When busyness is a trauma symptom
Do you know someone who always seems to have a million things going on? Perhaps you admire their productivity, their service to the community, their professional accomplishments, their social prowess. Maybe you are even this person. Our culture highly values productivity and has ever since the Puritans who founded this country viewed it as a mark of God’s salvation. But sometimes we subconsciously choose to keep busy to recreate a chaos or anxiety that is rooted in trauma.
If your environment growing up was unstable, unpredictable, or unsafe physically and/or emotionally, you may find these types of environments “comfortably uncomfortable.” Trauma influences how we feel about control, it influences our desire to have control, our discomfort with acknowledging the limits of our control. When your experiences or those you’ve witnessed force you to confront how brutal, unpredictable, tragic, and senseless the world can be, it’s understandable to try to cling to control. Sometimes people ricochet to another extreme and, believing they are powerless, don’t exercise enough control over their lives. In such situations, people may neglect to limit or discipline themselves, over-indulging in alcohol, drugs, spending, gambling, or other “vices.” Often people with trauma exhibit features of under-control and overcontrol, such as when people restrict and then binge eat, or when they are miserly spenders (overcontrol) but abuse Xanax (under-control).
Societally, we tend to recognize the problems of undercontrol. But we often praise those with overcontrol issues. A saying goes that (restrictive) eating disorders are the only types mental illness that garner admiration. Excessive involvement at work, in hobbies, parenting, and community service can stem from a trauma-based desire for control. Control over how you and others view you (productive, wealthy, healthy, attractive, charitable, powerful, etc). Control can be self-reinforcing, taking on an addictive quality. When you get praised and compensated for working hard, it can be hard to step back, even if you’re overdoing it.
The goal is balance. How do you push yourself and grow without tiring yourself out or allowing your busy schedule to detract from your role responsibilities, like being able to take a call from a friend having a bad day or ensuring you’re creating a calm environment for your children, not one that induces a constant state of anxiety because you’re running between so many activities. It can be hard to resist the pressure to schedule another extracurricular activity for your children (will they one day resent you because you neglected to enroll them in piano?), but important to pause and reflect on your values and how you’re feeling day-to-day. The sweet spot is feeling as though you are growing and giving back and connecting with others, and that you are able to rest and savor the moment, and maybe even sometimes feel a little bit bored.
When we have trauma this can be challenging because we struggle to feel good enough, or to say no, or to be still (lest painful thoughts bubble to the surface). We must learn to tolerate these feelings so that we can strike a healthy balance, and hopefully model it for our children. Children do what they see.