The word ‘trauma’ is used a lot these days, particularly as more attention is paid to mental health and issues of well-being. But what exactly is trauma, and how do you know if it’s playing a role in your life and the choices you make?
Trauma describes unprocessed experience. It sounds simple. But in reality, if experience has not been processed, (by using emotions, thoughts and prior experience to make sense of it and to enable it to provide useful guidance in the future), this indicates that whatever the experience was, it was internally perceived as a serious threat to one’s safety or survival.
The two types of trauma.
There are two main categories of trauma. The first is where a person lives through a significant, life-threatening, one-off event. Examples of this are surviving a near-fatal car crash, a serious disease, a tsunami, a physical attack or a rape. The brain senses a potential threat to life and shifts into survival mode. Part of the brain’s action is to allow a survival response of fight, flight or freeze to kick in. The other part is to fragment memory of the experience, so that once the threat has passed, the recollection of it is hazy and incomplete. This stops a person becoming re-traumatised once the threat has gone.
The second category of trauma is what’s called complex trauma, or complex post traumatic stress disorder (complex PTSD). This refers to on-going breaches of trust in early care-giving relationships. For example, where a parent is both a source of caring and of fear, such as occurs if the parent is sometimes loving, but sometimes abusive.
What happens in this case, is the brain decides that there is enough safety to ensure survival, but not enough to conclude that other people can be trusted or the world is a safe place. Since this occurs in childhood, usually with mum, dad, another primary care-giver or person who is close, the brain plays a trick that allows a child to remain in these relationships and therefore stand the best chance of surviving to maturity (a child cannot survive independently). So the child starts believing that the abuse must be their own fault and that the other person is right to abuse them. A sort of self-gaslighting.
Research has shown that if a person has experience of complex trauma, they are more likely to experience symptoms of PTSD after a one-off traumatic event. Conversely, if a person has grown up feeling secure and loved, they are more likely to recover well emotionally and psychologically from a one-off trauma.
And this is the crux of why complex trauma is significant.
Complex trauma changes the brain.
Complex trauma changes the wiring of the brain stem and the nervous system. A person who has lived with complex traumatic experience retains a felt-sense of being under threat, whether or not a real threat is present. (You can read more about this by searching online for the topic of ‘Polyvagal Theory’. Here is a link to some useful information posted by the Polyvagal Institute).
Such people feel unsure of their own judgement, find getting close to and trusting others difficult, and may try to avoid feelings by using something (like drugs or alcohol) ‘to take the edge off’. Intimacy with others in adulthood becomes very hard; addictions, high anxiety and eating disorders may develop; and asking for help and support are often only considered as last resorts. Together, all of these things make life difficult, fulfilling one’s potential doubtful and experiencing further trauma more likely.
How I can help.
I specialise in treating the causes and outcomes of complex trauma. I understand how difficult it is to ask for help and that people may be hiding a lot of things about themselves and their lives from others because of shame and the fear of being judged.
Are you ready for change?
If you recognise anything I’ve written about here, please get in touch and together we can start processing any trauma you may have experienced. You absolutely can move beyond it, feel lighter and start flourishing.