Traumatic Incident Reduction
Bob Rich’s Self-Therapy Guide: Find the Trauma – with Giles
In this series, Dr. Bob Rich teaches you how to leave behind depression, anxiety, and other forms of suffering all too common in our crazy world. Recovering the Self published two sections of Bob Rich’s book From Depression to Contentment: A self-therapy guide in a series of posts – the first section ending with the quest for meaning and the second section concluding with The Development of Resilience. The third section of Bob’s work continues here with special attention to various techniques and practices that are helpful in controlling depression.
In the previous post, Bob taught a practical way to switch your state of mind from emotion to more of a thinking mode so as to respond more rationally to a triggering thought or situation. Here, Bob takes us back to the story of Giles in search for the earliest memories of negative feelings about oneself.
Find the Trauma – When It Hit Giles
Remember, I have previously explained where depression comes from: it is a child’s negative, self-bashing interpretation of a “blow” or series of “blows.” Often, the relevant episode is easily accessible to the sufferer, and examining it through the lens of mature hindsight is very helpful. My first task with Giles, who was too miserable for Shirley to tolerate, was to lead him to remember the start of his lifelong troubles.
“So, let me understand this, Giles. When your mother dies, you intend to kill yourself. When was the first time you decided to do this?”
“When she had a mini-stroke, I can’t remember what the doctor called it.”
“A TIA?”
“That’s it. I realized, she is getting old, and won’t need me forever. This was before I met Shirley, and… before I lost her like I knew I would.” He looked ready to cry, but put on a calm face. “No one else cares the slightest whether I live or die, so, why not?”
“Are you certain? Surely you have friends?”
“Nah. Not a one.”
“If I did a survey of all the people who know you, what would they say?”
Shrug. “They don’t know the real me. Yes, I’m of service whenever I can, because they matter.”
“THEY matter? You don’t?”
Another shrug, and a nod.
This was obviously a core belief. We were getting somewhere. “When was the first time you felt as if you didn’t matter?” (This is reframing a belief taken to be true into an “as if.”)
“I’ve known it all my life.”
“Right. You crawled out of the womb believing you didn’t matter?” (Again, I reframed “knowing” into “believing.”)
He laughed with me. “Of course not. Wait a mo. When I was eight, one day I came home from school, and a moving company truck was standing in front of the house…”
After this, we had something to work on.
You can do this for yourself. I did. As a youngster, my self-description was, “If there is a wrong way of doing it, or even if there isn’t, I’ll do it that way first.”
At this time, I still hated my stepfather, and often had flashbacks to his abuse. One day, I was driving along, following directions to visiting a nice family who had invited me for dinner, when, as usual, I got lost. Oh, hell, I thought, if there is a wrong way of doing it, or even if there isn’t, I’ll do it that way first. I pulled over to check the street directory. (For people who now follow directions on their phone, that was a book of maps you had to wade through to find your route.) “Where did that thought come from?” I asked myself.
I was transported back to an earlier time. I felt being in a kid body, kneeling on the carpet. Spread out in front of me was my brand new Meccano set, a birthday present from my grandmother. As I was puzzling over what had to go where, the door opened, and HE stood there. HE said, “Save us from the idiots of the world! If there is a wrong way of doing it, or even if there isn’t, he’ll do it that way first.”
That flashback was a big part of the start of my healing.
So, find the thought that pulls you down the most, and identify the exact episode when it intruded into your life, then question it with adult eyes.
Who knows why Giles’s parents didn’t tell him of the impending relocation? It was negligent, but probably they were under multiple pressures, and just assumed he knew. I am certain it wasn’t because they thought he didn’t matter. That was a little boy’s inaccurate interpretation.
Why did I buy into my stepfather’s abusive assessment of me? Because I was a nine-year old child, and he was a powerful adult. I rejected everything about him at the time, but he colored my world anyway. That’s how abuse works.
To the present day, it’s actually true that I get things wrong the first couple of times I try something. Nevertheless, when I was 21, I noticed another fact about myself: “If someone else can do it, I can learn it.” I can. After a few repetitions of the new activity, I understand it so well that I can teach it to others.
There was no basis of fact to Giles’s damaging core belief, unlike in my case. Both of us, though, used other facts to fight the poisonous belief. During therapy, he eventually generated the thought, “I’ve been helping everyone all my life to prove that I matter. So, this belief turned me into a good guy people like.”
Homework
Look out for your self-abusing inner clichés. If you can, track one back to an episode like Giles and I did, imagine yourself back there, and examine that young person’s plight with tolerant adult love and sympathy.
– Dr. Bob Rich
