Trauma Relapse: A Common PTSD Experience

I discovered a common relapse connection among many of my trauma life coaching coachees who had experienced childhood abuse and trauma . The relapse connection I discovered I will call “trauma thrill”. A trauma thrill is the act of reconnecting to an old trauma relationship, mindset, and/or lifestyle due to going through a new traumatic experience. The automatic response of the Core Self is to protect self by invoking old defensive patterns to stop the pain of the recent event even after years of successful growth and recovery. The person will continue the old defensive behavior patterns even though they may be destructive. At that point, strong feelings of blame, shame and guilt enter back into his or her life, due to feelings of failure and betrayal to their recovery.

I was coaching a 40 year old female who had 4 years of recovery from childhood/adulthood abuse and emotional trauma. After a successful experience in an inpatient psychiatric program where she connected with her system, she broke old destructive patterns, reduced her PTSD symptoms and entered into true symptom reduction and stabilization. Once out of the program and back home she had a new sense of self, confidence and freedom. She was able to live in the here and now every day. Her past was not her focus. She felt safe and for the first time in her life she had a future. She set a new course and went back to school. Through hard work and consistency, she graduated with a Master’s Degree; she then secured an excellent job in her field. Her path of recovery was working she even got into a loving relationship which was nurturing and fulfilling to her. Before her recovery, she had been convinced that she would never have a loving or safe relationship with another. After years of love and closeness, the wonderful relationship ended suddenly due to the shocking death of her partner. She lapsed into grief, fear and abandonment. Even with all the successful years of recovery, she started displaying old destructive behaviors. Behaviors just like the ones she had displayed before her recovery. Old thought patterns began to surface and she turned to doubting herself, denying, self judgment and punishing herself. She became very mentally confused and in crisis daily. She stated to me “this is stuff is so familiar to me, but I cannot seem to stop it”.

She wanted out and back into her life. She began Life Coaching sessions where she found by writing her intense assignments; she was able to realize where she was stuck. “I thought why was doing old destructive stuff causing the pain of my broken heart over the loss of my partner? But really I think it was the re-establishment and the familiarity of my old relationship with my traumatic life style.”

What came out of her hard work is that she was stuck in what I now know as a “trauma thrill”. When a survivor spends many years in repetitive abuse, chaos, crisis, confusion, dissociation, fear, pain, emotional trauma or punishment, a relationship forms with that life style. A relationship between the survivor and the “traumatic life style” becomes established and strong. It is known that if a person does anything, a behavior, thought, or addiction, over and over again then it embeds itself into that person. Losing that life style, even though they want to get out of it, is a “loss”. Due to incorporating, the connected pain associated with the traumatic past had gone away, but a strong underlying “core belief” remained lurking in the shadows. The core beliefs were that her old traumatic life style was her “best friend and exciting”. Once a person is in the “here and now, experiencing daily life”, he or she learns that everyday life style for the most part is repetitious, mundane and boring, compared to the old traumatic life style, which he or she had a long-term and stronger relationship with.

Understand that even though a traumatic life style is very painful and scary, it keeps one on the edge, constant fear of being hurt or attacked causes adrenaline to flow all the time to be ready to “fight or flight”. Through years of repetitive trauma, fear becomes confused with excitement because the only difference between the two is perception. The re-establishment of the destructive relationship occurred based on the “excitement” belief, not the emotion. So once the core belief is shifted then the relationship becomes invalid and she moved into trauma recovery.

Through the guidance of her Life Coach and customized assignments, the coachee created an action plan, followed the plan faithfully and returned to her life of growth and success.