When someone sits down with me and tells me about a difficult or traumatic experience they’ve endured – especially when that experience was early on in life – there are plenty of things I want to understand as a therapist. But over years of studying and witnessing how trauma takes shape, there’s one question that feels most important to ask.
More than anything else, I want to know: When this happened to you, who was right there and safe for you to tell? Who had the capacity to hold it with you at the time?
More often than not, the question hangs in the air for a moment. Sometimes it hangs because they are scanning back in their memory, not wanting to have missed a possible answer, not wanting to discount people they genuinely loved. More often, though, the question hangs because the answer has been sitting right there on the edge of their experience, waiting to be named.
“No one, I guess,” is usually what comes next.
When I hear that, I try to stay there in the moment. There can be an impulse in both of us to move away from its sharpness, but it’s so important to stay. For the person to have the experience of someone sitting in the heartbreak with them, not needing them to move beyond it quickly.
Once named, there can be an impulse too for the person to offer all of the reasons that their aloneness at the time made sense or couldn’t be helped. They were just so busy taking care of my brother – he was having such a hard time. Or, I’d just arrived at college and I didn’t really know anyone yet. Or, I made sure that no one would know because I was just so embarrassed.
The reasons are hardly ever wrong or inaccurate, even if incomplete. It’s just that they tend to offer explanation as replacement for being with the ache of it. We tell ourselves that if we can just make sense of the situation, if we can figure out the ‘why’ of what happened, we should feel better. And when we don’t feel better, we make that evidence of some fundamental brokenness in us.
Importantly, recognizing the aloneness isn’t about shifting blame or finding targets for our outrage; it’s about seeing the pivotal role that aloneness plays in how we experience hardship. It’s about finding ways to repair and reduce that aloneness.
–
Fall was descending on London in 1940, and night after night, air raid sirens began blasting their haunting wails throughout the city. It was the beginning of the Blitz, a period of eight months in which Germany relentlessly released bombs over London and several other British cities. The bombings would usually come at night, leaving residents desperate to seek shelter underground while homes and businesses were destroyed above. By the time the Blitz was over, thousands of civilians had been killed.
While the bombings were still raging, frantic parents began arranging for their children to be sent far out of the city. Almost 1.5 million children were sent away from the major cities during this time to live with strangers in rural areas. Meanwhile, other children stayed back with their parents, either out of parents’ choice or lack of options.
Various clinicians at the time began making some fascinating observations. Among those doing so were the famous Anna Freud (daughter of Sigmund) and Dorothy Burlingham, who founded the Hampstead War Nurseries to care for children separated from their parents. What they and others noticed was that the children who had remained near to the bombings, but in close proximity to their parents, actually fared better in many ways than those living in physical safety in more peaceful, remote towns.
It was a finding that mystified many. How could children who were continuously exposed to devastating trauma cope better than the ones who were safe from it? What they witnessed was that all the children, whether separated or not, had understandably strong emotional reactions to the air raids. But the children who had what we would now call their “attachment figures” nearby would react and then recover relatively quickly. Those who were separated were left with the incredible stress of bombings with nowhere for it to go. In the absence of a connected recovery process, the effects lingered and were more deeply entrenched.
We have to be cautious with these findings, as they don’t suggest that as long as parents are close, children don’t experience effects of trauma, or that children should always stay in unsafe situations. The reality is that some of the children left with their parents didn’t survive. But what was remarkably demonstrated was the power of a close and emotionally available caregiver on helping to metabolize traumatic events. We also got to see the heartbreaking results of its absence.
There are two other nuances that are important to name here. The first is that to experience the protective effect of the caregiver, the caregiver needed to be relatively emotionally available. That means that it’s not just the physical presence of an adult, but an adult with some level of capacity to support the needs of the child. The parents during the Blitz were understandably terrified as well, but the ones who provided the secure base for their children were those who were still able to access some level of psychological availability.
The other nuance is that when we are talking about the London Blitz, the source of the trauma was overtly external. This is fundamentally different from situations in which the trauma is a result of the caregiver themselves, whether by their action or inaction. In those situations, things get more complicated. In those situations, staying in proximity isn’t universally protective.
–
In one model of therapy called AEDP, which I’ve talked a bit about before, the founder, Dr. Diana Fosha goes so far as to describe much of psychopathology as being the result of unwilled and unwanted aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotion. That’s a big sentence, and one worth breaking down at least a little bit.
What she’s saying here is that, particularly when we are young and lacking our internalized resources, we naturally seek out support for our big and overwhelming emotions. We need to draw on someone else’s nervous system to help find a sense of safety and regulation. That’s what we call co-regulation – a beautiful process of finding synchronicity with another person’s energy. When that isn’t available to us – for any host of reasons, but for ones that we aren’t choosing – we end up developing less healthy ways of coping with what feels overwhelming. That could include anxious habits, compulsive behaviors, a depressed mood, mentally checking out, intellectualizing things, or a variety of other ways. These ways of coping are the basis for what ends up getting called disorders.
It’s important to say that while a lot of us will experience this kind of unwanted aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotion, many of us won’t identify with a “disorder.” That’s because a lot of the coping strategies go unseen or are even celebrated in our culture: think overwork, obsession with health, people pleasing, or mindlessly scrolling. But eventually these strategies do tend to cause us problems.
But back to the aloneness itself – why is it so detrimental? It’s because, before we’ve developed the capacities inside of ourselves, the overwhelming feelings are lacking any kind of container. We again need regulate those feelings dyadically – with another person, usually our caregiver or someone we trust. When we don’t have that, the emotions stay unmetabolized.
You’ve probably heard people talk about trauma getting “stuck” in the body. I don’t personally think this is the best way to describe it, but it’s close. I’d suggest that the it’s more that our responses to the trauma or overwhelming feelings get frozen in place – the strategies we develop to deal become rigid and repeated over and over.
And the most frustrating part is that eventually those strategies themselves – the overwork or avoidance or anxiety – end up keeping us from more fully connecting with other people in the future. So we get a bit trapped in the cycle of aloneness that started.
But what happens when we do have access to connection – dyadic regulation, as it can be called? We suddenly have a place for our overwhelming emotion to land. We have a bigger vessel. A way to start metabolizing the feelings instead of returning to our familiar strategies. A way to get freer.
–
Back in December of 2012, just before the winter break was to start in the small town of Newtown, Connecticut, an incomprehensible tragedy struck. A 20-year-old white man killed his mother and then forced his way into two first-grade classrooms and opened fire. In the end, he killed 20 children and 6 adults, and then himself. America watched in horror.
As the Sandy Hook tragedy unfolded, the mental health response launched quickly. Children were reunited with the parents as quickly as possible – not because the parents would erase the trauma, but because it was understood that the kids needed their adults’ nervous systems to begin to regulate. The town initiated as many gatherings and rituals as possible, giving people places and ways to be together rather than isolated in their grief. They reopened schools fairly quickly because the people and structures were attachment figures too and restored kids’ connection to each other.
The entire response was centered around the idea of undoing aloneness in the wake of unfathomable experience. They knew that they weren’t going to prevent the pain of what had unfolded. They expected nightmares, startle responses, regressions – but they didn’t pathologize those reactions. Rather, they worked on reducing the isolation of the reactions so that they didn’t become entrenched patterns.
This is what undoing aloneness is all about. It’s about giving hard feelings a place to land, allowing them to move, and watching them evolve – together.
–
Most of us have never experienced air raids or a school shooting, and so our painful feelings weren’t anticipated or met with a community response. Our painful feelings were often the quieter kind. They showed up in the panic we felt walking into our first day of school or the anger we felt toward our dad when he went away for those weeks. They were often the ones that no one thought to ask about.
We don’t necessarily need to call them trauma, but rather emotions with no place to land – feelings with no other relational field to help us learn to regulate them. As adults now, the experiences have long past, but the embodied sense of estrangement often remains. It might be the nagging feeling of aloneness that we can’t quite shake. Or the sense of overwhelm that comes when we start to touch in to what we feel – and so we retreat into distraction.
What do we do now?
The beauty of neuroplasticity – the capacity for the brain to reshape in the face of new experience – is that we can quite literally undo the aloneness that we experienced early on or even more recently. What that requires in the here and now is an active and experiential process of undoing aloneness. Not just being around people generally or having an active social life, but being in relationship with particular people in a particular way.
It’s what I think of as the foundational basis for good psychotherapy. Developing a relationship with a skilled therapist allows for an undoing of aloneness over time. As I said, it’s an active process – not simply the result of sitting with someone who is compassionate (that’s lovely, but not quite enough). Most of us have had the experience of being with nice people, and it doesn’t change that we can feel alone inside our own experience. A skilled therapist helps us specifically and strategically draw out what needs to be felt and offers a certain kind of accompaniment in that process.
Some therapies will help us undo aloneness with interventions that develop our own internalized attachment figures. That might sound a little complicated, but it essentially means that they help us cultivate our own sense of connection with ourselves, so that even in the absence of another person, we feel tended to and supported. That might be through approaches like EMDR, Internal Family Systems, AEDP mentioned above, or a variety of other models.
The amazing thing about this work is that it tends to build on itself. It lets us spiral up, as I like to say, as we start to feel less alone with our feelings and more receptive to others’ presence. As we do that, we become better and better at being with ourselves through our most difficult emotions and not letting them escalate or cause us more problems. Our concept of ourselves even starts to shift – from someone who, perhaps, felt pulled toward hyperindependence or unable to settle to someone who can feel present, clear, and in connection.
And the reality is that being deeply understood can feel almost disorienting at first. Having another person remain present without turning away isn’t simply comforting, it’s corrective. The nervous system begins updating its expectations about what is possible.
Maybe that’s what healing is – giving our hardest experiences the one thing they never had the first time: a place to land.
