Book review : Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma, by Janina Fisher

I have been reading psychology self help books for a quarter of a century. I’ve read lots of them.

Still, while reading Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma, I have never felt so understood and validated. As if Janina Fisher was writing about me all along.

If you know or suspect you have been through traumatic experiences, I strongly recommend you read it too. This book is a godsend.

Granted, for those among us who are at the beginning of recovery, some things in this book may seem strange or even infuriating. The idea that our painful past is still alive in us is difficult to accept at first. We want to believe we are over it.

Trust me though, even so reading Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma will be helpful. When we will feel safe enough to let it sink in, we will. So the sooner we get the information, the better.

For those among us who have been healing for a while, this book can help go further in our understanding and compassion for ourselves. I was already familiar with some of its main points, but I got plenty of material for further thoughts.

As an introduction, or if you can’t read it, here are the main ideas of Janina Fisher’s book, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma :

Symptoms are a form of memory

Overwhelming experiences are not likely to be remembered in a coherent story or clear pictures that we can describe. That’s what decades of research and our recent understanding of how the brain works have demonstrated.

Traumatic memories are often stored instead as:

• emotions such as rage, shame, panic or depression
• physical reactions such as trembling, shallow breathing, or hypervigilance
• impulses like fleeing, fighting, drinking / abusing drugs, or disconnecting from reality

Trauma survivors have symptoms instead of memories.

Mary Harvey

These reactions, or emotional flashbacks take hold when we are triggered, i.e. when something in our current reality reminds us of what happened during our traumatic experiences. Mind you, we usually are completely unaware of our triggers and why they are here.

For example, one of my triggers is being separated from loved ones, particularly if I have to sleep on my own. It’s a fairly common trigger, and the first I spotted in my own life (among many!).

Triggers are both a curse and a blessing

It took my years to identify a pattern in my behavior when I was finding myself alone. I did not feel particularly distressed. I did not understand circumstances were triggering implicit memories. I did not spot any link with difficult experiences.

Each time though, I was isolating, fleeing reality by compulsively day dreaming and watching TV, smoking, sometimes drinking, and having difficulties to attend to my most basic needs such as eating and sleeping. I was leaving reality, and I did not understand why I was doing that. I felt so weird, and there seemed to be no way I could prevent it.

So all in all, not a great time. But still a blessing, because triggers are like breadcrumbs left by our past. They can show us what happened and how we felt at the time. Each time I was left alone for a few days as an adult, I was kind of spontaneously regressing to my younger self.

It was not a great experience, but it was a memory.

Once I got it, it got really easier to go through it. It helped my self esteem tremendously: my behavior made sense.

It also got me an opportunity to be in contact with this little girl inside; most of the time she was present but well hidden, even from my conscious self. Triggers allowed me to see this part of me, interact with her, and start to heal her.

One part of us is traumatized, one part is functional, and both are “us”

I don’t know about you, but I used to read a lot about our “false self”.

Somehow I got the impression that when I was triggered, I was experiencing “my real me” with all its internal chaos and unbearable feelings.

When I was functioning normally on the other hand, with a kind of neutral emotional background, I thought I was operating from a false self concocted to go along and please others.

Janina Fisher clarified all of this for me, with the help of the theory known as the structural dissociation model. When confronted with overwhelming experiences, we can learn to operate on two levels: one part of us is indeed traumatized, hypervigilant and chaotic. But one part of us keeps on with normal life no matter what. We attend school or go to work, make friends, cook dinner and watch movies. Even if we have been through hell, and even if a part of us is still in hell. And it is all very normal.

This part who keeps on keeping on is not a false self. It is not here to please others. It’s here for us to build enough capabilities to find safety, and build a good life once we are safe. It is a resource, and not a social mask.

What we have to do to get better is owning both aspects of our personality, and get them to build a relationship instead of ignoring, or trying to overpower each other.

Yeah I know, it’s far easier said than done. I have done a lot of progress but I’m still working on it.

We can feel better with time and deliberate effort :-). I’m certain we can, and so is Janina Fisher.

Take care my friend.