The Undervalued Self by Elaine N. Aron

Author:Elaine N. Aron [ARON, ELAINE N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SEL000000
ISBN: 9780316072274
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2010-04-01T06:00:00+00:00

THE INNOCENT PART OF YOU TOUCHED BY TRAUMA

Most traumas, as I explained in chapter three, involve feeling defeated, powerless, or used by someone who did not have your interests in mind or was willing to harm you. We come into the world expecting linking from others, as well as expecting to take a rank within our group. But ideally that ranking occurs with people to whom we are linked, starting with our parents. You are born prepared for some defeats within your group but also prepared to receive security and protection from adults while you are a child and support from your peers in adulthood. When these expectations are not fulfilled, you are shocked, defeated, and often ashamed as well. What part of you is shocked? The innocent, trusting part.

While I will refer to the innocent as feminine, you may see it as either gender and any age, from infancy to your present age. Perhaps you will see her as being the age you were when you encountered the trauma of abusive power. The first trauma often happens in childhood, but for some it does not occur until adulthood. Someone might say, “I lost my innocence the minute I found out my wife was being unfaithful.” Sometimes we lose our innocence simply because we are unprepared for the fact that the world is not always kind and just, nature is not always benign, a job can disappear overnight, health is not a right but a privilege, and loss and death are inevitable. Suddenly we are overwhelmed with unbearable fear or sadness, which indicates trauma, as I have defined it.

As I said in chapter three, almost all shocks and traumas, but especially the ones involving people, can lead to feeling defeated, ashamed, and depressed. But whether the trauma occurred when you were a child or in adulthood, you had to go on, even though you were overwhelmed by your feelings. You could not afford to dwell on what happened or be immobilized by distress. The feelings had to be hidden from yourself as well as from others. The innocent is the name we are giving to that part of you still distressed by that trauma and unable to move through it because you are unaware of it.

As a part cut off from the rest of you, however, the innocent is real and must be reckoned with if you are to heal the undervalued self. As soon as she thinks there’s danger of more trauma, she employs those instinctual responses of shameful self-blame, which reset your overall sense of self-worth to zero and activate the involuntary defeat response of depression to keep you from challenging those who seem to the innocent far more powerful than you. Your goal now is to use active imagination to experience the full reality of the original trauma so that it is no longer cut off and then to slowly work with the innocent to let go of her outmoded instinctual responses and defenses.

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