Picture this:
You are a person with extreme trauma-induced anxiety and depression, sitting at home, trying to avoid contact with the world on Halloween evening. People are knocking on your door, over and over, and you are afraid to answer. But the knocking continues into the night. Unable to face contact with strangers, you hide out, pacing like a tiger inside your home, feeling more and more alienated and paranoid as the night progresses.
Or this:
You’ve joined your very large extended family for Thanksgiving dinner, and you want the salt from the other end of the table. But because you’ve been shut down due to unresolved trauma, you are physically unable to open your mouth and ask others at the table to pass the salt.
The latter is not a made-up scenario but the experience of Manitou Springs-based psychotherapist Gustav Moen. The former is a scenario similar to what Moen experienced when he was a self-described hermit with unresolved trauma shutting down his ability to function among other people.
Having experienced healing through therapy for his own deep-seated trauma, Moen now specializes in treating unresolved trauma in others. He identifies as a wounded healer, sharing his story and process with others to enable healing together.
“I specialize in trauma, harms from the past that overwhelm our system, that have gone unresolved,” Moen said. “When there’s nobody to work them out with, they remain unresolved, they remain within us.”
This time of year, when the seasons change and the end of the year presents a series of holidays that bring people together, those with unresolved trauma might be at risk of feeling overwhelmed, often not understanding why holiday gatherings feel so threatening.
“When we carry trauma, we’re not safe in our system. We become hypervigilant and enter certain psychological states to protect ourselves,” Moen said.
Those states are flight, avoiding interactions with others altogether or possibly staying busy to avoid them; fight, or becoming irritated and angry; freeze, or disassociation from self and others; and fawn, self-sacrificing to please others and make ourselves feel better.
These are not voluntary states, and people with unresolved trauma often don’t even recognize their behaviors as symptoms of traumatic stress.
“Why didn’t I just ask for the salt?” Moen said. “I didn’t know. I couldn’t ask for help for anything because it was too uncomfortable. What I learned as a child was that my needs could not be met by others.”
Some people with unresolved trauma and resultant depression may be more affected during this season of holidays by what they don’t experience — connectedness with family and friends in ways that are extraordinary like parties, feasts, large gatherings, affirmations of kinship.
“Holidays provide a sense of belonging,” Moen said. “But for people with depression, if we don’t have those things, the fact that we’re alone can impact us negatively.”
Basically, it’s important to remember during the holiday season that depression is pushing down emotions, and they need to be allowed out, Moen asserts.
“It’s not the season, the depression and the trauma are already there,” he said. “If we push down those feelings, don’t allow them to be there, we go into fight mode or flight or freeze or fawn. We need to witness our trauma. We don’t have to re-experience it, but we do have to witness it to resolve it.”
Moen cautions against rationalization — “somebody else had it worse than I did” — arguing that if we believe only those with the most severe trauma should seek therapy, then ultimately only one person can be healed.
Then there’s the idea that seeking resolution with a therapist is somehow self-pitying. Instead, Moen argues, it’s empowering to connect with parts of ourselves that have been shut down, regardless what may have caused the shutdown.
“We are social beings,” he said. “We need each other. And to really connect with others we need to know who we are ourselves first.”
All of this doesn’t preclude enjoying Halloween for Moen and his family; his wife, Jessica, is an English teacher at Manitou Springs High School. Walk down their street and you’ll see ghoulish decorations outside the house that might frighten passersby.
Mental health experts agree that for some with anxiety, the orchestrated frights of Halloween can be a welcome relief, inducing a rare feeling of being in control that overshadows daily obsessive worries.
“It’s my wife’s favorite holiday,” Moen said. And now that he knows himself, he enjoys it too.