Trauma

Trauma applies to a wide range of events experienced by people. Trauma impacts each person differently. Let’s dig into trauma a little more.

Big “T” traumas often describe a life-threatening event or situation. This could be a natural disaster, a violent crime, a school shooting, a sexual assault, or a serious car accident. Chronic (ongoing) trauma, such as repeated abuse or exposure to domestic violence, can also qualify as big T trauma.

Little “t” traumas typically don’t involve violence or threat to your life. These events in your life which have an impact on your day to day functioning. Some examples include: a break up, loss of a job or death of a pet.

In the end, trauma is defined by you. Let’s start there. After experiencing a trauma, you may have seen changes in your day to day functioning. Your emotions, thoughts and behaviors are impacted after a trauma. In addition, there are three other areas of symptoms commonly seen. These include re-experiencing the trauma, avoidance and hypervigilance. Not every person experiences all of these symptoms. Psychoeducation is a big piece of the therapy process. Knowing the challenges you’re experience are experienced by others who have experienced some type of trauma can be helpful.

In my intake session, we discuss these specific areas. I ask clients to share how have their day to day activities changed since the trauma happened. What feelings are they noticing since the event happened? How have their thoughts changed? Do they engage in behaviors that they did not engage in before? The goal of the intake session is to explore how they were doing before this trauma or traumas happened compared to now.

If you have experienced a trauma, you may re-experience it in some way. Clients may complain about nightmares or recurrent, intrusive thoughts about the trauma. Clients may experience flashbacks. Above, we talked about how you may feel some intense feelings after a trauma. Most people don’t want to experience those feelings and engage in avoidance. The thinking is if I avoid any type of reminder of the trauma then I’ll be ok. We discuss how avoidance shows up for the client. Examples include avoiding going to a park where it happened, avoiding looking at pictures of a loved one who is gone or absolutely any reminder of the trauma. Hypervigilance is being hyper aware of your surroundings in an attempt to keep yourself safe. You don’t want to be traumatized again so you are constantly scanning your environment to prevent it from happening again. I often ask have you noticed sometimes you have a BIG reaction to something small? This explanation makes sense.

Another big piece of trauma work is discussing your beliefs about who is responsible for the trauma. Trauma therapy involves a lot of work. There are different methods to process trauma including Trauma- Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Cognitive Processing Therapy or Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR).

Finding a therapist to process your trauma involves work and does not erase the memory of the trauma. It can help you learn tools to mange symptoms after the trauma, not blame yourself for the trauma and learn to grow after the trauma.

Reach out today to schedule an intake and get started.