Traumatic experiences can also affect how you perceive things and cause you to have what we call "cognitive distortions." These distortions are especially present in people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cognitive overload, panic attacks, depression, anxiety, shame, and, yes, substance abuse.
But you don't need to have that diagnosis for your thinking to be skewed by a traumatic experience. Here are four ways trauma can distort your thinking. Number one is that you can't feel close to people if your trauma involves losing someone or something, or even being rejected by someone you love, like an absent parent; you can believe that you'll permanently lose people or things that are important to you. If that's the case, then why bother getting close to someone? Or why bother investing that much into this thing?
Because you'll lose it anyway, you'll have to suffer again. Breaking out of this pattern takes time, but change starts with recognizing the connection between your past losses and how you react to new situations. In the wake of a traumatic experience, you tend to overlay the same emotions from the past onto the present and react to it as if it's the same experience, but it's not. You can still be disappointed and experience a loss in the present, but you have the agency to make different decisions that could result in a different outcome. So, getting past this pattern of reacting with old emotions takes constant reminding that that was then, and this is now, and the two are not the same.
You won't be able to work all of this out in your head if you don't have a therapist to help you see what you're doing. Journaling your experiences can help you be more introspective. One approach to journaling is to write down a negative experience you had interacting with someone. This could be the result of a conflict you had with someone. Or did someone say something that made you feel uncomfortable, insecure, angry, ashamed, or guilty, just to name a few negative emotions.
Once you identify the emotion, write down the situation. What did the person say or do that resulted in you feeling that way? Notice I don't say what they did to make you feel that way? We're assuming here that your reaction was out of proportion to the trigger. It doesn't fit the situation, so whatever the person said or did isn't to blame for how you feel.
The next thing to explore is whether another situation evoked a similar reaction or emotion. What about a situation like the present? Then you want to look at how that situation is different and how you could have responded differently. This is a generic template, and you'd have to modify it to make it fit. Cases where you were overtly harmed versus covertly harmed.
For example:
You tend to withdraw from people when they get close to you. You may recognize that the situations that trigger you to do this may be when someone becomes too controlling or smothering, like a key figure from your past. Or you may pull away when you notice that you're relying too much on the person and want to keep an emotional distance because you anticipate eventually being rejected by this person or situation like it always seems to happen. These are two very different originating traumatic experiences that result in similar behavior of keeping people at a distance or not being able to feel close to people. So this is how exploring these situations through journaling can help you figure this out and see your patterns.
The second distortion is around feeling safe. Suppose you've experienced something threatening your safety, like a car accident. In that case, you may have this foreboding sense that you will eventually die in a car or other accident. It's just inevitable.
This unsafe feeling can run in the background of your mind and make you feel anxious, and you may not connect the tension that you feel with feeling unsafe. That fear may not register consciously for you. Instead, you just have this sick feeling in your stomach or a sense of dread and do not know why you feel that way. Grounding exercises are a great way to get out of future thinking and bring you back to the present moment, where you are safe. And there are lots of ways that you can ground yourself, but one easy way to do it is to use color awareness exercises.
You pick any color that comes to mind and then name all the objects in your view that have that color. So, you look around the room and say the object aloud. You can use this and other grounding exercises to diffuse your fear and settle your mind. A third way trauma can distort your thinking is by generating self-blame and mistrust. It's common to blame yourself for the experience.
Person-to-person trauma is things like abuse, bullying, or assault at the hands of another person, as opposed to a natural disaster or an accident. We process intentional person-to-person harm differently than unintentional accidents, even if the physical outcome is the same. The thing about distortions is they aren't logical, so when something wrong happens, you look to blame yourself for the circumstance. If I had only gotten an earlier start to my day, I wouldn't have run into this person who attacked me. This self-blame, guilt, and shame can cause you to doubt yourself and not trust your judgment.
On decisions. You may even have trouble believing that people can really have your best interests at heart. You can address this distortion with journaling the same way as you would with not feeling close to people. A fourth cognitive distortion that can result from trauma is feeling powerless. You can feel like you can't control any aspect of your life, and this feeling can drive you to make extreme decisions or eliminate things from your life to gain control.
For example, when you step out of your car to pump gas, you're held up at a gas station. This is something that can happen to anyone. Your reaction is to stop driving because you don't feel safe. Even in your car, you fear someone can walk up to your vehicle at a red light. Now, you've never seen someone walking up to the vehicles at busy intersections with guns in their hands, but now you see this as probably an incident just waiting to happen.
It's a matter of time. Fear, followed by avoidance of things related to the fear, makes the fear grow bigger and sometimes morph into other fears. Like in this example, it starts with the fear of someone surprising you when you step out of your car and then evolves into general concerns that you're a target anytime you're in your car. Avoiding driving altogether is what made the fear grow and develop branches. If you recognize this kind of distortion around being unable to control anything, the thing to do is to dial back and look at the things you can handle.
If you gain control over something, even if small, you weaken the distortion about being powerless over everything. And these can be small wins. Maybe you can control the time of day you drive or only get out of the car in well-lit and well-populated areas. If you've gotten into a pattern of avoidance, you may need help from a therapist to help you recognize ways to feel more in control. Another approach to reducing and eliminating avoidance behaviors is gradually exposing yourself to things you find threatening.
This is called graded exposure or systematic desensitization. Desensitization helps you get past the restrictive behavior holding you back, but you'll still need to work on your mindset around feeling powerless. It's a combined approach to managing how you think and your actions. You can learn about addressing cognitive distortions even if you don't have a therapist. In my new book, "if it doesn’t apply, let it fly,”?
Chris Packham, LAADC, M-RAS, CCDS, CS
