A New View From the Top of the Trauma Stack

I was in conversation today with a networking friend and we were sharing stories.

I talked about two things. The new term I made up last week, trauma stacking,* and the fact that I suspect I have ADHD. From the top of this trauma stack mountain, the ADHD seems entirely plausible and almost inevitable.

A blog post is as good as anything to explore my new understandings about myself. I tried morning pages, but the brain fog before breakfast and the writer's cramp and tennis elbow put paid to that.

I've been blogging for a while here on podia (my website), and I've had some interesting feedback, most of it positive. But also 'it seems like Sorrel uses her blog to work through her issues.' Yes I do! Because writing about my stuff helps me get clarity and it helps my community understand their own stuff (I hope). After all what I have to offer is only relevant to people who share some of my experience - either boarding school, or the car-crash relationship, or maybe anxiety/depression.

And the big message I want to get across is that when we start to be more relational, we heal our trauma so much faster.

So here I am explaining my new concept of trauma stacking to myself and to you reading this. And seriously I would recommend blogging to anyone who wants to explore their experience in a public space rather than the privacy of a pile of notebooks!

Building the Trauma Stack

Trauma stacking is how our experience of life leads to one trauma stacking on top of another. The first one that I'm aware of was the death of my beloved grandmother when I was six years old. In a world of babies (I have two younger sisters) and parents who were at loggerheads with each other, Nanny's home was a place where I felt safe and loved, unconditionally.

I remember the desolation I felt when I realised I would never see her again. So it wasn't just any bereavement.

Life continued in much the same way in the years that followed. The babies turned into children, but my parents continued to argue. That's the second trauma in the stack.

I get to the age of 11, and find myself in boarding school. I was a shy, sensitive child, entirely ill-suited to this Victorian institution where it seemed like only the bullies thrived. (Actually I now know they were as unhappy as the rest of us). So that's the third trauma in the stack.

Fast forward eight years to my 20th birthday and two days later my boyfriend, who I had been with since I was 16, took his life. The fourth trauma in the stack.

Boarding school casts a long shadow and bereavement by suicide a longer shadow still. But I should probably point out here that my response to boarding school will have also influenced my response to Andy's suicide. I was entirely unresourced and unable to cope, and was later told that I'd had PTSD. In those days it would have been called a nervous breakdown.

About two years after that, I moved to the US, where I spent five years in post-graduate study (developmental psychology in case you're asking). This was not so traumatic, but it was immensely stressful, and I was there mostly because of an American I had fallen for. Needless to say the relationship was pretty challenging.

I came back to the UK and spent a few happy years in London. Yay! Maple syrup in the stack - a thick layer of it! And I met the man who would go on to become the father of my two daughters and my husband.

The marriage didn't work out so well and turned into a bit of a car-crash. At this time I started to see how my own adaptive psychology (to my parents' conflict, my experience of boarding school and Andy's suicide) was playing out in my marriage. This then is the 5th or 6th pancake in the stack - depending on whether you count the US years.

What Sits at the Top of the Stack

I left the marriage in 2016 and now as I stand here on top of my trauma stack I can see why my brain no longer functions as beautifully as it did when I was a young woman. I can now do relationships really well, I'm an excellent coach, but my ability to organise my time, my work, my life has gone a bit pear-shaped.

There are behaviour patterns I recognise as very particular to boarding school survival - defensiveness, needing to be right, needing to be in control, pedantry, needing to correct people when they put apostrophes in the wrong place! I don't usually do that - I just feel the pressure inside... I've had to address all of these in order to get good at relationships.

And there are more general things that anyone might experience regardless of where they spent their adolescence: anxiety, depression, bouts of insomnia, and the unmentionable - IBS.

As I see it all of these contribute to the disorganisation that I inhabit. Hence my suspicion that I have ADHD. Besides there's definitely autism in my family and I've been pretty sure for years that I'm on the spectrum. It would explain the shyness, the social anxiety and the pedantry!

But there is something really positive here at the top of the stack - like the strawberry or blueberries piled onto the pancakes. It's that I can see where I've come from, how far I've come and how much I now have to offer other people, particularly since I stopped inhabiting the position of victim. Writing has been a big part of that too, and keeping up the blog has been a really good discipline to make sure that I do the writing!

Dismantling the Trauma Stack

But the really important realisation has been about how you take down the trauma stack.

My friend suggested this morning that trauma unstacking might be a thing. He might be right too. But my urge to find the flaw in the argument (you see?) led me to question that. And I realised that when you take out the layer at the bottom, the whole stack collapses.

Let me explain: it's more like Jenga or a brick wall. You pull out the bottom layer and the layers above are bound to fall over. The bottom layer of course is our childhood trauma. I don't think I'm special. Pretty much everyone has some kind of childhood trauma, albeit small-T trauma if not big-T trauma. You don't need to have been abused; you just need to have experienced your parents' divorce or a spell in hospital or the death of a beloved grandparent or bullying at school.

The trauma we experience as children sets the stage for the rest of our lives. We learn to adapt to it (forming the Adaptive Child, who emerges about age six or seven). The pain experienced by that small child (the Wounded Child) triggers the Adaptive Child to respond in ways which served him or her or them when they were seven or 10 or 13.

The problem is those behaviour patterns are not very relational. When you're in fight/flight or freeze you're not thinking about the impact of your behaviour on how other people feel or what they think of you. And if your preferred option is to 'fawn' - ie to placate, to people-please - you're still not being relational. Because fawning is not about supporting the relationship, it's about keeping you safe.

Once you understand what triggers pain or shame in your Wounded Child and which option is preferred by your Adaptive Child, you'll start to understand what you're doing to help create trauma in your current relationships. And that means you'll be able to make a stand for yourself and to practise relational mindfulness.

One way to do this is to do the work of learning to parent your Wounded Child and Adaptive Child so that you both nurture them and put limits on them (such as "I love you, but you are not to speak to my partner like that!"). That definitely means stepping out of the role of victim.

If this is something you would like to explore, get in touch. You can book a complimentary Clarity Call with me and we'll take a deep-dive into your relationship dynamics and what you can do to change them - because you can't change your partner, but you can change yourself!

* It turns out that I wasn't the first to use the term 'trauma stacking'. In an email I received recently from trauma specialist, Dr Laura Donaldson, the first known use of the term was by Gail Johnson in 2016. Dr Laura has used it for years in her work with trauma. It's kind of reassuring to know that other people see things the same way as we do.