Trauma

Trauma is an emotional and psychological response to a situation, event, or experience you found overwhelming, distressing, frightening, or disturbing and over which you had little or no control. Trauma occurs when your brain and body feel so overwhelmed by what has happened that you struggle to return to a relaxed state, leaving the “fight, flight or freeze” response activated.

Understanding Trauma

Traumatic events tend to be characterised by a sudden and unpredictable threat to the person’s life, impacting the person’s sense of safety, such as accidents, physical violence, loss of a parent in childhood, loss of a loved one, sexual assault, having an injury or illness and so on.

However, it is central to note that trauma is subjective. Any experience that leaves you feeling frightened, overwhelmed, rejected, humiliated, unsafe, ashamed, abandoned, dismissed, threatened, not supported, powerless and trapped can potentially result in trauma. This is because each person processes situations and events uniquely, depending on previous experiences in their life. For this reason, two people that experience the same event might be affected differently. Whether or not an event is traumatic is not determined by objective circumstances. Trauma is a subjective and personal experience.

What happens in our body when we experience a traumatic event

When you experience a traumatic situation, event, or circumstance, the limbic system in your brain gets activated. It initiates a domino reaction that activates your autonomic nervous system; in this instance, the part of the autonomic nervous system that is activated is the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for significant physiological changes. This “alarm system” stops all non-essential systems like sleep, digestion, and rest and triggers the production of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol so that you are ready to fight, flight or freeze.

Usually, when the threat has passed, your parasympathetic nervous system gets activated and puts your body in a calmer state, reducing the level of stress in the body. This will help you restore normal functioning, generally with minor side effects, although you might feel on edge for a bit longer.

However, if you have gone through an experience that was highly traumatic or gone through traumatic experiences that occurred repetitively over a long period, the balance between the activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems doesn’t quite work in the same way; the limbic system is activated most of the time. In the event of ongoing adversity, our brain has this coping mechanism to try and keep us safe. This can be described as “survival mode” and involves a constant engagement of your sympathetic nervous system, thus becoming a “normal baseline” for your body and brain. This hyperalert state can significantly impact your actions, wellbeing, thoughts, emotions, and relationships.

What Are The Main Symptoms Of Trauma?

Trauma responses vary from individual to individual. Some people might experience the effect of trauma right after the event, whereas for others, more significant symptoms may occur a long time after the event. Furthermore, everyone will respond differently in terms of the intensity and duration of the symptoms depending on their previous experiences and, thus, their interpretation of the traumatic event. As mentioned above, different types of trauma may present with different symptoms; however, common symptoms include the following:

• Sadness

• Despair

• Nightmares

• Flashbacks

• Anger

• Feeling numb or disconnected

• Difficulties in regulating emotions

• Headaches

• Nausea and other gastrointestinal problems

• Intense feelings of guilt and shame

• Hyperarousal

• Difficulties in memories recollection

• Insomnia and other sleep difficulties

• Difficulties in interpersonal relationships

• Low self-esteem

• Difficulties in prioritising their own needs and people-pleasing

Trauma can also be associated with several mental health conditions, such as PTSD, anxiety, depression, dissociative disorders, and substance abuse difficulties.

What Causes Trauma?

As mentioned above, any experience that leaves you feeling frightened, overwhelmed, rejected, humiliated, unsafe, ashamed, abandoned, dismissed, threatened, not supported, powerless and trapped can potentially result in trauma.

Different types of trauma

Different categorisations of trauma have been developed to facilitate assessment and treatment, as trauma responses exist on a broad spectrum and can vary depending on the severity and frequency of the trauma.

- Acute Trauma

Acute trauma occurs due to exposure to a singular, terrifying event that is also brief, such as an assault or car accident. The intense distress the person experiences following the one-time event is usually short-lived.

- Complex Trauma

Complex trauma occurs as a result of ongoing or repeated traumatic experiences. The traumatic experience generally occurs within a specific relationship or specific timeframe. Very often, it transpires within a particular setting and usually occurs over months or years. This is also called Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). It usually develops due to repeated trauma experienced during the person’s developmental years -childhood- but it can also develop as a result of repeated traumatic experiences in adulthood.

- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can develop if the person is exposed to a highly frightening event or experience involving actual or threatened physical harm. Thus, threatening the person’s life/safety.

- Secondary or Vicarious Trauma

Secondary or Vicarious Trauma occurs due to witnessing/being exposed to other people's suffering. This is common in caring professions and professions where the individual is exposed to emotional and physical injury, for example, medical doctors, law enforcement, therapists, nurses and first responders. Compassion fatigue might be a risk for individuals in these professions, where in the attempt to protect themselves from the pain and distress they witness in others, they avoid emotional investment.

Treatment For Trauma

There are different effective therapies for trauma, and as everyone is unique, not every approach will work for every individual.

Therapies that are effective in treating trauma include:

- Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is generally used to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It is designed to identify trauma memories that cannot be processed and is aimed at helping our brain process these.

- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) takes on the view that our feelings, thoughts, and how we behave are connected, and changing one of these factors will affect the others. It focuses on how your thoughts affect how you feel about yourself, a specific situation -e.g. traumatic event- and the world and consequently determine how you behave. It is also helpful in developing strategies and tools to better manage emotional triggers from the trauma.

- Psychodynamic Therapy is centred on the belief that painful and traumatic memories, experiences, and feelings in our early life, are stored within our unconscious mind when they are too difficult to be processed. It helps make links between how your past experiences shape how you feel and behave in the present. This is especially helpful for childhood and early life trauma.

Your therapist will use these therapies to help you process the traumatic event(s) and related feelings. This may be achieved in several ways depending on the nature of the trauma, your preferences, and your therapist’s therapeutic approach. Your therapist will develop a treatment plan tailored to your needs.

Please get in touch with us to learn more about therapy for trauma or schedule an appointment for a free initial consultation.