If you’re a kid growing up in a frightening or abusive environment, how do you survive? You dissociate. When your parents or other family members mistreat you, and running away is not an option, you escape mentally and emotionally. You stuff your painful experiences into “trauma capsules” and bury them somewhere in your subconscious, where they’re out of mind but still affecting your life.
As part of my training in Clinical EFT Tapping (Emotional Freedom Techniques), I learned about trauma capsules. They explain so much of what I’ve heard from people who were manipulated and exploited by sociopaths.
Trauma capsules form when children experience events so disturbing that kids can’t assimilate them into ordinary consciousness. The only way they can protect themselves is to block the events from their minds, in a form of dissociation.
Dissociation
According to WebMD, dissociation is a break in how your mind handles information. “You may feel disconnected from your thoughts, feelings, memories and surroundings,” the website says. “It can affect your sense of identity and your perception of time.”
Symptoms of dissociation include having an out-of-body experience, feeling like you’re a different person, feeling little or no pain, or more.
Psychology Today describes dissociation as the experience of detaching from reality. In this state, the website says, “consciousness, identity, memory, and perception are no longer naturally integrated.”
These definitions refer to adults who cope with current stress or trauma by checking out. If the condition continues, psychological treatment is usually recommended.
Trauma capsules and kids
For children, however, dissociation may actually be a reasonable way to deal with unreasonable experiences, according to Robert Scaer, M.D., a neurologist who specialized in treating pain.
Imagine a three-year-old who was sexually abused by her uncle. What is she going to do? She may not understand that what the uncle did was bad. She may not have words to describe her experience. She may only know that she felt icky. So instead of telling her mother — especially since her uncle said they had a “special secret” — she may pretend that it never happened.
The girl’s young mind encapsulates the trauma. Here’s what happens, according to Dawson Church, Ph.D., writing in The EFT Manual:
“The unpleasant memory is wrapped in a protective sheath and buried in the subconscious mind or the body. The whole event is encapsulated in this way, from the beginning to the end. The child may remember events up to the neutral point of emotional calm before the traumatic event began, and also remember events subsequent to the neutral point at which the traumatic event ended, but nothing in between.”
Children may have to live with people who are traumatizing them. “Isolating these events in trauma capsules allows the child to continue functioning in a hostile environment,” Church says.
By the time they are teenagers, children may have had many traumatic experiences and accumulated dozens of trauma capsules. They may have vague recollections that bad things happened but can’t remember the details. Those buried memories, however, affect how they perceive the world.
Painful experiences as adults
People who have traumatic experiences as teenagers or adults may react in similar ways. Some are aware that something bad happened but absolutely refuse to think about it. Others may block the memories completely.
The Lovefraud author Travis Vining, for example, had repressed memories that his psychopathic father had murdered people and then enlisted him to cover up the crimes. For a long time, Travis didn’t remember. But the hidden trauma ate at him mentally and physically, causing all kinds of illnesses. When he finally remembered and dealt with the truth of his experience, all his symptoms cleared up.
What Travis endured, and his recovery, is amazing. Listen to the True Lovefraud Stories podcast, Travis Vining: Miracle in the Madness.
Trauma leads to vulnerability
Past traumas, when they are unprocessed and unresolved, increase the survivor’s vulnerability to future exploitation. Dr. Robert Scaer, who identified the protective features of dissociation, estimated that 60% of his patients had been abused as children.
According to Dr. Liane Leedom, another Lovefraud contributor, research shows that people who endure narcissistic abuse once are likely to fall victim to narcissistic abuse again. I’ve spoken to multiple people who escaped one sociopath only to become involved with another one who was worse.
What’s going on?
Sociopaths target vulnerabilities. Abuse, whether experienced as a child or adult, creates vulnerabilities. You’re walking around with old or new emotional, psychological or physical wounds. They stay inside you until you deal with them.
All you want is to feel better and sociopaths sense your distress. They may ask you what happened, seeming to be genuinely concerned. You spill your guts, they promise to make the pain go away, and sooner or later you’re snagged into a manipulative relationship.
The solution to old trauma
How do you break the pattern? How do you avoid getting involved with more sociopaths? The solution is emotional healing — finding the buried memories and trauma capsules and releasing them.
But how do you release an experience you can’t remember?
Your mind may not remember what happened, but your subconscious and your body do. This is the point of an excellent book by Bessel Van der Kolk, Ph.D., called The Body Keeps the Score.
One of the approaches that Van der Kolk suggests for releasing trauma of the past is EFT Tapping. It works even if you don’t know what to tap on.
Here’s the process. I may ask you to tell me where in your body you feel a disturbance and what it’s like. We’ll tap on that. The sensation may change and move to another spot. This is good — it means the energy is shifting. We’ll continue tapping, chasing it around your body.
As we go along, I’ll ask you to describe any thoughts or memories that come up for you. Even if they seem to be random, they may be clues leading to what has been hidden from you. We’ll just keep following the breadcrumbs.
If you’re afraid to confront the memories, we can move forward slowly and gently. I’ve been trained in techniques to help you temporarily dissociate, to create some separation between you and the emotional pain.
Tapping sends calming signals to the brain. Then, as you feel stronger, we approach the memory a little at a time, tapping continuously. The tapping relieves the emotional charge, and eventually the memory doesn’t bother you anymore.
With that, you are free of the trauma capsule.
When you keep releasing the trauma of your past, your energy shifts so you are no longer a sociopath magnet. You gain the emotional freedom to build the life you truly want.
Learn more: Talk to Donna for validation, advice and emotional recovery
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