What is Trauma?
When we live through a traumatic experience, it is a shock to our nervous system. Generally, human beings are pretty resilient. You cut us, we bleed, our skin heals over. We see or experience something, it creates sensations, emotions, and thoughts, our brain integrates them into a memory. Sometimes, an experience is too intense for us to process or something interrupts us from doing so. When this happens, those sensations, emotions, and thoughts can get stuck. They are not processed into long-term memory and so our brain keeps bringing them up for us saying, look at this! Pay attention! I don’t know what this means for us yet!
This unprocessed information can sometimes show up as symptoms such as nightmares or flashbacks (seeing and feeling the experience as if it is happening in the present time, re-experiencing sensations, emotions, and/or thoughts from the original event), memory problems, unexplained physical pain, etc. People who have experienced trauma can also find themselves stuck in patterns of fear responses that feel out of their control.
Examples of Fear Responses
Here are some common responses that humans have to threat or danger:
Fight: our nervous system releases adrenaline and tenses our muscles, priming us to defend ourselves. This can sometimes show up as frequent irritability or rage.
Flight: adrenaline floods our system in this response as well, and we prepare to flee or run away. This can show up as anxiety, panic attacks, a need to constantly stay busy, etc.
Freeze: in this response, we attempt to stay completely still so that the threat will not see us. This can show up as feeling numb, dissociation (feeling like we or the world around us aren’t real, out of body, feeling like parts of ourselves are split off or in charge sometimes, etc.), addictions, feeling helpless or unable to move, depression, etc.
Flop: a more extreme version of the freeze response – our bodies shut down and we play dead so the threat will no longer be interested in us. This can show up as fainting or also some extreme forms of depression.
Fawn: another response to threat that we sometimes use is attempting to befriend the threat. This can look like people-pleasing behaviour, losing oneself in relationships, being attracted to narcissistic behaviour, etc.
What Causes Traumatic Stress?
Generally this includes anything that threatens our life or the lives of our loved ones. Here are some examples:
Jobs that put your life at risk and/or involve the frequent witnessing of death and trauma
Physical, emotional, or sexual violence or abuse
Neglect from caregivers
High conflict interpersonal relationships
Motor vehicle accidents
Experiencing oppression and/or violence because of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, sexual preferences, ability, etc.
War, terrorism, natural disasters
The loss of a significant other, especially due to violence, sudden illness, or suicide
The loss of a loved one due to dementia, alzheimers, etc and the experiences of caregiving
Many more things that overwhelm our nervous systems
What Helps?
Learning to listen to our bodies and treat ourselves with compassion and care
Learning to experience and trust our emotions so we can use the information they are trying to give us
Noticing reactions that might be out of proportion to what is happening in the present moment
Exploring automatic thoughts and core beliefs that are hurting us and updating these with kinder, more realistic ones
Getting in touch with parts of us that we might have disowned to help us cope
Processing the traumatic memories so that they can be integrated into our stories and not pop up so much. I am trained in a therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) which is an evidence-based treatment for processing traumatic memories. This is an optional therapy we could use in counselling. To learn more about this type of treatment, contact me to book a consult. You can also visit https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/ and https://www.emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/ for more information.