advocate
What does family need most of all to support us with a right foundation that provides initial safety and security to do so?
Income supports to make it through recovery unimpeded. From there, we'll need individualized, trauma-informed help to protect our family from vicarious trauma. We can't access the help we need without an income to support ourselves through. If we wish that family are protected from ending up in the boat along with us, as the one stricken we need empowerment to commit to treatment. We need such financial help for as long as any individual recovery might take.
Once we find our way together as a family through the initial phases of recovery in treatment, we are then at the 'reconnection' phase (tri-phasic trauma therapy): All in the family will here perhaps need a process in recovery with right supports to reconnect with lost intimacy, trust, and care-for-one-another that trauma and these conditions hoped to steal away.
This world? Is far from perfect. Families? Not anywhere near perfect at all.
Current systems of help? All remain on a learning curve, but I'm growing more grateful as I see the growth in understanding of these issues which indicates to me that we're finally on course. Movement forward in the society remains slow, too slow for my liking. But there is evidence of movement, and for that, I becoming daily that little-bit-more grateful.
Change needed still will take time, but change will come as more and more across society get caught up to reality about these issues. If we can start together, or continue to agree to do all we can to become as informed about issues of mental health and trauma as we can, change will come now for us all over time.
As our helping professions push away their own denial, and learn along with us that trauma, ptsd, depression, addiction, and secondary traumatic stress (compassion fatigue) in ourselves, our peers, and in many living among us, can be pretty fully today understood, change will come, and quite joyfully, I can't wait.
Our families DESERVE the same level of care as does any-and-all in society when physical illness and disease threatens the well-being, or life of a family member. We families in Canadian society, over time, will find ourselves far more easily supported when we end up challenged to deal with issues that traumatic stress injury levels upon us in this life, once all the now bubbling-to-the-surface right information enters into, and remains, main-stream.
I'll conclude this piece with one last bite of advice for families: "Love one-another." As unconditionally as you can.
It's completely valid to challenge an ill-family members troubling behaviour lovingly:
Just ALWAYS remember: Traumatic Stress injury and resulting illnesses are medical problems, just as any other medical problems might be. Judging a family member who is legitimately ill, or judging yourselves, even judging the stricken-one's often troubling behaviours to a degree that might be perceived as feeling like abuse-in the end, this will only serve to tear you all apart.
What is the goal of trauma recovery?
It's just what it says it is: The goal is TO RECOVER. TO RESTORE.
We who are stricken can't do that alone-we need our families, more than my own past may have allowed my own family to know.
WE ALL in family need a relationship, as early into our own struggles as we can get there: With Right, family-therapy help, from those clinical professionals who provide today, trauma-and-violence informed, clinical care for trauma issues.
For access to right help, see the links below for those living in BC.
For others in the country: Follow This Link To Badge-of-Life Canada/Therapists (There's a drop-down menu linking to those serving in other Provinces in Canada).
For information on specific mental health conditions that trauma creates, follow this link to "Here To Help BC".
There you can review the signs and symptoms of PTSD, Depression, Substance Use Disorder, Alcohol Use Disorder, and any other mental health conditions that impact family in our times.
Knowledge is power. Fostering a sense of becoming as brilliantly self-aware as we can allow ourselves, this is what I've learned the hard-way I needed once this beast came into my own and my family's lives.
Be bold. Be Brave. Be good to yourselves: Find out everything you can-the effort, I near-guarantee, as one who's lived this thing, every effort made to learn about this stuff takes much of it's negative power to destroy us all away.
Be Well.
Choose that. Choose to be well.
That's the prayer I'll leave behind for any who are family who continue to hold-tight to the love inside of you, still strongly enough that you wish to overcome this thing, as much as your stricken family member wants healing for herself.
See the links below to search for a trauma-informed, specialized counselor or psychologist in BC.
Look down the page for links to other resources and videos for more information.
Best to you all who visit here. I applaud you for seeking out what you hope to learn. Love one-another, and embrace this experience as an opportunity, rather than a curse. Try to accept the opportunity with this experience that has the power to transform yourself, as well as your family.
I'll leave these words for encouragement:
"The cave you fear to enter, holds the treasure that you seek." ~ Joseph Campbell
"All we have to fear, is FEAR itself." ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” ~ Elbert Hubbard
Accept this experience as an opportunity for all in your family to experience the blessing that is Post Traumatic Growth.
Cheers.
Darren Michael Gregory; Curator-The Trauma Recovery Blog
Find Trauma Informed Family Clinical Counselors Here
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Find Trauma Informed Family Clinical Psychologists Here
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Online Resources
Here are some links to sources online that speak to family issues relative to trauma, and to the mental health issues trauma causes. I hope you find that these articles are written in a way that is about YOU, the family member, struggling with your own challenges brought into your life by these issues.
Knowledge is power.
The more I learn, the less frightening my conditions become:
Studies/Articles Online
Here are some links to sources online that speak to family issues relative to trauma, and to the mental health issues trauma causes. I hope you find that these articles are written in a way that is about YOU, the family member, struggling with your own challenges brought into your life by these issues.
Knowledge is power.
The more I learn, the less frightening my conditions become:
- Trauma & Families: The Better Health Channel
- Families & Trauma: The National Child Traumatic Stress Network
- Treating Trauma Within Families: Metro-Detroit Counseling
- Breaking The Cycle of Inherited Family Trauma
- Trauma & Families: A Facts Sheet for Providers
- Separating Families and Creating Trauma: Thrive Global
- Trauma-A Toolkit for Families: BC First Responder Mental Health
- Families and Caregivers: The National Child Traumatic Stress Network
- Intergenerational Trauma-Healing & Resiliency
- A Sea of Online Resource: Courtesy of Google
Studies/Articles Online
- Relationships and PTSD: National Center for PTSD
- Effects of PTSD on The Family: National Center for PTSD
- Mental Health of Children of Deployed and Nondeployed US Military Service Members: The Millennium Cohort Family Study.
- Interventions to Support Caregivers or Families of Patients with TBI, PTSD, or Polytrauma: A Systematic Review [Internet]
- Patterns of Trauma Exposure in Childhood and Adolescence and Their Associations With Behavioral Well-Being.
- Personal characteristics associated with the effect of childhood trauma on health.
- Intergenerational Continuity in Adverse Childhood Experiences and Rural Community Environments.
- Residential schools and the effects on Indigenous health and well-being in Canada-a scoping review.
- The Importance of Culture in Addressing Domestic Violence for First Nation's Women.
- Suicidal thoughts and attempts in First Nations communities: links to parental Indian residential school attendance across development.
- Crisis intervention by social workers in fire departments: an innovative role for social workers.
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Video For Family To Understand The Impact Of Trauma on Yourself (Vicarious Trauma) & Your Family Member
“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Disclaimer: These materials and resources are presented for educational purposes only. They are not a substitute for informed medical advice or training. Do not use this information to diagnose or treat a health problem without consulting a qualified health or mental health care provider. If you have concerns, contact your health care provider, mental health professional, or your community health centre
Darren Gregory © 2018. All Rights Reserved
