What to Do When Divorce Drudges up Suppressed Trauma for the High Achiever

Join us as we sit down with Marriage & Family Therapist, Laurel van der Toorn, to discuss what you can do when a pending or active divorce starts to drudge up suppressed trauma for the high achiever. 

Laurel explains how EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy works to help people process traumatic memories and heal attachment wounds. The conversation explores why high achievers often struggle during divorce, how childhood attachment styles affect adult relationships, and the importance of addressing trauma early. Laurel provides insights into the window of tolerance, the grieving process, and how effective trauma therapy can create permanent, positive change. 

If you would like to speak with one of our attorneys, please call our office at (503) 227-0200, or visit our website at https://www.pacificcascadelegal.com.

To learn more about how Laurel can help you, you can view her website at: https://www.laureltherapy.net/

Disclaimer: Nothing in this communication is intended to provide legal advice nor does it constitute a client-attorney relationship, therefore you should not interpret the contents as such.

Transcript

Speaker 0: Hi everyone. I'm Steve Altishin, Director of Client Partnerships for Pacific Cascade Legal, and today we have trauma therapist Laurel van der Toorn to talk about what to do when a divorce judges up suppressed trauma. Nice. So before we start in though, why don't you want, can you talk a little bit about yourself and how you kind of got into this particular kind of therapy?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I was in grad school during a time when the understanding of trauma really broadened. Um, historically, trauma was something that people only thought that combat veterans, survivors of assault and kinda like a ver and first responders could experience, and that's definitely not the case. We're now understanding that trauma is anything that overwhelms your ability to cope and therefore everyone can experience trauma and being in grad school training for this profession, right. As that expansion of the understanding of trauma was happening really got me kind of locked in on trauma as like, yes, this is what I want to do. And there was also a whole lot of research about what treatments work really well for trauma. And I was really lucky very early in my career to be trained in a type of therapy called EMDR therapy, uh, stands for eye movement desensitization and repro reprogramming, or reprocessing, sorry, <laugh>. And that training and just seeing how effective it was and how much it was helping people is just so invigorating as a provider to see people really heal, to really work through some deep stuff. Um, pre prior to going to grad school, I had worked in, uh, several crisis response centers for sexual assault. Um, so I was kind of always on the trauma train and then just seeing, okay, most people have some trauma and there are very effective tools that we can use to really help them do some deep healing. It just makes the work so rewarding. People always say to me, oh, being a trauma therapist, it must be so hard. And I say, well, yeah, there are hard moments, but the actual work is not as hard as people expect because I get to see the healing and I just have that front row seat to human resilience and I, I can keep going for a couple more decades. <laugh> <laugh>, I like that. And, and, you know, you, you have this whole group of clients who are, are I get, we call high achievers mm-hmm

<affirmative>. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And you know, lawyers, I guess doctors, you know. Yep. Those kind of people. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And, and when I was going kind of going through your stuff, I, you know, it was fascinating because my brain went to, well, you know, you think high achievers mm-hmm <affirmative>. Would be really the best people to handle a divorce <laugh> because they're, you know, they can get, they can overcome anything. They can think, they can, you know, be rational and all that stuff. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. But you say that that's not necessarily true really when it comes in for a divorce and there are reasons that high achievers can struggle with a divorce. Can we kind of talk about that?

Speaker 3: Absolutely. The, I like to say a lot of people are replicating an early environment in their career, or an early schema or a message they got. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't mean to say like, oh, all lawyers are traumatized, or all, you know, doctors are traumat all entrepreneurs. But I think that for a lot of people that I work with, they grew up in a stressful environment and are replicating that stressful environment in their career because it's familiar. You know, they, they go into an OR and they're like, yeah, this frantic pace is familiar to me. This feels safe. I can do this. Right. So it's this kind of, um, low level, I'm gonna call it low level trauma, that it's often an attachment wound or, you know, something that happened early on that it's not all, it doesn't set you on a disaster course. Like sometimes our early negative experiences really inform the choices we make and we go on to do a lot of good in the world as a result. And sometimes we get to a point where it exceeds our ability to cope, and we have no other coping skills besides working hard, you know, kind of pushing more and perhaps avoiding emotion. And that's where I see people run into trouble is when their coping skills are not enough to handle a stressful career and a personal life. Yeah. Disaster or trauma. Yeah.

Speaker 0: You would think that also for people who are so used to success mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. Divorce is, is almost never a success. <laugh>.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0: It's, it's the first amount.

Speaker 3: Occasionally it can be, but it's not what people have in mind when they got married.

Speaker 0: But it's like, yeah, it's, it's, if I can do this and I can do that, why can't I make my spouse Yeah. Understand it almost like a fear of failure kinda kicks in some People. Well, and divorce can feel like a failure. Like, I invested so much, I brought everything I could to this relationship and it wasn't enough. Yep, Yep. And that can be a real like ego crisis for sure. So if I come in and, and I'm one of those, those folks Yeah. And I'm getting a divorce and I go, I just don't understand. I'm not making this work and now I don't understand what I'm doing, and now I need some help. And, and, and I don't know why all my old, I don't wanna say tricks, but you know, skills. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Uh, and my work life aren't working here. I know. How do you start getting around that?

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's so different for each person, but when fundamentally when we have a major relationship dissolve, whether that's through divorce or just, you know, whatever it is, could also be honestly a friendship. Like some people going through a friendship breakup, like a long-term deep friendship losing that can trigger this as well. And, and we don't expect the intensity of the loss of a friendship. Right. Um, could also be family of origin disconnect or a child cutting you off these attachment traumas. These ruptures in relationship, they really trigger our attachment system. Our attachment system is built early on in life and it is your way of approaching relationship. Now, a lot of people have probably heard about this that your attachment style, it's, there are four styles. There's secure attachment usually means you had parents that did a good enough job of attuning to you and your emotions and your sadness and anxiety and fear as a kid and giving you skills to help manage those feelings. Secure attachment is good enough attunement from parenting, and then anxious attachment is parents that were maybe misattuned or neglectful. And you kind of are always seeking that safety and reassurance from others that's gonna show up in a marriage or, you know, another relationship. And what we often see is someone with an anxious attachment style partner with someone that has an avoidant attachment style, which is someone that doesn't wanna get too close <laugh>, but they're, they're not gonna leave. They're just gonna kind of be half in. And the reason we see this pairing so often is because it feels familiar to the anxious attachment person, that it feels familiar to the kind of inconsistent attunement of a parent. Yeah. So when something feels familiar to us, it feels safe. Just like I was saying, a stressful work environment feels familiar if you grew up in a stressful home.

Speaker 3: And then the final attachment style is a disorganized attachment where you kind of vacillate between anxious and avoidant. And this is usually a result of like some pretty significant childhood trauma, particularly around your caregivers. So if you had, um, a, a parent die suddenly, or a parent that was in and out of prison or um, parents that were kind of cycling through different relationships or had major substance abuse problems, that's gonna show up as a really disorganized attachment style. And without fail, when someone is going through a divorce, their attachment style gets really activated. So if they were a little bit anxiously attached before, they look extremely anxiously attached, going through a divorce and vice versa. And even for the securely attached, the grief of losing that primary relationship is just devastating. So to some extent, your attachment style doesn't matter. It's going to be hard to go through a big relationship transition and a lot of behavior that may not make sense to us or behavior that feels extreme or kind of ungrounded can really be attributed to that attachment style getting triggered.

Speaker 0: You, I, I was looking at some of the stuff you talk about and about how to kind of start to get out of that. Yeah. And you, you said something like, you gotta start to reframe what you're feeling. Mm-hmm. And I thought that was fascinating. Um mm-hmm <affirmative>. Just that 'cause that's prob maybe the hardest part.

Speaker 3: Yes. <laugh>. Yeah. Well, and and insight alone isn't enough to feel better. Right. It has to be insight paired with behavior change, paired with positive coping, paired with healing some trauma, then you're actually gonna start to feel different.

Speaker 0: You mentioned at the very beginning E-E-M-D-R mm-hmm <affirmative>. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And is that a type of therapy that is particular for high achievers, or could be for any trauma people Or No, for anyone with trauma. Yeah. And there's actually applications beyond trauma as well, but it was originally developed and researched for trauma. It was specifically in combat veterans, but then they were seeing like, oh, it actually works for a lot of trauma. A lot of times when people talk about EMDR, they go like, really technical and into this like neuroscientific language. And I know for me, like my eyes just glaze over when you start talking about the hippocampus. It's like, okay, like I know what you're saying, but it doesn't feel real. Like if I'm having a conversation with someone, I'm not aware of my hippocampal activity, <laugh>, you know? So I try and explain it in a way that feels real to people. In the 1980s, Dr. Francine Shapiro, who is a research

psychologist taking a walk in a park in Brooklyn and thinking about something really upsetting that had happened to her, and she was feeling that like agitation in her body.

Speaker 3: And as she was walking, she was moving her eyes from side to side along the sidewalk. And she discovered after about 10 minutes, she no longer felt that physical disturbance in her body, like the memory had been neutralized. And she went, huh, okay. I wonder what that was about. And so she went back to her research lab and started researching bilateral stimulation, which is side to side movement, or you know, anything that's side to side and how that affects memory processing. And, and what she found is that stimulating both sides of the brain, or both sides of the body, which attaches to the brain while talking about something really upsetting, helps the brain recategorize the memory. So if I were to ask you, Steve, to recount your last trip to the grocery store, would you have a big emotional reaction to that? No. No. Because your brain has stored it like a typical memory. Like you probably wouldn't even be able to recall that many details. Like maybe some of the items you bought, maybe which checkout line you went to, depending maybe the time of day. But it's not like a crystal clear memory that evokes a body sensation. I'm not going to, but if I were to ask you to describe something really upsetting that happened to you, you would be able to tell me a lot of detail. Yeah. And a lot of like specific detail and the body sensation and the emotion that you had while thinking about it. So what EMDR does is, is help an upsetting memory be stored like that grocery store memory. It's just like, okay, it's no longer critical to my survival that I remember every painful detail of this. I can log it away. You're never gonna forget it and you're never gonna lose the lessons and the meaning from it, but you will be able to move on and just feel like it doesn't have this grip on you and that you're not at any point seconds from being thrown into that physiological, uh, tension and discomfort of the memory that gets neutralized in the EMDR process.

Speaker 3: So a lot of people just find tremendous relief and comfort after going through EMDR therapy. As far as what it looks like, there are eight phases of EMDR and each phase is a little different. The one that gets all the attention is phase four, where you're talking about the upsetting thing and either having eye movement that goes side to side. We can do beeping and the ears, we can do self-tapping just with your hands on opposite shoulders. It's any bilateral stimulation. So phase four is the, the one that gets all the attention. 'cause it, it's weird. It's super weird. <laugh>.

Speaker 0: Well, I mean, sort of makes sense though. Yeah. I mean mm-hmm. I don't know if you wanna say you're almost distracting yourself from your memory.

Speaker 3: Yes. No, that's exactly, you're, Yeah. You're not fixating on it and that's gotta be good. Yeah. And I like to say like an EMDR therapy can be very intense 'cause you do have to fully access the memory. Now, some of the early phases are giving you coping skills and the ability to tolerate the intensity of it. Um, so you don't want just wanna be dropped into it. Um, but I like to say, okay, like this is gonna be intense. Let's imagine we're a train going through a tunnel. We are gonna come out the other side, but we just gotta keep going through it. And then you come out to the other side and, you know, I've had people that after, you know, we processed for a few sessions, they had a tremendous fear of flying. They were able to get on a plane without getting activated. That kind of thing. Like, there's truly like a brain shift that happens and it's, I just love it so much. And for high achievers, they've often been able to cope well enough throughout their life. And then divorce or, you know, some, you know, major family shift is the thing that kind of pushes them over the edge and they can't cope anymore. And a past trauma is now really weighing on them in a way that it wasn't before.

Speaker 0: Obviously divorce is a, is a deal, but is there any, this is kind of cr mm-hmm. Crazy question. Mm-hmm. Particular time. It's really important to start thinking about trying to fix it. Yeah. Can they just get set so much that it becomes very difficult?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, complex trauma is like a childhood attachment thing, and that, that takes a, a good deal of time to heal. Even with EMDR, which is a, a faster modality than other trauma therapies, it still isn't a couple sessions and you're done <laugh>. Yeah. But as far as like, when is the right time for EMDR, honestly, the sooner the better. They, you know, they say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today <laugh>. I actually, this is, I was going through my EMDR training. It's a lengthy training process. It's not just like a weekend course <laugh>. And in the middle of that training, I was in a a, a very, very scary car accident. And the next day I was in an EMDR therapy session because if you access EMDR therapy earlier, it's much less likely you would develop PTSD. And so there are even some organizations that dispatch EMDR therapists to disaster zones and do a, a version of EMDR that can be done kind of relatively quickly and, um,

really prevent PTSD because it just helps access your positive coping skills and helps your brain store it more like a typical memory.

Speaker 0: It's funny because in a lot of really high conflict divorces mm-hmm <affirmative>. We see people coming out of it even if they get what they want. And, and they, yeah. Seems like it's okay with that syndrome and it's kind of like, God, I wish I'd have done this like earlier mm-hmm <affirmative>. Because now the divorce is over and I, and I'm just, I, I dunno how to get out of it. It's, it's difficult. Uh, So yeah. It can feel like APY victory where like the, the cost was not worth what you won mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. Yep. And is this a group kind of or an individual Thing? No, it's individual therapy. Yeah. The earlier you can get in, I think the less time it'll take. But again, every, every person is bringing such a unique history to EMDR. There's something called a float back. And I think that in most divorces, the trauma that's getting kicked up is not just the relationship itself. Sometimes it is, but I would say most of the time, again, it's that attachment trauma that we're looking at. It is something very deep and raw. So in EMDR therapy, the float back is like, you think you're coming in because your boss yelled at you and you had an outsized reaction. Right. And then what it actually is is going back to a caregiver that yelled at you for doing something that you didn't know was wrong and that, that you felt unsafe in that situation. So that float back of like finding the early memory, we call it first or worst memory, can really, and, and you know, even as an adult, like you objectively know you were safe as a kid when you were being yelled at you, your physical safety right from yelling was not a threat.

Speaker 3: But your emotional safety as a child is often just as important as your physical safety. And that there's, the body doesn't understand the difference between emotional safety and physical safety. So those float backs that come up when I'm working with someone that's going through a divorce or like a major, you know, family rupture, they're really interesting because they're like, I know I'm an adult. I know I'm not being currently yelled at by my parent, and yet my body reaction is such that it feels like I am. And going back and being able to heal that has a domino effect to the present. Yeah. And that you're able to, if you go back and process those childhood wounds and really make great process there, then the divorce process gets a lot easier. It's, it's never easy, but it gets a lot easier.

Speaker 0: It feels almost like a legacy thing because mm-hmm <affirmative>. If you can do that Yeah. You and you have kids Yes. And you're going through a divorce, you may not be as quick to do what to them, what they did to you. Kind of break that Yes. That spiral.

Speaker 3: Yes. Be a cycle breaker. And, and I'm really glad you brought up kids because that is often a motivator for people seeking therapy and trying to do their own work. 'cause they don't wanna pass on that legacy. Yeah. And I don't think, as far as kids, I don't think divorce is always the worst thing for kids. Right. I mean, there's something to be said for seeing your parent happy and free and maybe in a new relationship that feels more balanced and authentic to them. I think that we can't just make a blanket statement that divorce is always bad for kids because it's not. Right. Like there's a lot, there's a lot more nuance there. And doing the attachment work, and I see a lot of people coming in for therapy when their child is the age they were when something bad happened to them, there's something like seeing their child be the age they were, gives them a totally different perspective and kind of like, oh, the story I was telling myself about that thing that happened to me as a kid makes no sense in the context of looking at my own child. So if something bad happens to a kid, there may be a narrative around, oh, it was my fault. I did something to provoke it. And then they see their precious child, their sweet, innocent child, and they're like, there is nothing this child that is the same age that I was could do to warrant that being their fault. Yeah. Or being okay. Yeah. And then that triggers this kind of breakdown of the narrative that has fortified them for a long time and brings them to a place where they actually want to do the healing work. And, and that's incredibly rewarding. And I just think what a gift to yourself and what a gift to your child. Yeah.

Speaker 0: Really someone who comes to you and, and successfully goes through it mm-hmm <affirmative>. But is it over then or is it still an ongoing thing? I mean mm-hmm. I know I, I saw something you talked about, which was daily coping strategies. Yeah. And, you know, it feels like that's something that it for the rest of your life.

Speaker 3: Yes. We're always all gonna need coping strategies. So there's something called the window of tolerance. When you're in the window of tolerance, you can think, feel, and act at the same time. And like, it's kind of like hopefully your baseline, you're just kind of like normal. Like, and I'm like, yeah, I'm alert, but I'm relaxed. I'm like, you know, pleasantly engaged or just kind of neutrally engaged in life. If you're outside the window of tolerance, you're other extremely anxious

and agitated and worked up, or you're numbed and depressed and completely, completely dissociated. And we find that people going through a divorce are in the win. Their window of tolerance shrinks, it's much smaller. So they're knocked out of that window of tolerance more often because the stress is exceeding their ability to cope. So an important part of therapy is widening that window of tolerance. So like 80 90% of the time you're in that window. Yeah. And then when you do get knocked out, you have the coping skills to help yourself get back into it. Yeah. And that really is the long and short of it. As far as EMDR is very useful in widening that window of tolerance so that you're just kind of at a healthy baseline more often as far as, you know, going through EMDR. Is it then over? Um, I think that there are other experiences besides trauma that get kicked up in a divorce. So grief, grief is not something you can magic your way out of. Grief is a process that has to be gone through, takes a couple years when it's simple grief. And when it's complex grief, it takes longer. You know, and it's, it's not something grief is never done, it just stings less and kind of that like gutting and that just hollowness in your chest starts to feel less intense. So I always like to let people like to manage expectations. Like you're not just gonna feel carefree after EMDR, but you're gonna feel like your capacity is greater even if the capacity is still exceeded sometimes.

Speaker 0: And if you start to fall back. So everyone mm-hmm. Kind of does can they like, would come to you again for a refill for, you know Yeah. Kind of a, Yeah. I mean, effective EMDR, we don't see that happening very often. Like, it's usually someone would come back and need to do more work on the same theme if it was a pretty complex thing. So let's say, I like to say like you, you line up the dominoes, but you have multiple lines of dominoes. So one line of dominoes is abandonment, the other line of dominoes is injustice. The other line of dominoes is being forgotten. And if you can find the right domino in EMDR, you can take out the whole line, but you have more than one line. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm

<affirmative>. But that's fascinating. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. I mean, and that's powerful.

Speaker 3: Very powerful. It's, that's why I say it's so invigorating to me to do this work because I just see such a transformation. It, it doesn't feel like a radical transformation in the moment. But then, you know, I do get the, you know, someone comes into a session and they say like, you know, I, I realize I'm ready to date again and I'm actually like, excited about opening up my life and my heart. And like they could not have fathomed that a year prior, figuratively. Or literally going back to ground zero and being okay and just being like, wow, you know, I didn't think the work we did together was that impactful. But then I realized like, I was at the site of my greatest trauma and I was in the window of tolerance.

Speaker 0: It's a, I don't wanna say sticky, but I mean, it's one of those things that, that once you, once it happens, yeah. You know, you don't have to worry every day of your life. If I'm, if I'm gonna go back there.

Speaker 3: Nope. No. If it's truly been effectively processed with EMDR, the effects are permanent.

Speaker 0: I love it. I love it. Yeah. Oh my gosh, Lord. Uh, Laurel, we're unfortunately, we're running out of time. Yeah. But before we go, I wanna ask if, you know, someone would like to get ahold of you or Yeah. Learn more about this mm-hmm

<affirmative>. How can they do that? Our Website is laurel therapy.net. Uh, if you wanna learn more about EMDR, we have a free webinar that you can, you can watch on our website that we have a fake client. Her name is Jessie. And she had a college sports injury. So her career trajectory was that she was gonna be a pro athlete and she had this injury. And so that's the trauma. And we take her through all eight phases of EMDR and what it looked like for her and explain in a little more detail, but still using plain language. It's about an hour long. So if you really wanna dive into what EMDR looks like, that's, uh, a resource on our website. And then we also have a lot of blog articles and information about different parts. You know, people being worried like, well if I go through EMDR therapy, will I lose my edge <laugh>? And the answer is, no, <laugh>, you will lose your anxiety, not your edge <laugh>, You're not dumbing your brain down.

Speaker 3: No, no. You keep the lesson, you leave the trauma. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. I love that. Yeah. Wow. That's wonderful. And and speaking of plain speaking, yeah. What I loved about today was, again, sort of talked at the beginning, you know mm-hmm <affirmative>. You explained this really complex issue in terms that like even I can understand mm-hmm

<affirmative>. And so that is so much more relieving when people don't leave and go, I don't know what half of that meant. Yeah. You know, that's And knowledge is power. Knowledge is power. Yep.

Speaker 0: Knowledge is power. Well, thank you again for being here. This was just really good and I think important, especially for people and like you said, any kind of trauma situation. So thank you for being here. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Very happy to be here. Thanks It, it was great. And thank you everyone else for joining us today. If anyone has any further questions on today's topic, you can always post it here and we can get you connected with Laurel or you can just go to her straight yourself. So until next time, stay safe, stay happy, and be well.