Trauma is simply the Greek word for “injury.” Medical personnel use it all the time. Police—often with the help of coroners or EMTs—use the word trauma when referring to injuries that people sustain in accidents or as the result of crime. Trauma refers to a fairly broad category of physical injury. Is the same true of psychological trauma?
Understanding Trauma
When it comes to psychological trauma, it’s important to focus on the injury sustained rather than the event or process that caused the injury. As terrible it is to contemplate, a fire that burns your house down is not a trauma—but the way that you respond it may be. If you and your friend witnessed the same car accident, you may be upset for a few hours, but your friend may be bothered by nightmares for several months. You were not traumatized, but your friend was.
An instinctive reaction might be to suppose that you are made of “tougher stuff” than your friend. That may or may not be the case. It’s true that some supportive factors—say, having a safe place to live, or strong emotional ties with loved ones—can reduce the statistical likelihood of you or your friend experiencing an event as traumatic. But statistics aren’t people. Your friend might have a very good life but the car accident you both witnessed brings up a long-forgotten memory for your friend that becomes associated with this event.
Along with these event-related traumas, called “incidental” traumas, there is “developmental” trauma. Developmental trauma is a kind of traumatizing that happens over extended periods of time, often in childhood, that rob us of the potential to develop a sense of everyday safety and self-worth. Growing up in a household where no one was allowed to talk about feelings, or being routinely neglected, or being bullied for months without parental support, could be traumatic in their impact. Again, some may survive those conditions without traumatic impact, but it is important to ask the question.
There are also physical traumas that can physically cause symptoms similar to symptoms of psychological trauma. Acquired Brain Injuries (ABI) sometimes produce hyperreactivity, explosive anger, and other behavioral issues. It would be important to note if there might be physical causes to someone’s trauma-symptoms before proceeding with therapy.
Common Causes of Trauma
When we speak about trauma, we often think of events that are publicly visible. These events are actually just a small fraction of actual traumas. If you have invested most of your identity in your career and you get passed over for a promotion despite years of nose-to-the-grindstone effort, this could be traumatic for you. Identity-threatening events are just as potentially traumatizing as life-threatening events. There is no scale of how “big” an event has to be to traumatize someone. Sometimes a stray arrow pierces the armor and inures the soldier more than the boulder from the catapult that grazes him on the way by.
While we have known it for a long time, in the last few decades we have returned to the notion that the earlier in life we experienced trauma, whether incidental or developmental, the deeper the wound. Our ability to think and reason like adults is one of the supporting factors that might protect us from being traumatized by difficult events or circumstances, but children don’t have those capacities. So often we “learn” things at an emotional level that we would later reject at a cognitive level. Young children are naturally egocentric. A young child who had a parent forever leaving the family home may well have believed that this was somehow their fault, and this buried trauma could affect them for the rest of their lives if left unresolved.
The first step in identifying trauma is to observe and record the symptoms. Incidental trauma can lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares, and frequent dissociative episodes. Other symptoms of incidental trauma can include hyper- or hypo-reactivity to certain situations, phobias, and involuntary physical reactions.
The second step is to trace the impact of the trauma. People who have experienced developmental trauma often find a disconnect in the way they routinely respond to things. If someone’s anger is disproportionate to their circumstances, for instance, this could be the effect of trauma. Many people have recurring, intrusive thoughts, often negative and overly harsh (“You’re no good/you’re unlovable/you don’t deserve to be happy”).
The third step is to seek professional help from Psychotherapist or Psychotherapy Clinic.
When to Seek Professional Help
If any of the symptoms discussed above—or ones very much like them—are causing problems in your life, you should seek professional help. The idea of what’s “problematic” can be boiled down to this: if your traumatic experience is causing you to do something you don’t want to do (e.g., misuse drugs) or preventing you from doing something you do want to do (e.g., get on with your life, treat your partner well, etc.), it’s problematic.
But don’t worry. Psychotherapists can help.
How Psychotherapists Help with Trauma Recovery
Trauma therapists in Toronto should have training and experience in more than one mode of trauma therapy and be able to customize their approach to your experience of trauma. Ask a therapist you are considering if they practice EMDR, memory reconsolidation, regression therapy, relational therapy, somatic therapy, narrative therapy, logotherapy, and existential therapy.
Beyond the therapist’s credentials, the quality of the relationship is critical in trauma therapy. How can you face your darkest moments with someone that you feel less than safe with? Find a therapist who is warm, supportive, and inviting, and commit to taking this healing journey with them.