Rumination can be a particularly potent coping behavior. This article is meant to help you compassionately identify what needs your rumination is helping fulfill. That way you can work to find more effective tools to fill those needs.
Your rumination is catering to important needs. It won't stop until those needs are met in other ways.
If you aren't sure why rumination is problematic (or what it really is), I'd start by reading "What is Rumination and How It's Preventing Your Healing." After you've done that, I'll meet you back here.
Biochemical Stress (Cortisol & Adrenaline) Addiction
The Benefit: Certain kinds of trauma can lead to a behavioral addiction to stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. Our bodies can become so familiar with stress that feelings of calm and safety can be surprisingly triggering. Diving into the scenes of the traumatic past can cause a release of these hormones.
Clues: This may be you if you are recovering from developmental (i.e. childhood abuse, neglect, attachment issues etc.) or institutional trauma (i.e. communal racism, religious abuse, poverty, etc.) Other indicators of stress addiction can be:
high risk hobbies
difficulty with downtime
chronically over-scheduling yourself
Filling the Need: Detoxing from stress addiction is a slow process that requires a lot of patience, exploration, and assistance from your care team (a therapist if possible). Body-oriented trauma work can help increase your tolerance to safety and reduce your body's need for stress.
Attempt to Control What Happened
The Benefit: When we ruminate we become the narrator of the story. Traumatic events are, by definition, out of our control. When we ruminate we can provide a sense of control over what happened to us. It also gives us the opportunity to:
Distort the memories in ways that help us cope better with them (i.e. suppress certain things or highlight others).
Assign meaning to things to change the tone of the memory.
Try and "solve the problem" of why something happened to you that shouldn't have.
Clues: This may be a benefit you are seeking from rumination if you tend to regularly try to understand what happened to you. Remember, we're talking specifically about rumination not psychotherapy. Some of the things that have happened to us make no sense at all. This kind of senseless suffering can be very difficult to accept. Controlling the story through rumination can feel like a quest to transform the story into something that we can tolerate better.
Filling the Need: This is where traditional psychotherapy really shines. A good therapist can help you tease out the story in a way that is effective and transformative using specific tools and protocols. Rumination is not the same as talking to a therapist. I know not everyone has access to a therapist, but if you are stirring over the story in this way, therapy may be a powerful tool for you. (I recommend seeing a therapist with a certification in EMDR and/or Internal Family Systems).
Sense of Vindication
The Benefit: Some of the traumas I have bore witness to over the years have been unspeakable. And some of the people I have worked with have developed behaviors because of them that make no sense to anyone else. Developmental and communal traumas have a particular way of leaving their victims feeling alien to those around them. They don't fit in the way they'd like to. Things that are simple to others can feel impossible to them. They are triggered in situations that don't seem to bother their friends. Rumination can provide an ongoing reassurance of "why I am the way I am". It is a pacifying practice to remember why you are so different from everyone else.
"No one else may understand me, but when I remember my story, my behavior makes perfect sense."
Clues: You may be dealing with this if you struggle to feel comfortable around those around you. If you feel judged consistently or have to explain yourself often. If you find yourself thinking "I just don't know how to be a human"... you probably relate to this.
Filling the Need: Adjustments to your environment can be a powerful tool in addressing this need. It will take time, but finding more supportive relationships and avoiding triggering places and activities can make a big impact. Trauma work in general will also assist in the way that it can help you find a sense of inherent belonging within yourself.
Bearing Witness
The Benefit: "Someone needs to remember what happened to me and I'm the only one that really knows." This statement can fuel a lifetime of rumination. The compassion I have for this feeling cannot be overstated. We all have a desire to be witnessed and so many of us never had one.
Clues: This may be you if you tend to overshare parts of your trauma story in inappropriate settings and feel uneasy about it later. You may also find yourself repeating the same stories to people and never feeling really heard.
Filling the Need: Finding good witnesses for your story can be incredibly helpful here. A good witness is someone that offers a safe container for you as you share. Ideally they are validating, empathetic, and curious about what you have to say. This can be anyone from your care team (friends, a therapist, a partner, etc.) I highly recommend practitioners certified in Compassionate Inquiry.
Keeps You Out of Body
The Benefit: The body can be a particularly painful place for trauma survivors considering it is the place we hold our traumatic memory. Because of this, compulsively intellectualizing our trauma story through rumination can be a relief.
Clues: If you tend to numb out or quickly fall into freeze states like depression or dissociation, this is likely relevant to you. In fact, rumination has close ties with depression and is believed to worsen existing depression symptoms. With depression acting as a nervous system's tool for shut down, it makes sense that rumination works to disconnect us from the body's experience.
Filling the Need: Somatic trauma work is necessary for all trauma survivors. Building a safe relationship with your body is instrumental in the healing process and can absolutely be done! With proper guidance somatic work helps:
build tolerance to sensations
regulate the nervous system
process traumatic tension stuck in the body's tissues.
Prevents Painful Action
The Benefit: A real benefit to rumination is the fact that it keeps us from taking action. It is literally the wheels just spinning in our head so we never have to move forward, because – let's face it – moving forward can be damned painful. We'll have to process things we've buried for years, change relationships that are damaging to us, learn to set boundaries with ourselves and others, and sooo much more! Sometimes the action-items list feels too daunting and it feels better to disappear into rumination instead.
Clues: Have you had the ability/access to important care and refused to take advantage of it? Have you been aware of the toxicity of certain people or environments in your life and made no changes to them? Have you witnessed your own toxicity and made little effort in doing what needs to be done to understand and correct it? If any of these feel familiar you may be using rumination to avoid action.
Filling the Need: Finding what you need in order to feel safe in moving forward is an incredibly personal endeavor. Working with a therapist, coach, or somatic practitioner can be really helpful in knowing where to start given your specific circumstances.
No matter what you've discovered about your relationship to rumination in this article I hope you approach it with compassion. I used the word "needs" for a reason. These are all necessary things that rumination may have been helping you obtain when there hasn't been any other way before now.
And if you're ready to move forward check out these helpful articles for stopping rumination or preventing it in the first place.
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