It may seem unlikely that surviving a potentially life-threatening or significant traumatic event could end up negatively restricting one’s future, but this is possible with trauma. Because traumatic experiences can have a profound impact on both the individual’s present and future, it is important to move from being a victim of the situation to being a survivor. However, to align oneself solely as a survivor can come to define the person and inadvertently bring limitations. The only part of a traumatic experience to incorporate into one’s self-definition is that the person overcame the obstacles and came out ahead. Anything less than this can become a trap, or what I call the survivor trap.
The survivor trap occurs when someone carries through life the traumatic event in such a way as to distract from personal goals or add additional burdens to daily living. Just the act of frequently thinking about significant negative events in our lives can have an adverse impact on our attitude and energy. This is not to suggest that taking the time to celebrate the fact that we have survived and overcome the challenge of the experience is a bad thing. But as any artist, athlete or scientist has found, resting on the laurels of past accomplishments is not the foundation for future success. There is the East Indian expression that when you get a thorn stuck in your foot, you take another thorn to get it out, but then you throw both thorns away. To avoid the survivor trap, it is important to limit the impact of the trauma on our lives and our future.
What Is Wrong With Being A Survivor?
There is no argument that being a survivor is far better than being a victim. So what is wrong with being a survivor? There are many ways this question could be answered, but it all comes down to one word—power, or more precisely the lack of power. It is power that produces the long-term negative impact of a traumatic experience. If two people find themselves in the same situation and one has the ability to impact the situation and the other person is powerless to do anything, the person who could end up traumatized is predictable—the powerless individual.
Power is at the base of traumatic experience in the first place. Trauma is any situation that overwhelms our ability to cope with the event. The inability to cope comes from the absence of the ability to respond, to change, to influence, to understand, or to get out of a frightening or intensely negative experience. Therefore the inability to cope relates to powerlessness.
Power appears to be one explanation for why some soldiers are traumatized by war and others are not. Power relates to more than just the physical ability to respond to a situation. Internal power is also very important when it comes to trauma because trauma is also predicated on the way the individual perceives the situation. The power over our internal experience–our emotions, our perceptions and our conceptual understanding–can all greatly influence whether we have a traumatic experience. So, power and powerlessness are at the root of both the initial experience of trauma and the short and long-term impact of the experience.
From a power perspective, what is wrong with being a survivor? To move from feeling as a victim to a survivor takes courage, support and personal power. At the same time, to move from being defined as a survivor to being free of the past takes even more power. To reach our full potential as individuals we need to take advantage of our experiences and our past, but we also need to be careful as to which experiences we allow to define us or, for that matter, to limit us. Most of us would be pleased to self-define as an Olympic athlete, a best-selling author or someone who has walked in space. On the other hand it may be tempting to have a traumatic experience define us in some way but is that what a person wants? There are two ways an experience can have power over us, either in a negative way or positive way. Certainly being defined in a positive way is preferable to negative, but the experience is still having power over the individual rather than the individual having power over the experience.
To have power over any experience in life includes the decision of moving on and relegate the experience to the past. This does not mean to block an experience from our memory either in a conscious or subconscious way. As many traumatized individuals have found, blocking memories actually gives the memories power over the individual because it is never clear when a blocked memory will be triggered from subconscious to conscious awareness. When we act as if it does not exist, this does not make it go away, it just means we are pretending to have power over the memory, but this is not true power.
True power over an experience is to relegate the experience to the importance we want it to have. It takes true internal power to define our past and our self-definition as we choose, rather than have our past define us. If someone who has experienced some form of trauma chooses to build his or her self-definition around the experience, I support them entirely. For example, there are times that major events just happen to take place before us. Examples could be witnessing the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, or being present on Iwo Jima as the marines raised the flag, or personally witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center, as thousands did on September 11th. Whether positive or negative, some people chose to include such major events as a part of their personal life resume. When this is a conscious choice, the person is using their power of self-definition.
Defining oneself as a survivor of trauma is not always a choice. Some view this as the more positive of only two choices—victim or survivor. However, I propose that we help those who have experienced trauma broaden their choices. To fully use internal power, the choices need to include not only victim or survivor but also the choice to acknowledge, grieve as necessary, and relegate the experience to the past and choose not to have the experience define the individual in any way. As long as a traumatized individual has this third choice, whether they choose it or not, I support their ability to decide how they decide to view the experience.
Based on the previous points, being a survivor may be a very positive and healthy choice, or it may not be. The difference is whether the individual has actually made a decision and considered the alternatives available. Being a survivor is only a trap if we are stuck in a self-defining situation that we are not choosing, or even more so, we are unaware of.
[Excerpt from Beyond Healing, The path to personal contentment after trauma. (2009). D. L. Ziegler]