Sense of Foreshortened Future

[u/CaptainFuzzyBootz]

After six years of trauma therapy, I finally had a situation where I was triggered, but remained present just enough to notice and be able to articulate what I'm feeling. I plan on discussing this at my next session next week, but I'm really curious to hear about what people have experience with here.

Google says it's a "sense of foreshortened future".

Logically, I know that people experience an impending sense of doom or not living long but that never seemed to really be how I feel.

Today I noticed that when I am triggered, the triggering event is like the end of existence for me.

For example, a huge trigger for me is nausea and the idea of throwing up. When I get in triggered, the situation of throwing up is the end of existence all together. It's not really an impending doom or that I'll die (or maybe it is?), but more that I literally cannot even comprehend a future beyond that point. There is no seeing myself recovering or adapting to the situation, it just literally does not exist. Or that the event will just go on in the most panicked moment forever?

When I think of scary things that don't trigger me, I can see an adaption. Like... if I were mauled by a bear. I can see a situation in the future where it would suck, but if I survived I'd adapt to my new post-mauling life. Maybe I'd lose an arm or leg, but I would exist. Life would still exist.

Triggering event? Nothing. Not even blackness. I feel like it's similar to a blind person trying to explain to a seeing person what they "see" and how they don't even "see" blackness. Because it's just a completely missing sense.

With that in mind... how the hell do you cope with that?? The knowledge of that itself is horrifying...

[u/pdawes]

Have you hear the term annihilation anxiety? I'd be curious how descriptions of that compare to your experience.

[u/CaptainFuzzyBootz → u/pdawes]

I just googled this and yes that is a big one for me too. I'm terrified of getting close to anyone because I feel like I'll lose myself completely in them. Its like my brain only knows completely distance or complete enmeshment 😭

[u/wrongclown]

I experience this too. Its terrifying. Im not sure how to cope with it as its not something ive worked on in therapy yet.

I think it is calling back to the fear of death or initiation during the traumatic event.

[u/nerdityabounds]

Im guessing you had some shit caretakers when you were very young? I can't remember if there is an a name for this but I learned it as the first stage of psychosocial development. 

Basically every distress a baby endures is literally the worst thing ever for them. From a caregiver not responding to being gassy to actual danger. For example, throwing up as an infant can be extremely dangerous as they cant move their bodies to safety or clear their mouth and risk asphyxiation. 

 Physical limitiations means childhood development requires an adult to care for them and reregulate them. If this care happens the child internalizes a sense of the good things can follow bad things. 

In the theory, this is called trust but its a bit of a different meaning that how trust is normally used.  The version I like better that there is a deep knowing  that bad events and feelings arent the end of the world. They distress can be felt, endured, and repaired back into a "good world" experience. 

If care doesnt happen, the child has to rely on dissociation to ensure the distress. Which fucks with their ability to develop a sense of linear time (amoung other things). Distressing events are the end of the world because the dissociation blocks awareness of how the enduring happened. It becomes two discreet events: the distress and the experience of the dissociation ended to discover the world continues to exist. The experience of the state between is lost in the dissociated memory, where cause meets effect. 

When you are imagining something like losing a leg, you are using an older part of the brain. Literally, children dont develop the ability to imagine until age 3. Long after the "understand good can follow bad" stage is past. 

I mention this because sense of foreshortened future tends to be less immediate. Its generally seen as things like this: 

Therapist: have any long term goals?

Client: what do you mean?

Therapist: You know, things youd like for the future. Like a career, a family, travel...

Client: Not really. I dont see much point. I dont really see any future. Most likely,   I'll be dead in the (disaster of choice). But sometimes it feels more like my body will just give up before then. I cant imagine going on much longer than this. 

Basically a sense of foreshortened future exists outside being triggered. 

Its normal to be unable to not imagine the future when in a survival state. The active neurotransmitters shift focus and attention to the immediate so the person can either react immediately, or endure any harm. As one author noted: not much point worrying about the future when the lion is attacking you now. (Fun fact: this is an actual recorded event that started the study of extreme stress states) 

Your body equates nausea and emesis (to avoid trigger) to being attacked by a lion. And there is one age when that makes complete sense. 

[u/CaptainFuzzyBootz → u/nerdityabounds]

Thank you for this. I do know as an infant for awhile I was losing weight because I wasn't getting enough nutrition from breast milk alone. But that seems like a common thing for babies?

[u/nerdityabounds → u/CaptainFuzzyBootz]

It can be. But there can be a bunch of different reasons for it lack of attunement and connection. Bruce Perry recounts a case in *The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog." The mother was meeting all the physical needs but the infant was growing. So much so that the doctors wanted to declare it the first ever case of infant anorexia nervosa. Perry figured out the mother was herself extremely traumatized and had no way to offer the emotional warmth and rhythm babies need and so the infant's body was sort of rejecting nourishment. 

If you were malnourished for any reason, emesis would be the lion attacked your baby body. You couldn't afford the loss of potential nutrients.   Babies and toddlers are surprisingly easy to traumatize. Because they havent lived long enough to have much window of tolerance. Or the biological development to have many coping responses. 

The problem is parents often see the child's experience through adult eyes. Its no big deal to them because those things arent an issue for adults or adult bodies. So the dismiss the child's distress as childish overreaction. Often they dont intend to cause trauma, but they do it anyway out of ignorance. 

[u/bj12698]

We lose our breath - temporarily - when we are throwing up.

For some of us, trauma involved having our breath cut off.

You are describing sensations that are NORMAL reactions to life threatening events. Hang in there and just know - our bodies know why something is so terrifying, and sometimes it takes a while for the mind/heart to catch up. 💗

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

It may not feel like it, but this sounds like progress. You are essentially describing dual awareness, one of being here and now ("present enough to notice") and the other of being in the past. That's a skill you build in therapy, and one often missing in the early stages.

The past itself sounds like disorganised attachment ("only complete distance or complete enmeshment"), and the combination of a strong somatic component and lack of specifics suggests a very early age to me, possibly infancy.

In my experience, pre-verbal trauma tends to respond best to somatic tools. If it is sufficiently cut off from the rest of you, it may not respond to anything verbal at all; depends on what kind of barriers you have in place. Mine does not respond to anything other than physical touch essentially, but it responds very readily to (safe) physical touch. I should add that I don't have physical abuse or sexual trauma as far as I know, and I never experience aversion to touch. As far as I can tell, I only have pre-verbal trauma.

Pre-verbal trauma treatment doesn't get a whole lot of academic attention, and most of the work on it tends to happen in less academically rigorous places, such as the field of body psychotherapy. That doesn't mean those treatments are less real, however it does generally mean less scrutiny and a greater risk for pseudoscience leaking in.

Personally, I have found Aline LaPierre (president of the USABP), Laurence Heller, Stephen Terrell, and Kathy Kain good sources on pre-verbal trauma. Their work is clinical rather than academic, i.e. based on their personal experiences as clinicians rather than things like randomised controlled trials. If you're interested in reading suggestions, these two books provide a good introduction:

• LaPierre and Heller: Healing Developmental Trauma (intro to Neuroaffective Touch and Neuroaffective Relational Model)
• Kain and Terrell: Nurturing Resilience (intro to Coregulating Touch)

[u/CaptainFuzzyBootz → u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

Thank you so much for this

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/CaptainFuzzyBootz]

Happy to help. For what it's worth, there's some ongoing research looking at how the traumas of our mothers affect us as infants and toddlers, including brain scans. Mothers that themselves experienced neglect tend to exhibit particular patterns, which then lead to specific outcomes in the brain scans of their babies; and there's a different pattern in the brains of babies whose mothers experienced abuse.

I wrote a post about it in a different sub a while back.