Trauma Informed - what is that with narcissistic behaviour ?

This registered clinical psychologist, trauma therapist and trauma survivor, Dr Ingrid Clayton aptly demonstrates all the ways in which something that is NOT “trauma informed therapy” mistreats survivors of emotional relational trauma. I believe at some level almost everyone is suffering some level of relational trauma because of the way that Western culture and capitalism has escalated out of control, something Dr Gabor Mate elaborates on in his book - “The Myth of Normal”. If you need factual evidence then ultimately worsening emotional health statistics in our populations are undeniable.

Relational trauma dynamics where the person holding power behaves in narcisstic ways are often very difficult to detect and this is intentional because the underlying imperative is to project any blame, guilt, shame, fear, even anger onto the victim . At heart this individual loathes themselves and can’t stand any feelings which activate that self loathing. Any criticism or exposure of themselves must be batted away and hidden beneath the cloak of self confidence and image management. In broad terms these individuals will tend to seek power as a way to defend themselves from their own view of themselves.

This dynamic can only be successful when the victim also holds similarly fundamental self destructive beliefs of self doubt and a lack of self love. Once they get to the point of making boundaries to protect themselves, the dynamic can not survive.

But you can see in Ingrid’s video that as this second group of people seek help in therapy, it is possible to re-experience another helping of the same dynamic when the therapist is unable to tolerate the natural expressions of outrage that emerge after they start enforcing boundaries and the need to be respected.

Many of us have been on the receiving end of anger and violence that was either excessive or undeserved as children and many of us are unable to discriminate between genuine outrage without acting out and that which is destructive. Instead we tend to shut people down because we can’t cope with the discomfort that other people’s outrage evokes in us. It frightens us and we just want it to go away. Sometimes we try and get it to stop by giving people advice, gently admonishing them or waiting for a break in the expression to distract or shut them up. But genuine outrage at wrongs done just needs validation if people are able to let it go. Most people can’t let it go if they are continually being shut down.

Healthy children when they experience intense emotions are soothed by their parents responses and they then learn to do that for themselves. But the kind of non trauma informed responses Ingrid is modelling, is not emotional co regulation leading to health. It is reinforcement of emotional suppression leading to ill health.

If this is a chronic pattern in a childs life and it tends to be the way boys particularly are conditioned to be strong and not emotional, you get a sense of the range of strategies that people as very young babies learn to adopt to manage their distress. There are entire generations that were advised to just let their babies cry sometimes for hours. The still face experiments show the incredible creativity of very young babies to try and get their emotional needs met.

We can’t change things in ourselves or in the wider culture if we don’t know that they are issues . Neither are we able to change things on a global level where we deny that the power holders are perpetrating narcisstic behaviour and want to get us to desist from complaining or changing the culture. In many ways as ordinary citizens we have been naive about those who hold power and have never questioned things which should be questioned.

One of the important things in changing those very destructive self beliefs is understanding that even when we have acted in narcisstic ways towards ourselves and others, we have simply been unconscious of why we were doing that, there is no need to punish ourselves for what has been imposed on us and our parents and even those before them. There may be a need for accountability but that can be from a place of understanding “why” rather than a need to label people as “bad”.

No human being baby ever was born “bad” - anyone who has seen a newborn has seen the purity of that baby, it can only ever be the environment that acts upon that purity to such an extent that that child believes they are “bad” and needs to somehow cover that up to survive. Lets not continue to replicate the emotional harm of the past.