At first, I was in denial about the amount of trauma I’d endured as a child. It took me a while to accept that I’d experienced trauma, and then longer to connect difficulties with relationships in my present life with my traumatic childhood. When I received my diagnosis of Complex PTSD and began reading about it, it was overwhelming. The more I recognized how impaired my functioning was, the more broken I felt. I went through a period of intense anger about it, feeling as though I would never be whole again. I finally came to a somewhat uneasy acceptance sparked by a sign I saw in a gift shop, It is what it is. I still have that sign to remind me to accept the things I cannot change.
In the beginning of my research for my memoir, most everything I read reinforced the notion that those who had experienced Complex PTSD were damaged. Wading through articles and books gave me no reason to doubt that idea. There were many findings that those who had been diagnosed with complex trauma encountered difficulty regulating their emotions, maintaining healthy relationships, and struggled with poor self-esteem, among a laundry list of other deficits. Then I came across the research of Dr. Bruce Ellis and his team at the University of Utah: “Beyond Risk and Protective Factors: An Adaptation-Based Approach to Resilience” (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2017). Their approach was informed by studies of both humans and animals and how they responded to stressful environments. They state:
In this article, we argue that the deficit model is incomplete because it misses how individuals adapt to their environments by fine-tuning their cognitive abilities to solve recurrent problems faced in their local ecologies. We propose an alternative strength-based approach that asks: “What’s right with these kids?”
Suddenly, the frame shifted – I dug deeper to discover that those who have experienced trauma, while undeniably having suffered greatly, in many cases developed skills and strategies that appeared to impact their lives positively. In the list, I saw some that resonated with me:
- The ability to recall negative events, allowing the individual to avoid them in the future
- Greater accuracy in detecting facial expressions, such as anger, leading to a better sense of threat detection
- Enhanced working memory, allowing the individual to analyze and process quickly
- Increased ability to detect when someone is lying
- Enhanced memory for rote tasks that are acquired from practice and repetition (i.e., riding a bike, cooking a recipe from memory, learning how to use a keyboard, following procedures, those tasks that require steps in a process and can be repeated automatically).
- An enhanced capacity for compassion
In a later paper, they refer to these skills and abilities as “hidden talents.” I realized then that my story is not only about the trauma I experienced due to my environment, but also the hidden talents that I developed in response to that environment.
It was evidence that I was not forever broken. I cried.
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