Fight-Freeze is one difficult shell to crack, but not impossible. Just ask that infamous character from Charles Dickens’s classic, A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge was a Fight-Freeze trauma type with an intense attachment disorder. Yet he processed his trauma and retrieved the best parts of himself in a single night. While overnight healing happens only in fiction, there are inspiring lessons, nonetheless.
Just two quick notes: First, if you’re unfamiliar with the 4F Trauma Types, a visual aid can be found here. Second, there’s a major spoiler alert to anyone who is unfamiliar with Scrooge’s story.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?”…But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance…
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Thus sums up the bitter old man we meet in the story’s opening. Isolating is a key piece of the Freeze Type. Scrooge jealously guards his space – and woe to those who dare to get close! His reactive anger (Fight Type) shows itself many times over. And this is just in the story’s opening. He chases off a boy who dares to go caroling at Scrooge’s counting house. He responds with venom when two gentlemen come around collecting for charity.
Victorian Translator: Bah! (blunt dismissal of person/place/idea) Humbug! (fraud)
His nephew, Fred, who also happens to be his only living relative, stops by to wish him a merry Christmas. “Bah! Humbug!” retorts Scrooge (and not for the last time). Fred invites Scrooge to have Christmas dinner with him, as he does every year. Every year, Scrooge refuses.
Last but certainly not least, the financial abuse of his clerk, Bob Cratchit. Not only is Cratchit severely underpaid, he must also endure working inside an office that’s just as cold as the weather outside. For Scrooge is too cheap, even to to warm the fireplace.
We watch Scrooge go home to a dark and cold abode. It’s remarkable how, for a wealthy man like Scrooge, he is living like a pauper inside his own house. So enslaved he is to money, he has robbed himself of any quality of life. How fitting then, that when the ghost of his old business partner, Marley shows up, he is bound in chains. He warns Scrooge that his own chains are even longer but he won’t see them until he dies.
Miserliness as an Attachment Disorder:
Miserliness is one of the many forms of adult attachment disorders (Trauma Glossary 2). It is driven by equal parts scarcity fear and having one’s sense of identity hyper-focused on either a person, object/s, or dissociative action (or inaction). At the same time, the attachment disorder limits the person’s quality of life. In the case of Ebenezer Scrooge, his identity is: “I’m rich” but at the price of forsaking all other aspects of life.
Intervention for Ebenezer Scrooge
The first ghost: Ebenezer Scrooge Processes His Memories
The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge on a journey to his younger years. This is where we learn what made him. It turns out, Scrooge grew up in a boarding school where his father had abandoned him. He wasn’t even allowed to go home for Christmas, while all of the other boys did. In other words, love itself was a scarcity for young Ebenezer Scrooge. Like any child whose choices are limited, Scrooge adapted and coped the best he could. He found companionship through fictional characters.
As old Scrooge observes the scene of his younger self, he explains to the Ghost how “real” Robinson Crusoe and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves were to him. He does so with so much joy and boyish excitement, that it seems out of character from the man we met in the opening. Then Scrooge pauses and sheds his first tear in sympathy for the lonely boy he once was.
How Unmet Needs Develop into Attachment Disorders
We all have basic emotional needs. We come to understand and name them through our experiences, particularly in our formative years, when our minds are developing most rapidly . When one or more of those basic emotional needs are denied us, it creates a sort of vacuum effect in our psyche. The emotional need for what’s lacking is still there, we simply lack the foundation for understanding what it is.
This is why processing our trauma is so crucial. When we can’t identify what the unmet need is, it causes us to rely on that which we are familiar with. This attempt to fulfill “that mysterious thing that’s missing” through means that are unrelated is an example of transference (Trauma Glossary 2). This, alone is a recipe for developing an attachment disorder.
We see this play out in Scrooge’s story. His mind developed out of being deprived of parental love. This was his original scarcity. Not knowing how love and human connection can build emotional security, he latched onto financial security.
At the closing of Scrooge’s past, we see from the way he’s dressed that he has become financially successful. However, he’s gotten so obsessed with money, it is not registering with him that he has enough!
Money itself has become his scarcity fear, overwriting his childhood scarcity of love. Worse still is repetition compulsion (Trauma Glossary 2) in action. As Scrooge’s father emotionally neglected him, so Scrooge emotionally neglects Belle, the only woman he ever loved. Belle breaks off their engagement and in so doing, Scrooge’s childhood pain has been fully manifested into his adult life.
The Ghost of Christmas Present: Mindfulness versus Negative Noticing
First stop, the home of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s underpaid clerk.
Scrooge sees the ill effects of his financial abuse. A hen too tiny for a family of eight is being served because that’s all Bob Cratchit can afford. His gentle son, Tiny Tim is disabled and it looks like his health is fading. In this scene, we learn the most shocking part of all: Scrooge has a heart after all! He pleads over the fate of Tiny Tim but the Ghost of Christmas Present says that unless something changes, Tiny Tim will die.
In other words, if Cratchit could afford medical expenses for his son, there might be hope. If only he had an employer who paid fairly…
Next stop, Scrooge’s nephew, Fred’s house
Scrooge sees what he’s been missing out on all these years, and it’s more than the dinner invitation he keeps turning down. You know you’re dealing with a remarkable character when their own creator breaks narrative to address his audience:
If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blest in laugh than Scrooge’s nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I’ll cultivate his acquaintance.
A Christmas Carol; Charles Dickens, himself describing Fred
Fred has a personality that infects everyone around him. He laughs quickly and easily. Even as he tells his guests that his uncle believes Christmas is a humbug (Ha! Ha! Ha!) he does so with compassion. He points out to his guests that he pities his uncle because his wealth has brought him no joy. That’s why he invites him to dine every year.
This is a great example of negative noticing (Trauma Glossary 2) in action. When we first met Fred in the story’s opening, he showed no signs of having such a jovial temperament. We had no way of knowing that his was the sort of personality that could exude happiness onto others.
When we are only noticing the negative, it affects how we respond to our environment. Our attitude towards our environment affects how the environment will respond to us. So as we saw in the opening, Scrooge was a severely closed off person (Freeze Type). It’s obvious that he didn’t want anyone close to him and he responded with venom (Fight Type) if anyone dared. Thus how his attitude towards Fred prevented him from seeing his most beautiful parts.
The Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come: What Happens Next? Scared Straight
The last Spirit shows Scrooge what’s in store for him if he doesn’t learn to open his heart and let go of his attachment disorder.
A wealthy man has died all alone and no one seems to care. Worse still, some thieves took advantage of how no one was there when he died. They stole his draperies, blankets and clothing out of the very room where his dead body rested. The Spirit leads Scrooge to the wealthy man’s grave. The tombstone reveals that the dead man in question is Ebenezer Scrooge, himself.
Just for the record, Scrooge was ready to become a better person by the time the Ghost of Christmas Present left him. This is why I always feel sorry for him when he’s with this Ghost. Would he have changed so swiftly and abruptly without the last ghost scaring him straight? Probably not, but I do believe he would have put forth a sincere effort.
But hey, this is fiction and fiction tends to have the highest success rate with “magical 3’s”, not 2’s. Besides, no one knew how to kick those fictional characters while they were down quite like the Victorians. Just saying.
So what’s the takeaway for us in this scene? Don’t worry, I don’t promote scaring my CPTSD community straight. What is worth thinking about is our future. We can get so caught up in survival mode, we lose sight of where it’s taking us. If we can just take the time out from our trauma responses and really look at what we’re doing to ourselves, what kind of changes might we make for a better tomorrow?
Ebenezer Scrooge Improves His Quality of Life
Big surprise, Scrooge wakes up in full euphoria. Nothing like being brought back from one’s death sentence to give one a new lease on life. We watch him undo every wrong he committed in the story’s opening. He orders the prize turkey to be delivered to the Cratchit house. Then he runs into the two men who were collecting for the poor and gives them a surprisingly generous donation.
Scrooge’s joy is at fever pitch as he does this. He has gotten hooked on a tool that counteracts negative noticing. Do you know what that is? Positive feedback loops (Master Toolbox 1 under tools for Negative Noticing) are based on the same principle as negative noticing. Whatever you put out is what you will get back. Scrooge’s miserliness fed the illusion of being in control of his life. Scrooge is experiencing the pure and uncorrupted type of power.
Positive feedback loops occur when we say or do something good. When we see that it made a positive impact on the person, it empowers us while releasing those happy hormones known as endorphins (Trauma Glossary 3 – Section 3). I think it’s safe to conclude that Scrooge is experiencing an endorphin high.
This carries him into what he does next. He shocks his nephew by showing up at his house for dinner. The next day, he shocks Cratchit by giving him a raise. (And may I say it’s about time?) Scrooge ensures that Tiny Tim does NOT die and by the story’s end, he becomes “a second father” to the child.
The Three Christmas Ghosts = Three Years
While making overnight changes like Ebenezer Scrooge doesn’t happen in real life, what I love about this story is that it’s like watching someone’s healing journey in fast-forward. If we think of the three spirits as representing one year each, we can start to appreciate the realistic magic of healing. Year one: process our past. Year two: the practice of being present. Purposely scan for the good and think of ways we can connect ourselves with it. Year three: stop and think about our future. How will people remember us? Are our habits today leading us to a better tomorrow, or do we need to make some changes?
Further Reading
Did you know that Charles Dickens wrote a total of five Christmas books and that A Christmas Carol is only one of them? I’ll be honest, of his five Christmas books, three of them were disasters. However, there is that one other book worth recommending. The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain has a premise you might find intriguing. How many of us have wished we could have at least one painful experience removed from our memories? The haunted man meets a ghost who offers him exactly that. Without giving away any more of the story, it begs the question: Where does our compassion come from, if not from our painful experiences?