BEING HAUNTED BY OLD TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES

Recently I stopped assessing and treating children and adolescents who were hospitalized on the Copestone Child and Adolescent Inpatient Programs on the St.Joseph Campus of Mission Hospitals.  I had planned to do this for over a year and thought that I was ready and well prepared for this change and transition in my life.  Some people kept referring to my retiring from my work at the hospital.  I found myself reacting strongly to this and kept clarifying that I was stopping my work at the hospital but not retiring. The term retirement  continued to bother me and I realized that I was feeling more stress about this change than I thought I should be.  Then, my wife and I were eating dinner with some new friends and one of them had been retired for 17 years and was healthy and loved being retired.  As I listened to him talk about this I suddenly realized that I associated retirement with death as my father had to retire due to illness [he had lung cancer] and then he died a short time later.  My brain [I] still connected retirement with dying!  I had explored my feelings related to my father and his death in some detail during a psychoanalysis that I had during my training in general and child psychiatry.  I felt that I had dealt with the stresses and emotions associated with his death and yet clearly not completely.  What I apparently had not done was disconnect retiring from dying.  After I made this connection I was able to reassure myself that my situation is different from my father's and that I did not have to be worried about it and my brain did not have to be on guard to protect me from a similar fate as my father suffered.  

Our brains are very good at storing information and maintaining a pattern of response unless we give our brains specific instructions to change the pattern.  It seems that we need to tell our brains in very clear terms that the old response no longer applies.  This requires that we name the old response and recall it and then confirm that it no longer applies and can be modified.  This happened for me when I recalled the connection of retirement and death for my father and knew that this connection does not apply to me and my brain does not need to be on guard trying to protect me from death if I retire.

I believe that frequently when someone has been traumatized, it is difficult to believe that they are not in danger like they were when the trauma occurred.  They have changed and are wiser and have different coping strategies and even though they can be stressed and feel overwhelmed at times, it is not at all like they way they felt when the trauma occurred.  

It seems critical for people to be able to recognize if they are still feeling at risk to be retraumatized as a source of their ongoing anxiety and stress and even physical symptoms. Then, they have an opportunity to clearly tell themselves that they are not at risk and why not. This can then relieve a lot of their stress.