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| Harjot Atwal |
Last year, I met a mental health professional on a dating website. Her work was heavily involved with trauma. We interacted for a few weeks, and she suggested I read The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk. I read a significant portion of it, and we discussed it before ultimately parting ways.
However, our discussions made me see certain things in a different light. Though I have had ups and downs in my life, often related to anxiety and depression, I do not think any of my experiences amount to what is referred to as big “T” trauma. At most, I would say I have experienced little “t” trauma.
I’m not sure she would have agreed with my classification if I had gone into detail about my past difficulties, but I just like to think of myself as having a “stubborn heart” as the above quote suggests. I deal with problems as they arise, as best I can. Usually, these days, I can work through stuff by engaging in exercises of varying intensity, writing a reflective poem or doing some journalling to get negative thoughts out and make them more linear. If it is a larger issue, then I would usually talk to a medical professional like my family doctor who has known me since I was four years old.
Yet, in reading that book, I did learn a lot more about intrusive thoughts. Nearly everyone has them from time to time, and they can be loosely characterized as being unwanted thoughts or images that repeatedly come to mind and make it difficult to focus on other things (as opposed to thoughts you can just move on from and ignore more easily). Consider the following quote from pg. 44 of the aforementioned book:
Freud had a term for such traumatic reenactments: “the compulsion to repeat.” He and many of his followers believed that reenactments were an unconscious attempt to get control over a painful situation and that they eventually could lead to mastery and resolution. There is no evidence for that theory — repetition leads only to further pain and self-hatred. In fact, even reliving the trauma repeatedly in therapy may reinforce preoccupation and fixation.
Basically, I have had moments where I have interacted with certain individuals and had arguments or disagreements — whether they are family members, friends, colleagues, opposing counsel or clients (though the last one is usually less of a disagreement than what I would describe as more akin to annoyance) — where I have replayed my interaction with them over and over after the fact.
There’s usually a desire to change the outcome. The underlying thinking pattern is something like: If I had just expressed this thought differently, perhaps then there would not have been such interpersonal conflict. It’s an attempt at “mastery and resolution,” and the repetition is, I guess, some sort of attempt to change the outcome in my mind, maybe to achieve some kind of greater closure. It does not help! That’s why I find writing poems or journalling to be beneficial. It helps get the thoughts out and make them more linear rather than them circling around my mind so that I can move on.
Yet, for people who experience big “T” trauma, I do not think it is that simple.
It could be all sorts of things. For instance, there are news stories of lawyers being subjected to sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, kidnapped and held hostage at knifepoint by a former disgruntled client or being tortured and beaten during terrorist attacks. Those certainly sound big “T” and do not seem like easy things to come back from.
According to this podcast with Kara Hardin, a former lawyer turned therapist, the three “E”s of trauma are event, experience and effects. She summarizes it this way:
If I were to put it into a sentence, trauma is any pattern of activating your stress response system through the event experience and effects that leads to an alteration in how that system is functioning. More specifically, it leads to either an overactivity or over reactivity in your physiology. It's basically something that disrupts how your body responds to the world around you.
She gives the example of practising law in the days of BlackBerrys. A little red light would flash in the corner of the device when an email came through. After she left law and was in a yoga class, she noticed a classmate’s phone flash the red light. Then, she noticed her breathing started to shorten, she experienced other somatic symptoms like her heart beating really quickly, her brain started developing to-do lists and she was generally distressed. While she does not refer to this as big “T” trauma either, I found the example illustrative of how responses to trauma can be physical in addition to mental.
Mention is made of how cumulative the events are that will impact one’s physical responses. If one misses lunch one day, for instance, this is not likely traumatic. But, if you are missing lunch every day for years and experience significant food insecurity, then that is likely traumatic.
Though I cannot honestly think of an experience I have personally had that I could describe as congruous (such as being activated by a flashing phone), I have experienced anxiety. When it is more than average (and once in my life, it was outright panic), sure, it may affect my breathing a bit similarly.
Why did I put “trauma” as the first word in the title of this piece if all I genuinely feel I experience is intrusive thoughts and perhaps some little “T” trauma? The issue is the stigma.
As Kara Hardin describes it: “Trauma is a really highly stigmatized and intense word.” There is a tendency to believe traumatized people are damaged by bad things that have happened in the past, whereas there have been fundamental changes to their nervous system that have altered the way their fight-or-flight responses react to different stressors and environmental cues.
It’s not an issue of “maybe you need to set better boundaries” or “you are working too much” as may be told to lawyers experiencing these issues. Regardless of whether you can intellectually tell yourself saying these things is the appropriate way to resolve the situation, your nervous system may be saying “I cannot say that — to my boss, my clients, or anyone else — and still be safe.” If that is at play, it will be hard to ignore and just “fix” the problem.
As I mentioned in my previous article here, suffering is part of the human condition and mental health stigma only goes away if we talk about it. So, I thought I would share a few words today about trauma and intrusive thoughts.
I’ll end with a quote from Glenn Close: “What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candour [and] more unashamed conversation.”
Harjot Atwal is a real estate lawyer. In 2023, he opened up his own shop, Atwal Law Firm. You can reach him via email at harjot@atwallawfirm.ca, by phone at 905-264-8926 or on LinkedIn.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, Law360 Canada, LexisNexis Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
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