Volcanoes: Child Abuse, Rage and Recovery

By Lindsey Fairfield

“Volcanoes is searingly honest... a lucid probe into the devastating effects of childhood trauma. But it’s more than just an analysis - Volcanoes has a building-block process for recovery. It’s a must-read for any survivor battling with rage.”

Rod Phillips, Chairman of the Board Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse

“This is an informative and comprehensive text for those who have suffered severe trauma and for those professionals in the healing sector. Using clear, detailed, and precise language, Lindsey takes us on a thorough and exhaustive analysis covering all aspects of the human journey through healing and back to wholeness.”

Hetty Johnson, Founder and Director of Bravehearts Inc.

“I enjoyed Reading this book very much. It integrates Tomkin’s affect theory into trauma work very nicely.”

Gershen Kaufman, PhD. Author of The Psychology of Shame: The Power of Caring.

“I found the group brilliant. It opened doorways to deal safely with emotional issue from the past. I was also able to pass on the skills to other survivors - with astonishing results.”

Janelle Sansom, Group Participant and Support Counsellor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781398404403

Lindsey Fairfield

Lindsey Fairfield holds a PhD and had a successful career in research astronomy despite many nervous breakdowns. Over the years, the breakdowns lead to sampling many different forms of therapy including five years of intensive psychiatry. While all that therapy led to recovery, she was dissatisfied with the length and painfulness of the process. Obtaining a Graduate Diploma in Counselling, she set out to pass on to other survivors – through groups and individual counselling – the skills that she found to be of greatest assistance. This book sets that learning down in writing.

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About the Author

Lindsey Fairfield holds a PhD and had a successful career in research astronomy despite many nervous breakdowns. Over the years, the breakdowns lead to sampling many different forms of therapy including five years of intensive psychiatry. While all that therapy led to recovery, she was dissatisfied with the length and painfulness of the process. Obtaining a Graduate Diploma in Counselling, she set out to pass on to other survivors – through groups and individual counselling – the skills that she found to be of greatest assistance. This book sets that learning down in writing.

Copyright Information ©

Lindsey Fairfield 2024

The right of Lindsey Fairfield to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398404397 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398404403 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Thanks go first to my friend, Mim Rona, and gentle therapist, Caroline Davis, who taught me much of what I needed to know to complete my own recovery, read the very early drafts, assured me that the book was worth completing, and encouraged me throughout the process. Dorothy Ginn, founder of the Child Abuse Prevention Service and Liz Mullinar, founder of Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse, gave me the opportunities to run groups for other survivors. Claire Wright edited the manuscript in unbelievable detail, insisting on clarity and (where appropriate) complete objectivity. Most of all, I thank the trusting survivors who stuck to, and survived, the process as it was gradually refined. Their successes maintained the motivation needed to complete the book and create an earlier small-edition print version.

The impetus to create an e-book came entirely from Dr Johnathan Dwyer and I thank him profoundly for his persistence.

Lastly, my thanks to Austin Macauley for their courage to publish a book on such a sensitive subject.

Photo credits:

‘Surprise’ © Dann Tardif/Stock Photos

‘Dissmell’ © Larry Williams/Masterfile Australia

‘Fear’ © H Armstrong Roberts/Stock Photos

‘Disgust’ © H Armstrong Roberts/Stock Photos

‘Embarrassment’ © Kim Robbie/Stock Photos

‘The feeling Bear’ © Jon Feingerish

Foreword & Overview

This is a book by an adult survivor of childhood trauma for other such survivors with the aim of helping to speed the recovery process. It is my experience that non-survivors do not understand the feelings or actions of an adult with unresolved childhood trauma. Our desperate attempt to gain that understanding and acceptance from significant others is itself a major component of our story. We are like aliens describing another world. The more we attempt to communicate, the less we are understood. The less we are understood, the more alien we feel and the more desperate our attempt to communicate.

The experience of being understood and accepted is vital to the recovery process. Our emotional responses to both present and remembered events are confused and tangled. Our needs are multiple: to have our confused feelings clarified and reflected in the words of another person – verifying their understanding; to have the reality and validity of our feelings acknowledged; to tell the original traumatic events that began the cycle of overwhelming feelings; and also, to tell of the myriad times that, attempting to communicate, we felt denied and rejected; to tell of the downward spiral of despair and upward spiral of anger in which we were or are trapped.

The feelings and story form a spiral, the same scene playing out over and over again with ever increasing intensity, so it is not easy to put them into linear words or to relate a linear sequence of events that accounts for the intensity of the feelings. I have, to the best of my ability, opened out that spiral, but incompletely. If you, the reader, are not yourself a survivor, you may find that this account lacks the linearity that you require for real understanding. If you, the reader, are yourself a survivor, you will understand my stosry more easily and, if there is some similarity between you and me, you may find that the recovery process I describe is useful to you.

I used to run groups to teach this process and a high proportion of the participants found it helpful. This book attempts to make the process available to other survivors with whom I did not have the opportunity to work personally. Each of our survivor stories is unique. However, we are all left with a hurt ‘Inner Child’ (or children) who provokes and controls much of our adult behaviour. My internal structure was fairly simple and I had good communication with the inner children. My process will work easily for you if your inner structure is similar. If you have many inner children or poor internal communication, you may need to modify the process.

My own survivor story is, perhaps, not the norm. Overt abuse, sins of commission, were minimal. That leads me to focus on the sins of omission, the absence of the physical and emotional soothing, care and attention that can begin the healing process. These sins of omission are usually overlooked when considering the long-term effects of abuse and are equally overlooked when designing a recovery program. I believe that the sins of omission are universal in the history of survivors who still suffer from long-term consequences. My thesis is that a child can recover from almost anything and continue healthy emotional growth so long as there is sufficient acknowledgement, attention and caring; the events need to be named for what they are, and the associated feelings also need to be named and acknowledged as an appropriate response to the overwhelming events.

I think that all survivors of child abuse feel anger at some level. We know instinctively that what happened was not right. But the dominant external symptom may not be rage. The elements that, for me, created a volcano may lead, in others, to different symptoms. However, the skills described and taught here are still useful for recovery.

For me, the most obvious external symptom was rage (the combination of anger and helplessness that drives anger out of control), and on the recovery from the debilitating consequences of that rage. I call this rage the volcano. It results from the double wounding of a physically or emotionally absent caregiver (the sins of omission) and acute trauma (abuse, the sins of commission). It is a parent’s responsibility to provide physical protection and emotional nurturing for a child and absence of either is damaging. Those who suffer from emotional neglect alone can be crippled without ever realising that they are ‘less’. Trauma brings the need for physical and emotional care into sharp focus.

The life problems of a rageful survivor can compound rapidly. Anger is disallowed in our culture and rage in an adult is frightening to persons who are nearby at the time. An angry adult is shunned, compounding his or her isolation from the very human understanding that is needed. Expectation of parental care and attention to feelings of distress and helplessness are appropriate for a child. However, for the child, there was, at the moment of trauma, no adult to provide the care, understanding and acknowledgement needed to begin healing the trauma. The feelings, unacknowledged at the time of the abuse, resurface in the later-adult. Feelings towards the abuser tend to remain clouded in fear, helplessness and distress. It is the feelings towards those whose job it was to care for the child that can turn to rage. Hence the rage tends to be directed towards the non-offending parent(s) rather than (or as well as) towards the overt offender. It was the parent’s job to care for the child, and anger towards the caregiver is justified however inappropriate it may appear at the time.

The rage, however, can diffuse into other relationships also, as the demand for care and acknowledgement of the childhood wounds is directed beyond the responsible caregivers. The adult survivor may direct the anger towards authority figures, peers, or towards his/her own children, consciously or unconsciously expecting them to care for the survivor’s well being. However, these peers (or children) have not accepted, and can not accept the responsibility for that care. The child’s expectation for care and attention to these feelings is not appropriate for the adult in his or her current situation. Adults are expected to have self-care skills, to attend to their own fear and distress, to ask for attention in an appropriate manner, and to also consider the needs of others. Adults are expected to be powerful, not helpless. They are expected to be able to cope with the normal vicissitudes of life. However, when an adult suffers the repeat feelings of childhood trauma, he or she loses the adult power, reverts to a child state and is aware only of the desperate and unfulfilled need for external care. Hence the problem of spiralling rage (or debilitating depression) for which I hope this book offers some assistance.

Rage can manifest externally in many ways: mine was overt, expressing itself in outbursts, explosions, eruptions of the lava inside the volcano that I felt myself to be. Rage can also lead to an implosion, into suicidal depression. The forces at work are the same and, in survivors, a history of alternating rage and depression is common.

The construction of a volcano does not happen in an instant: it builds, inch by inch, pebble by pebble. The explosions or implosions, when they occur, appear to come from ‘out of the blue’. Denial of the reality of the explosion/implosion, and/or refusal to explore its source, build the volcano higher, to ever more explosive potential. Eventually, if no appropriate attention is given, the eruption rests on a hair trigger and its force is sufficient to motivate murder or suicide.

Chapter 1 is my story, ... well, parts of my story. It began as an attempt to explain to myself how I came to be the way I am. It’s not a complete story, just the crucial events in as orderly a manner as I can manage. Some of the events described are cameos, told as single events but representing repeating patterns, that, like drips on a stone, left an indelible print. It’s a one-sided view – the view of the child – with occasional commentary from a ‘now’ perspective. It provides the background against which I can, in Chapter 2, tease apart the structure of the volcano and, in later chapters, provide personal examples to illustrate important points in the recovery process.

Part two of the book describes my recovery process, the process that I used carefully and systematically to dismantle my volcano. It is supplemented by some of the exercises that I used when teaching the process to groups of other survivors.

The recovery process addresses the following issues.

The Problem

The emotionally absent caregiver failed to provide reliable soothing and appropriate emotional response for the child, with the consequence that the sense of self (or simply ‘the self’) was not well formed. The addition of a severe trauma (abuse or abandonment) further denied whatever sense of self existed at the time, destroyed any awareness of personal boundaries that had developed, and left the child with a belief that (s)he did not have the right to defence. The emotional or physical absence of the caregiver denied any chance of repairing the boundaries or the sense of self.

The Recovery Goal

The recovery goal is to create a reliable sense of self, define one’s personal boundaries, and learn how to defend those boundaries and how to respect the boundaries of others. The desired result is a person with a stable self-identity who can retain their own perception of reality and their own self-esteem while recognising and interacting with other persons as independent people who each have their own reality and independent value in the world.

The Recovery Sequence

In the recovery process, the sequence of steps is vital because interpersonal skills are impossible to master without first having a secure and stable sense of self, a clear distinction between self and other (boundaries) and confidence in one’s ability to defend against invasion of one’s boundaries by others. Rushing or muddling the sequence tends to induce a relapse, a collapse of the recently acquired sense of self.

I describe the necessary sequence as a series of ‘levels’, each building on the level below. Some degree of mastery is needed at each level before progress can commence at the next.

Level 1 is about the awareness of and language of feelings, especially the in-born feelings:

interest, joy, surprise and dissmell (something smells ‘off’) that drive our learning;

distress, fear, anger and disgust that warn of danger and provide defence; and

embarrassment that limits over-display of emotion.

For a positive sense of self, I must be able:

to recognise each of these feelings in myself;

have language to express each feeling verbally (rather than just physically as a child does);

have a range of appropriate responses (verbal and physical); and

be able to impose an instant’s pause after an emotion is activated, in order to choose an appropriate response.

Level 2 is a process for handling trauma tapes:

taking the present-time repeats of childhood events (flash backs and body feelings, which I call ‘trauma tapes’);

connecting them to the original events; and

leaving them there.

The Tape Handling Process begins to repair the boundaries of the self that were damaged by the trauma. It addresses the following needs.

The traumatic events need to be revisited with the new sense of self intact. Support and guidance are vital in the revisiting to avoid re-traumatisation.

The complex emotions of the child in an overwhelming situation must be verbalised.

The right to verbalise the events, and the feelings about the events, must be supported.

The right (taken from the child) to defend the boundaries against invasion must be affirmed.

The false conclusions made by the child about its rights and the rights of others must be exposed and contradicted.

Level 3 is a process for stopping the tapes: halting the replay of the trauma tapes when it occurs at an inopportune moment. This maintains the survivor’s safety, sense of self, and appropriate interaction in situations that are, in any way, reminiscent of the old bad times and which thereby tend to trigger the child-state.

Level 4 is about tolerance: being able to fully appreciate the fallibility of self and of others. It is about quieting the Inner Critic that lashes the self for any perceived failure, and also becoming more tolerant of the idiosyncrasies of other people.

Level 5 moves to the cognitive level and addresses the myriad of meanings attached to words and actions, which were learned by the child in situations where the child’s needs (basic rights) were ignored. The most common ones are:

the child was obliged to conform to unreasonable expectations;

the child’s attempts to communicate about traumatic events or feelings were ignored;

the child’s physical and/or emotional space were violated;

the child’s safety was sacrificed to preserve the safety of the adult(s);

the child’s feelings of self-worth were sacrificed to support the self-esteem of the adult(s).

Unconditional acceptance of childhood meanings, learned in abusive, neglectful or traumatic situations, can lead to misinterpretation of present events and can trigger the trapped and helpless feelings of the child caught in a double bind: damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Level 5 clarifies and acknowledges the meanings and conclusions inevitably drawn by the child in such situations and develops adult defences to protect autonomy, feelings, space, safety and self-worth. The appendix addresses several other double binds that are less debilitating but that may still cause trouble.

While some degree of mastery is needed at each level before progress can commence at the next, advancement through the levels will probably not be a simple linear progression because the trauma events Level 2) tend to knot the line of development, tangling the feeling states Level 1) and creating meanings that are difficult to address until Level 5. Patience with ourselves and assistance from a trusted facilitator are helpful ingredients.

In Summary:

As survivors of childhood trauma, we are simply lacking in many of the skills that other adults, who grew up in a more child-friendly environment, have learned: awareness and expression of feelings; controlling inappropriate behaviour; tolerance; and the ability to defend our autonomy, space and feelings of safety and self-worth. In addition, survivors need some special skills that other people can live happily without: skills to keep us safe as we revisit and integrate the traumatic events of our childhoods; and critical awareness to challenge and change the meanings and conclusions drawn by the child we once were, who was caught up in those events.

It is my experience and observation that, with these skills installed, the process of recovery from the effects of childhood trauma becomes faster and less painful. It is also my experience and observation that, while therapists have a clear idea of the end result of therapy, many appear unaware of the need to (directly or indirectly) teach the skills that are needed to achieve that desired end result. The client can find him or herself floundering in the heavy seas of traumatic memories without having first learned to swim.

It is my hope that this book will fill the gap and provide a way for a survivor to learn to swim before confronting the surf. I hope that it may also be helpful to non-survivors who come in contact with survivors and who seek to understand the bizarre behaviour that sometimes results as we flounder in heavy emotional seas.

Part I

The Volcano

Prologue

There is something magical about words. We humans differ from other creatures on this planet in our sense of self and our use of language. Although our basic emotions are probably shared with other sentient creatures, the complexity we build, made possible by our sense of self and our ability to communicate with language, appears to be distinctly different.

The sense of self is not easy to express in words. The simple pronoun ‘I’ stands for a mass of complexity that is our self-image and our internal emotional structure.

Transactional Analysis, a school of psychology, has a simple model that describes the internal structure of an adult person in terms of three basic parts.

The Adult, a conscious part that observes the world and rationally decides how to respond, based on the lifetime of learning.

The Parent, a less conscious internalisation of everything the person’s actual parents (and other significant adults) did when (s)he was a child.

The Child, a spontaneous, emotive part that contains all the feelings the child had in response to its surroundings.

In a well-integrated adult, ‘I’ usually refers to the Adult part, which can access the feelings of the child and the learning from the parents but has a choice whether to act on those feelings or learnings.

When there is child abuse or other trauma, the Parent part may be disowned as hurtful and ‘not me’ but lives on as a punitive or critical inner voice. The Child part may also be disowned or dissociated because the feelings contained are overwhelming. The internal emotional structure of a survivor is often described as ‘shattered’. Like the reflection in a shattered mirror, the self-image is in pieces that do not connect smoothly. The survivor’s emotive and behavioural responses to events in the world are not under the control of the rational Adult part but come, unmodified, from the Parent part or the Child part. There can be more than one Child part, and, in extreme cases, they manifest as distinct ‘personalities’ that take over the body without executive control from the Adult part. This extreme is popularly called multiple personality but is now medically labelled Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Most survivors of child abuse or other trauma lie on a continuum between DID and fully integrated health, where the Adult part has access to the other parts but remains in control. A survivor’s place on the continuum depends on the number of Child parts and degree to which they communicate with each other and are modified by the Adult part.

Figure 1. The continuum of survivor internal structure

Words play a crucial role in the development of the Adult. Rational, logical functioning seems to depend on having a language with which to process memories and ideas. Something that has a label can be communicated concisely from one person to another and therefore, in a sense, becomes real. Things that