Seeking Safety from Trauma

Over the last decade we have seen a deluge of spilled ink and sermons delivered on the topic of Trauma (capital letter intended).   Therapists and other clinicians are wont to see Trauma as the cause of all mental/emotional distress and disorder.  Payers and regulators want to see Trauma informed care as the standard for all services.

Please don't misunderstand and think I am about to argue against trauma as a factor of etiology.  I am not.  Please do not think I am going argue against trauma sensitive care.  I am not.

I do, however, have to take issue with a number of things.  One of which, I will briefly introduce here, is an intuitive response to emotional trauma (or the vision of Trauma in the mind's eye of the therapist).  I have noticed a tendency among my colleagues to fix Trauma through the exclusive use of invoking Safety (capital letter intended).

What is Safety?  It is a mythical destination we point people to who we believe are wounded by emotional trauma.  In its simplest and cliched manifestation, it is the "safe place" we tell people to go to inside themselves when they are distressed by Traumas past or current.  In its most Utopian manifestation, it is the construction (socially and physically) of a space (or whole communities) designed to remove all sources of trauma and reminders of trauma.  A Safe place is a place where people speak to each other exclusively in soft and supportive tones.  A Safe place has no rules to remind us we are not in control.  In a Safe place no one tells me I am wrong.  A Safe place is a place without "no".

The idea of creating Safety seems to come to some practitioners by intuition and without need for training.  For other practitioners (e.g., Sandra Bloom) it is a treatment model that is bottled, trademarked and sold, but more than that it is a morally driven world view.  It is true by faith and has to be defended against the unbelieving (read: medical model).

Why do we need to create Safety?  Because Trauma doesn't just hurt in the moment, it continues to harm day after day, year after year.  Life's little annoyances and disappointments are more than they are.  They are reminders of the Trauma.  Triggers and re-triggers.  It harms even when the individual has no idea it continues to harm.  Why?  Because the clinician believes.  Sometimes the individual doesn't even know they were Traumatized.  In those cases, the true believing therapist has to help the individual remember . . . (we know where that leads).

That's the reasoning for it.  I can't fault the premise (that psychological trauma hurts), but I doubt the conclusions.

So then, does creating a Safe place help?  I feel the need to ask, if only because so many around me seem to take it on faith.

I haven't come across so much empirical evidence apart from the some apocryphal study about mice and cat hairs.  But maybe this Trauma-Safety dilemma has a corollary in Happiness?  Seeking Happiness for the Sad seems like a very similar impulse to me.  And in that realm I think we do have some evidence that tells us it is a fool's quest.  Turning Sadness into Happiness through the power of affirmations, replacing negative self talk with positive self talk, while intuitively sensible, turns out to be the psychological equivalent of trying to catch a rainbow.  Every time I tell myself I'm beautiful and smart and wonderful, the opposites of those things echo in the mind and I have to increase my affirmations louder and louder to myself, but in the end, affirmations in a vacuum do not lead to Happiness.

Could the quest for Safety be a similar fairy tale?  A nagging doubt tells me so.   The fact that no one questions it, makes me worry all the more.

• Focusing so exclusively on Safety paradoxically highlights an individual's vulnerability.
• Focusing so exclusively on past Trauma reifies victimhood and takes the person out of the here and now.
• By focusing on victimhood we take away a person's agency.
• By focusing on the past we can't change, we forget the here and now where a person actually does have the power to change things.
• By externalizing cause and effect we have taken all control away from the person.

Considering these things, is it any wonder that we see so many people taking part in this therapeutic approach sink deeper and deeper into dysfunction?