Trauma layers — and how to work with them — in IFS therapy
Depending when (and how) trauma occurs, it is stored in different layers of our internal system. Or as danish Neuroaffective psychotherapist Marianne Bentzen puts it: Trauma lands in something.
In this article I focus on trauma-layers; how and where trauma is stored inside of us and how we best work with these burdens in therapy and parts work depending on the layer.
This understanding can be helpful in finding the right therapist, in understanding yourself and your reactions, and as a therapist in how to best help your clients.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is mentioned throughout this article. If you are not familiar with IFS, you can read more about it here and here, and throughout my articles on Medium.
I want to mention that this article is only a very small corner of what there is to say about therapy and trauma. There is much more to be said and the same material can be explained from many different angles, all adding different important aspects to the subject.
A deeper understanding in how trauma is stored in the human system can be found in “The body keeps the score” by Bessel van der Kolk, “Somatic IFS” by Susan McConnell and books by Marianne Bentzen and Peter Levine.
What is trauma?
In a very objectifying world it is important to make one thing clear when it comes to trauma: Trauma is subjective. It is not what happens to you, but what happens inside of you as a result of that. Therefor what is traumatic for one person may not be for another.
Trauma is when the internal system is too overwhelmed to cope with a given stressfull event and there is no safety to lean into.
For instance a baby left to cry it out cannot regulate themselves and is left alone without a safe attachment figure to lean into and thereby be regulated by. This can be traumatising.
An adult being left alone crying, typically has enough Self-energy or inner attachment and foundation, and is not likely to be traumatized even though the situation might be painful.
A child getting lost in the supermarked or the airport might be completely overwhelmed. But if a kind person reaches out and helps the child, this might regulate them enough, for the experience to not get stuck.
An adult being hit by a car, might be flooded and overwhelmed, but if there is a safe presence from a person helping them, the incident may not be traumatic or at the very least less so.
Trauma can both be shock trauma and it can be developmental- or chronic trauma. Shock trauma is typically a big blow/shock to the system. Like rape, a car accident, suddenly losing a loved one, war, extreme physical accidents and so on.
Developmental or chronic trauma is typically being left alone at a small age, not being comforted by our parents, and perhaps even being laughed at or scolded for our behavior or how we feel, being bullied at school, having our boundaries crossed by other peoples opinions (about us) and behavior.
This is not not necessarily traumatic when they happen once, but these kinds of experiences are rarely isolated incidents but are instead part of the air many children breath as they grow up. It shapes their internal systems and their protective parts starts revolving around the burdens of exiled pain.
Developmental or chronic trauma is just as severe and damaging as shock trauma, but can be more invisible (thereby creating more shame in the person) both to the person and to the surroundings.
Trauma is energy stuck in the body.
All of the internal and external movements of the human being is in a sense energy moving: Our urges and needs, our sensations and emotions, our opening up, closing down and opening up again is all energy moving; it’s all aliveness. There’s a certain flow to human existence. And when our movements; when our wants and needs are halted, the energy is stuck.
In extreme situations, there are ways the inner system and the body moves — or want to move — to protect itself, and when those movements are blocked; when the energy is mobilized to fight but you are held down by someone stronger, or when sympathetic arousal (the fight or flight) is overpowered by freeze and kollaps, because that the perceived threat is that great, all that moving energy is stuck inside.
As Peter Levine (father of Somatic Experiencing) points out, animals tremble and shake after they escape life or death experiences. The mobilized energy is released from the system and the animal is not traumatized.
Humans don’t shake. Even when the body wants to, we have learned to hold it back. And the energy stays in there. Stuck inside.
As parts of our internal system take over to numb and dissociate us from the experience and pain, and the movement that wanted to happen is exiled deep inside.
Keeping all that in, is no easy task. It takes up a lot of energy.
No wonder we’re tired.
IFS and trauma
IFS therapy works well for treating trauma in either of the three layers I’m about to describe, because it does not approach one layer specifically; it welcomes all parts and therefore all levels.
However: Since IFS is not a long psychotherapeutic education in itself, it does not necessarily provide the therapist or practitioner with a foundation for understanding or working in these layers. IFS is a framework that builds on top of what the therapist or practitioner has as their foundation.
And there is a large variety in the educations out there. They can be cognitive, emotional, attachment based, somatic and more. Some are behavioral, some existential, some systemic and so on. Many are a mix and it is not always easy to guess from the persons credentials. When in doubt, ask.
Trauma lands in something
You do not have to remember something consciously for it to be traumatic. And you do not have to recall the events consciously to heal the trauma.Your body remembers and your parts know.
The earliest traumas in utero, in birth or in the first preverbal years of life, lands in our sensations.
This internal landscape has a memory and a language that is different from our verbal and explicit memory and speech. This is a landscape of sensations, of movement and lack thereof.
From before we are born, resting, moving, reaching out, touching receiving, being held and sensing that felt sense of safety is part of our language and being.
The not being known or welcome in the womb, not getting what we need or feeling the stress of our mother can block the freedom of the energy in which we are evolving and becoming.
The birth wanting to happen, sometimes not happening the way unborn baby is moving towards, the being met with all the interventions and issues that can occur, the unnatural environment of the hospital when doctors are the first humans we are exposed to in the airy world outside of the safe womb.
The cry for felt safety that is not always met. The smile that is never returned. The shutdown that isn’t restored.
All the big and small disruptions and felt unsafety lands in the tissue of the young body, and the parts involved can be wordless and without a verbal storyline.
Therefore working with these parts will need a more somatic approach in order to feel met and understood, because their language is somatic, it is movement and stuckness, it is through our felt senses that healing can happen and safety can be restored.
This layer of sensation is related to the lower autonomic brain structures that control our body functions (so that we don’t have to remember to make our heart beat, to breath and so on). This part of our brain govern our survival both in everyday bodyfunction and in the fight, flight or freeze response that takes over in extreme situations (and in our everyday life when parts are stuck in these autonomic states). Working with the body and the vagus nerve is key when working with these parts.
The next layer in which our traumas can land, is the layer of emotion and feeling (or the limbic system in the brain). Whereas the first layer can be seen as almost pre-relational, but in movement to relationship; and depending on the dance of attachment to unfold and develop, this next layer is very much relational.
Building on sensation, emotions start to unfold and from there our feelings are formed (very much) based on our relationships and interactions with others. This layer of emotion and feeling is in the space between the verbal and the pre-verbal. Or more accurately: It is where to two meet and are woven together. In relationships and connection much of what happens between us and in us is wordless and still so full of meaning. And just like the mammals we share these brain structures with; body language, tone of voice and facial expressions are perceived and understood in a way words never could.
Who can I be here with you? How much can I open and close to you? How safe do I feel? How much room can I take up? Are all parts of me welcome?
How do you react when my sadness is present? When my anger is present? When my fear is present? Can your heart stay open with me in these layers or does it close off?
Can you see the pain underlying my anger and meet me there? Can I be there with you?
Relationship and attachment is a feeling stage and a felt sense of: Who can I be with you? — And thereby who can I be with myself? What is safe and welcome in me and in you? What can open and what closes? What can flow between us right now?
Therefore, when we say that what matters most in finding the right therapist, is the relational factor; the chemistry and connection between therapist and client, it is because the relational foundation underlie all else, and when the secure attachment was not available for us as children — when traumas occurred in our childhood and attachment relationships — this is where we need to start and we need to facilitate the secure inner attachment by being that safe figure on the outside.
As IFS therapists we are not trying to be the secure attachment figure for our clients’ parts, but we are creating a secure enough environment from our own Self and inner connectedness, so that parts of the clients internal system will start to feel safe enough to move just a little and the inner Self to part relationship can slowly start to take form.
As a danish Family Therapist trained in attachment, somatics and trauma, I have been quite surprised, to be honest, to find that many therapists have not had some degree of training in developmental trauma. It is my belief that most trauma opens up into that realm.
By that I mean that we all have some types of trauma from our childhood (big-T or small-t), because no parent and no childhood can ever be perfect. And when traumas hit us later on, they will add onto the earlier ones or open them up. So for instance the loss of a pet in adulthood, can open up to the pain and trauma of losing a parent, sibling or grandparent in childhood and all the feelings that wasn’t met back then.
At the same time shock and trauma in later childhood, the teenage years or in adulthood can tap into attachment and felt safety, because on a deeper level everything is in a sense attachment, safety and unsafety. A car accident is able to tab into that felt unsafety. And even more so trauma and suffering that is directly human caused tabs into earlier layer and deeper wounds. What rocks our foundation the most, as you can imagine, is human caused suffering and the deepest wounds are caused by the people who are supposed to be our safety in the world, our attachment figures.
The third layer is the cognitive or thought layer (cortex or top-brain). When we have a mainly secure attachment and a traumatic incident occurs in adulthood, the layer that this trauma lands in, is typically more mature, verbal and stable. We have a secure fundation and inner part to Self attachment. For these later incidents — and depending on the traumatic reaction (if it lands deeper because of earlier wounds) — more cognitive therapies can be helpful.
Different approaches of therapy work either bottom up or top down. Whereas bodywork og somatic therapy is bottom up (sensation to feeling to thought), the more cognitive top down therapies work the opposite way (thought to feeling to sensation).
There is not a right and a wrong way here, because both are useful depending on the trauma layer and the parts involved.
In many internal systems that have closed off to survive through strong manager-driven systems of control, the top down approach can be a way in, that doesn’t overrule protector fears. But even so, (in my view) the therapist must have a foundation of understanding trauma and attachment, to not end up causing harm and/or bypassing exiled parts and their burdens of pain.
When later traumatic events tab into earlier trauma and pain in the someone’s life, the reactions to these events open up to the parts of our internal system that carry burdens from early trauma, that we may have forgotten consciously. These parts can then flood the system in an attempt to finally be heard — through words, feelings, memories, images, beliefs or body sensations — and this feels scary and overwhelming for the rest of our system.
When we listen to these parts in therapy, they are very much able to turn down the volume and stop flooding and will do so, when they trust that they will be heard.
Severe trauma, even when it happens later in life, very much involves our autonomic nervous system (fight, flight, freeze) and the deeper parts of the brain that are not verbal and does not involve explicit memory, thoughts and consciousness. The body and the deeper parts of our brain remembers and knows, what our top brain structures are unaware of.
In these situations our top-brain parts will often try to figure it out (in order to feel safe). And when they do feel safe enough through the inner attachment that IFS therapy facilitates, they can give space to not-knowing and to deep listening.
In the IFS understanding, parts are seen as individual personalities of the human system. Therefore our parts, just like people, will all have the three, layers described above, inside of them. But just like you cannot reach a baby through verbal language, the parts that are stuck in early traumas, will often not respond or be reachable through and adult verbal communication form.
As I divide the brain and inner system up in this way for clarity, it is important for me to emphasize , that these parts of our brain and internal systems are not divided. They are so intertwined and in therapy (or in working with your own parts), you cannot — and should not — try to divide them into categories. We human beings, and our parts, do not fit well in boxes. This sort of framework or theory is good to know and then “forget.” Let it stay in the back of your mind, but (like any other theories, ideas and modalities) never try to fit your clients or their parts into them. They will not fit.
It’s all part of the backdrop. Center stage is a real live person, an inner system and a part — and not two are alike.
Trauma has many layers. Therefor it can take different approaches, lots of patience, felt safety and years of work, to get to the deeper layers of our burdens and pain.
For some clients it is enough to work in the upper layers, because their foundation of safety (from a mainly safe outer attachment) makes internal and relational change (for couples or in the family) possible quite fast.
And for many others (including most of us who decide to become therapists), the deeper layers need our slow and patient awareness and it can take much internal (and relational) work before we start to really see and feel the change that is happening.
IFS offers a framework and a human view that is in itself very healing, non-pathologizing and open. When we, as therapists, have a deep enough understanding of the different layers that trauma lands in, the IFS model, when used as a backdrop, is a safe doorway to into this landscape, and a healing modality for the internal system of the human being.