Recovery from trauma isn’t about ‘getting over’ something upsetting. It often requires building skills for managing emotions. In this podcast, I explain the process.

Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.

Welcome to this podcast – ‘Recovery is building skills’

I’m often asked how life is different for me now compared to when things were at their worst, which was probably around 2007-2008. At that point I’d been in therapy a couple of years and everything was kicking off. I was in the middle of the police investigation into my abusers. And I was ‘florid DID’ – lots of parts taking over, lots of things like dissociative fugues, losing time, uncontrolled switching, flashbacks, overdoses: just terrible.

Just to explain: ‘dissociative fugue’ refers to a specific condition in the DSM-5, but I’m using it here in the context of my behaviour at that time rather than a specific psychiatric diagnosis. So it’s often where you’ve been triggered in some way – pushed outside your ‘window of tolerance’ – and you take flight. You go off somewhere but you have very little conscious awareness of what you’re doing or where you’re going. Eventually – hopefully! – you’ll ‘come’ to and you might be miles from home. You’ve basically switched to another part and you’ve got amnesia for that, and for some reason – and usually there’s a very good reason – for some reason, this part has taken you somewhere else.

Because at that time, I was trying to work through the trauma of two childhood pregnancies that I had as a result of rape. I’d held them out of mind – dissociated from them – because they was just too awful to bear. I couldn’t come to terms with them. The emotional pain was overwhelming. So instead, I acted out in my behavior. I acted out what I couldn’t speak out in words. And I kept ‘fugue-ing’. I kept going off, in another part of my personality, to the place where the births had taken place, trying to find the babies. Those parts of me, stuck in trauma-time, couldn’t see that over 20 years had passed. They were just trying to find the babies. They were trying to piece it all together, to change the ending – I’m not sure what they were trying to do, but they were definitely stuck in a time-warp.

So I’d just ‘come round’ and I’d be somewhere else. I’d be sat in a car in the villages where it happened. Hours would have passed. There’d be a dozen missed calls on my phone from people trying to find me. I’d have a very vague sense of stuff happening, but it’s like I couldn’t separate out reality from dream from memory. I just felt overwhelmingly distressed and upset. And it was always really hard to get my front brain back online, to be able to think clearly, to calm down, to make decisions. Sometimes I’d get stuck, half aware that I was miles from home, and then just be frozen and stuck and unable to move or do anything about it, switching in and out and feeling really helpless. And I think as well part of me wanted to be rescued. Part of me desperately wanted someone to come and make it all alright for me.

This went on for a while, and I started to deal with it, started to stop it happening, fundamentally, I think, by paying attention to what was going on in me – what was going on in my parts. Because at that time I wasn’t willing to listen to my parts. I didn’t want to know what they were thinking or feelin