Trauma Eggs

One of the exercises we did in therapy when I was in treatment was a Trauma Egg. Here’s a rough sketch of the different parts of a trauma egg. Now let me just say that the therapeutic usefulness of this tool is in the SHARING, not in the drawing. That’s pretty important. Sometimes we have a tendency to nurse our wounds; to stroke and enjoy the pain that wells up when we remember the traumatic events of the past. That’s not going to help you get better, it’ll keep you stuck.

Drawing a trauma egg is the psychological equivalent of getting on the scale before beginning a diet and exercise plan. Sharing it is the diet and exercise part. 

Draw an oval on a large piece of paper - everyone has too much trauma to fit on a piece of notebook paper so use the back of some wrapping paper if you don’t have butcher paper. Put a line about 3/4 of the way up.

1 In the lower corners of the paper, write down a few words that pop into your mind when you think of your mother and father. Since my stepdad was a major part of my life, I included him too.

2 Now you’re ready to start filling in the egg. Using only symbols, no words, draw something that represents a traumatic event. Start with your earliest memories and go chronologically but don’t worry if you get something out of order. Draw a little bubble to enclose each representation as you go along. This should take at least an hour if not longer so make sure you take breaks if you need to.

3 – 5 Now it’s time to fill in the roles you played in your family of origin, the rules of your family, and the mission you feel your family gave you.

It took me two days to finish my trauma egg when I was in treatment and we devoted an entire group therapy session to sharing them. Although I thought art therapy was “touchy-feeling” bullshit, I really got into drawing my trauma egg. It was huge, and filled to the brim with traumatic events. When it was all finished I was nervous about sharing because I was worried that maybe what I thought was traumatic really wasn’t that bad. After all, I’ve never been raped or burned with cigarettes.

It’s like telling a little kid that it doesn’t hurt that much and they shouldn’t cry. That’s what I’d been doing to myself even though I know it’s bad parenting. The better strategy, the one I used with my children is to acknowledge the hurt, but insist on proper behavior. If you have little children, you can see for yourself how well this works. The next time your little one gets a boo-boo and comes crying to you, tell him or her “That hurts! That hurts a lot! We have to stay calm and take care of this boo-boo.” Then help the child wash and bandage the wound. Even toddlers can muster the self control to take care of themselves when they don’t have to cry louder to convince you that it really does hurt.

That group session was a strangely freeing validation. My mantra had always been that I had no reason to be unhappy. I had a good childhood. I wasn’t abused, I wasn’t raped, nobody burned me with cigarettes. I honestly thought it was a mistake to bring all that history up. I didn’t want to turn in to a victim, forever whining that if only I’d gotten what I needed as a child then I’d be able to be happy. I was telling myself to shut up, quit crying, it isn’t that bad, it doesn’t hurt.

Instead it was a clear look at my perception of what happened to me with a group of people I trusted. They agreed that some really bad things have happened to me. They said that it must have hurt. They felt sad that those things happened to me. 

The rest of my recovery has been washing and bandaging the wounds. And healing.

When I decided to write this post, I went looking for my trauma egg. I wanted to take a snapshot to upload so you’d have a good visual of what one looks like. But I can’t find it. And you know what? That’s pretty cool. I’ve lost my trauma egg. hehe.

For a more detailed description on Trauma Eggs, buy The Betrayal Bond by Patrick Carnes. It’s an excellent book, read the reviews, particularly if you want to understand why you’re attracted to someone who doesn’t treat you well.

Labels are defining

Sandra L. Brown, M.A.  is a psychotherapist in North Carolina. She runs the Institute for Relational Harm Reduction and the Public Psychopathy Education Magazine. The website is here.

I wonder how different my life would be if I’d gone there instead of a treatment facility for sexual addiction. At the very least I would have had a lot more proof of what happened, which would have come in handy when it came to paying for everything.

My initial interview with the doctor when I showed up at treatment was absolutely awful. In hindsight, I can understand that he was seeing me as a perpetrator who had brought down a good therapist, after all that’s how I presented myself. I was a bad, evil woman who precipitated the downfall of a decent therapist. That must have hit a few buttons for him. It would have been nice if someone had bothered to check my story, since my I’d precipitated exactly nothing. My former therapist was still going merrily along seeing patients and pocketing the money he was supposedly turning over to his order. Oh well. Nobody checked and I was treated like the sexual predator I’d confessed I was.

The interview left me absolutely prostrate. Well, duh. I was a battered woman, not a sexual predator. And I needed safety and reassurance, not help in seeing how destructive I was. You see, with addicts, sometimes they need help understanding that what they’ve done has caused harm to others because they’re in denial. They minimize. That doctor was treating me like an addict, not like someone who’d barely survived an abusive relationship with a therapist. He didn’t know, but it still hurt. A lot.

It’s confusing. The entire time I was there, I was treated as an addict. Well, duh! That’s what you get treated like when you go to rehab. I got diagnosed with all sorts of stuff – practically the whole DSM IV tossed salad of personality disorders. Labels are defining. So when I failed to engage in the therapeutic process, it was due to my personality disorders and my addiction. Not because I’d just come from an abusive therapeutic relationship of 3 years.

I’m guessing that this other place would have picked up on that. Not necessarily because they’re so much better, but because by going there, I’d have claimed a different label.

Would I still have problems with sex? Probably. Would I still be a sex addict? I don’t know. I don’t think so. After all, it was the abusive therapist who diagnosed me as a sex addict. So I think I’d still be me, but maybe I’d probably label myself differently.

If you have the time to browse through Sandra’s website, I think you’ll find it’s time well spent. It’s always interesting to see how things look under a different label.

But here’s an important point, and the one I want to really focus on: I got better. No matter what my label is, I am better.

Think about that! It’s pretty fantastic! Even though there were a lot of things wrong with my diagnosis and my treatment, even though I probably got the wrong label and the wrong treatment, I got better. We have an amazing capacity for healing. I was in a safe place with people who truly wished me well and tried hard to help me get better.

Whatever your label is, you can get better too.

Non 12-step Recovery

Sometimes being in recovery gets old. A few years ago, back when I was seeing Father M. the wonder therapist, one of the many books I read was Stanton Peele’s book, Love and Addiction. It was informative, but not terribly helpful to me. Gee, I wonder if the bad therapist I was seeing had anything to do with that. Of course, without the therapist I wouldn’t have been interested in the book since my life didn’t unravel without his help.

Recently I’ve taken to reading Peele’s blog, which more often than not pisses me off. I get the feeling that he looks down on people like me, people who just couldn’t (wouldn’t) stop, people who want to be disempowered, or if not want, at least acquiesce to powerlessness.

Feeling defensive certainly affects how I read him. Maybe he’d be quite compassionate if he was my therapist. He’s devoted his career to helping addicts, that’s demonstrably compassionate. Plus I’ll hazard a guess that he doesn’t email sexual fantasies to his clients, always a bonus when it comes to a healthy therapeutic relationship! (Yeah, I know that’s not taking my responsibility for my actions. As a friend of mine recently pointed out, even though he was wrong, I’m not a child. I wasn’t coerced. I got exactly what I asked for. And he did pay a terrible price for his mistake.) Besides, surely fighting the status-quo of the treatment industry gets old, which would explain the often sarcastic tone in Peele’s posts.

Here’s the thing: what if the only reason I’m even interested in his opinion is because my addictive thinking is creatively working overtime to find yet another rationalization?

What if he’s wrong.
What if he’s right.

This, my friends is where fundamentalism begins. When stuff is so confusing or overwhelming you just pick something to believe in and reject further input. If nothing else, fundamentalism gets you off the hamster wheel. That puts me between a rock and a hard place. I don’t want to rationalize but I also don’t want to turn my brain off.

But hey, all this shit can be a worry for another day. Just for today, I’m going to put it on the back burner. I have a new audio book, Spin and it’s loaded on my new super cool ipod that I got for Mother’s Day. “Just for today,” that part of 12-step recovery is well worth keeping, regardless of what I do about the rest.