- 1997: Volume 6, No. 6 Buried Alive

"Here's my card," said a trader, extending his unsteady arm at a trade show. It said, "Trader, Financial Advisor, Analyst, Vietnam Veteran." Many veterans bury the wounds of war and enter professions that allow them to do so. However, trading is not a merciful profession when it comes to burying past traumas. A high level of performance requires a great deal of healthy, high energy. When energy is down, the shadows of the past resurface, and then trading becomes a battleground of unresolved emotions.

With a look that brought back shadows of my own past (having been married to a Vietnam veteran), Joe asked, "Can we talk?" It was at a time when speakers were in their sessions. I left my exhibit unmanned, feeling intensity build with each step towards privacy and comfortable seating. And so the story began of how trading was now the Vietcong, the helicopters, the jungle and the terror. Joe is a trader's household name. He built a fortune over the years with his street-smart, savvy, approach to the markets. Then he lost it all and traded his name to keep up a comfortable life-style. He inspired many a new trader by being a guru and mentor. Now in his fifties, with a wife and two sons, he was tired of living the lie. He wanted to be the person everyone thought him to be, the person who made the fortune. Trading became a bottomless pit of disappointment where, in its debts, he found hell. He told me of his nightmares-the ones that haunt him still.

What is Happening?

What happened to Joe and why is his experience important for traders to understand? In the course of nearly everyone's life, the chances are that we will face an experience which will rock us to our core. Since death is a certainty for everyone, we will have to face the death of people we love very deeply. We live in a violent society in which we are faced with the prospect of being a victim of a crime, potentially a violent one. Each and every one of us travels, and as each mile ticks by, the likelihood that we will be in an accident increases.

Periodically, we find ourselves in a war like Joe. If we are lucky enough to survive, we are left to face the long-term trauma from wounds and terrifying experiences. Gulf War veterans, who have their own brand of horrors to bury, are being added to the victims of war. And finally, we live on a planet as guests of mother nature, who periodically throws a fit, just to remind us who is in charge. All of these potentially devastating experiences are predictable, to some extent. There are many others that are not. If and when they occur, how are we going to handle them and how are they going to affect our professional (as well as personal) lives afterwards?

When we experience a living nightmare, it often follows us throughout our lives, undermining our ability to trade because of its powerful and frightening imagery of loss, pain and disaster. The reason that these traumas continue to plague us is because they are often too overwhelming for us to deal with at the time they occur. As a result, we bury them deeply in our subconscious while they are still powerful and full of life, and where they continue to hold the same level of influence over us as long as they are left unresolved. Unfortunately, we never go back to dig them up in order to deal with them because, very simply, they frighten us.

As time passes, we begin to think that we have recovered and go on with our lives. After awhile, we often forget that these traumatic experiences even happened. Then, without warning, we start to have dreams about these past traumas, usually because something happens in our present lives that sparks old associations. Because we are not dealing with the past trauma on a conscious level, our unconscious mind will continue sending us a message that we need to attend to our problems until we finally do so.

The result of this common response to trauma is that even though we have survived the terrible experience, we are essentially buried alive by the trauma of the past that we have attempted to bury alive as well.

The Give-Back Trader

Several years ago I worked with a trader whose trading was dramatically inconsistent. Val, a brilliant trader in his late twenties, was capable of creating tremendous profits in his trading. Then, after a series of exciting weeks of profit-taking, he would fall apart. He claimed, during these give-back times, that he seemed to lack any energy. In fact, Val was suffering from stress and exhausted adrenals, the small glands above your kidneys which supply the body with the hormones that keep you going during stress. But, the question was, why did this happen to Val? What was so stressful about success that it would deplete all of his reserves?

In the course of talking to Val about his family, I asked him about his mother. Val talked animatedly about her for a long time. When I asked where she lived, I was surprised to hear him say that she had died 10 years previously. Then, Val changed the subject. But, some instinct prompted me to ask him to return to the death of his mother and tell me what happened. Reluctantly, Val said that she had died of cancer. I continued to probe. Finally, Val began to talk about the final weeks of his mother's life in the hospital, of the frightening things he saw happening to her and of her agony and fear. These images had burned so deeply into Val's mind that he could recall them in tremendous detail, from the smells of the room to the minutes it took her to finally die. When he was finished, Val was sobbing with grief that he had never released.

Val had been a freshman in college when he went to the hospital to visit his mother every day. He had grown up in a sheltered and loving family, never experiencing anything traumatic and painful. Suddenly, he was confronted with the images of suffering and death. Even worse, he was watching it happen to the person who represented all comfort and security in his world. As his father and sisters tried to cope with their own loss, they were unable to help Val cope with his. So, he buried the images and the feelings associated with them deeply in his unconscious mind. But, that was not the end of his suffering.

As time passed, Val began to have dreams about his mother. Sometimes these dreams would follow watching a movie in which someone died or in which a mother who was like his own mother played a prominent role. Sometimes his dreams came after driving by a hospital or after hearing that someone he knew was hospitalized. After awhile, there were more and more things which triggered the associations with his mother.

One of the most interesting associations with his mother's death had to do with Val's trading. Every time Val had an exceptionally good run in his trading, he began to have nightmares about his mother's death. He often awoke feeling stressed and exhausted, knowing that he had tossed and turned all night and not knowing why. Occasionally, he would remember his dreams, and then feel miserable all day.

The association with a successful trading run and the death of Val's mother became obvious after Val talked about the months preceding her hospitalization. Val had been competing in major gymnastic events in the months just prior to his mother's illness. In fact, he had been consistently winning more and more competitions, so that he was standing in line for a place on the U.S. Olympic team. His mother had traveled to each of his competitions. When he won, he would always search the audience for her cheering face.

Burying the Pain

Like Joe, Val had buried alive an experience that was too traumatic to bear. Instead of dealing with their fear and pain, both of these traders learned to protect themselves by pretending that they had healed. The result of this strategy, however, was that they were still suffering from the effects of these experiences many years later.

Are Joe and Val a tiny minority of two? Hardly. Every week, I receive calls from traders who are dealing with the effects of traumas in their lives which have wormed their way into the day-to-day workings of the trading day.

For example, I recently worked with a trader named Riener who grew up in Hitler's Germany. Riener lived on a farm with his parents. Because they were Socialists, his family were outcasts in the community. During the war, his father left his family for three or four years and they only saw him, at best, once a year. During that time, as a young boy, Riener ran the farm. He remembers, as a child, the Americans coming, and although they were kind to them, Riener and his family still feared them, not knowing how to react.

Then the Russians came. Riener remembers that they were a lot of fun and treated the German children well, too, but he continued to see strange people coming into his world and he felt much uncertainty. Then finally, the Communists arrived. Riener managed to escape just before they took over his country. Nevertheless, Riener is haunted by the memories and insecurities of his childhood. Today, when all things are secure and Riener's trading is going especially well, there is always an underlying fear-will there be enough? This fear has some obvious and also some very subtle effects on Riener's trading.

Accept the Unacceptable

The first step in healing and growing through a traumatic experience is to accept the fact that it actually happened. Many people live in a state of denial: it didn't happen. With that approach, no healing can ever take place.

How can you accept the unacceptable? One way, is to talk about it. As you talk about it, it becomes real. Of course, you must be careful with whom you talk about your most vulnerable issues and you cannot wear out friendships and family relationships by expecting them to endlessly hear about your traumatic experience. Joining support groups is a healthy way of opening dialogue about your experience. Another resource that is valuable are the trained listeners: clergymen, social workers, therapists, etc. These professionals know the questions to ask and when to be quiet. Writing about it helps as well. Sometimes the act of putting your experience and your thoughts about it on paper is the best way to make it real and to put it into perspective for you. Read aloud what you have written and listen for the truth of your own words.

Experience your Emotions

Far too many traders I have worked with are afraid to experience their own feelings. Because they are afraid of losing control of their emotions, they believe that they will give their emotions power over them by expressing them. As a result, they keep them buried deep inside, where they fester and seek to find an outlet whenever opportunity permits. The solution is to cry when you feel grief, to experience your fear when you are afraid, and to feel your outrage and anger when it wells up in you. This does not mean that you act out your emotions in destructive ways. But, feeling your feelings will allow you to bypass the self-destruction that takes place when you don't allow room for your basic emotions. For example, punching a punching bag or slapping water while you're in a pool.

Find Meaning in the Aftermath

It is true that bad things happen to good people and that there is no meaning in many of the painful and traumatic things that happen. Nevertheless, it is also true that out of nearly every tragedy evolves some of the most unexpected benefits to those who survive. Sometimes, it takes many years to see the doors that opened for us when the doors we loved so well shut down. However, the act of looking for these newly opened doors can help us heal by looking at the experience through a new paradigm.

Seek Help

A common mistake made by people who have lived through a terrible experience is to attempt to recover alone. Licking their wounds like a frightened animal, they go off in their own private, internal world, not letting anyone else know what is happening. Unfortunately, the longer this emotional isolation continues, the more difficult it is for the final healing to take place. At this point, it generally takes a trained therapist or psychological coach to guide an individual back into his unconscious mind and exhume the old trauma. Once this occurs, the therapist can work with the individual to help him put the experience to rest.

Help Others

One of the best ways to reconcile a traumatic experience is to help others who have recently gone through the same experience. Flood victims often find resolution by helping others who are going through what they themselves experienced. Cancer survivors find the same source of healing in working with people who are going through chemotherapy.

Conclusion

Since we are all subject to the vagaries of fate and our mortality, we are all likely to experience, at least once, a traumatic experience. If we have buried this experience alive while it still has power over us, we can still come to terms with this experience later on with help from the outside. Otherwise, it will remain a persistent and damaging negative force in our trading lives.