Category: Trauma

• We can think of a traumatic experience as our brains saying “this is more than I can handle”.
• This means what is traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another; each person has their own unique tolerance levels for being in (and capacities for coping with) different types of stressful situations.
• An experience has the potential to be traumatic for any of us if it pushes us beyond our capacity to cope, manage, make sense of what is happening, and feel safe (relationally, emotionally, and / or physically). 
• Feeling safe and secure are the opposite of the vulnerability, fear, and helplessness that are experienced when we are in a traumatic situation.
• While there are most certainly ranges in the severity of trauma, too many of us hold too narrow a definition for what qualifies as “traumatic”.  As a result we are often critical and judgmental of ourselves and others when trauma responses make themselves evident. This interferes with the process of healing from trauma and easing those trauma responses.
• When we’ve experienced trauma it effects our brains; development; and sense of trust. We can become limited in our ability to be vulnerable, connect, remain focused, plan for the future, and adapt in moments of stress.
• The responses that are typical of a traumatic experience are actually our body’s way of trying to protect us; numbness so we don’t have to feel the pain, anger so we can fight back, forgetting or blacking out so we are not consciously haunted by a memory, a limited ability to plan for the future so we can stay attuned to present threats, and challenges with vulnerability to prevent us from being exploited by others.
• We would be best served to think of trauma (and the impacts of it) existing on a spectrum. Most of us have experienced something in our lives that deeply overwhelmed us, and most of us would go to great lengths to not go through that experience again. Trauma responses are our brains way of trying to protect us from going through a painful experience again.
• We cannot recover from or heal trauma with the typical problem solving methods we use in other areas of our lives. If you’ve tried, it’s likely you’ve gotten stuck, frustrated, angry, judgmental, critical, or hopeless about changing what cannot be healed through logic and willpower alone. 
• I often find it’s helpful to work backwards; if you see, feel, or notice a trauma response, trust what your reactions communicate to you, even if you don’t identify as having a trauma history. If what I’m writing sounds familiar there a good chance something on the trauma spectrum is present and interfering with your ability to move forward in your life.

Sometimes our trauma is evident, other times it can only be found in the echoes it leaves behind. After trauma, a combination of the following dynamics are often present:

1. A struggle to trust and feel a sense of safety, even in scenarios where it might not be intuitive that someone wouldn’t trust or feel safe. Individuals who have experienced trauma remain on guard for something that could hurt them, and at times hurt their relationships in an effort to protect themselves. This can include a more limited ability to relate and connect to others due to difficulties feeling secure enough to make oneself vulnerable.
2. A brain that has experienced trauma is literally under more stress than a brain that has not (see comments for the science of this). After trauma, biological changes to the brain can lead to a struggle with planning, adapting, attention, concentration, and managing or expressing emotions in a constructive manner. This means work, planning, finances, relationships, communication and problem solving can all be effected. 
3. A struggle with hopelessness or powerlessness are common and often caused by how out of control, unfair, or unpredictable life can feel after experiencing trauma. Those pervasive struggles can lead to difficulties with taking initiative, independence, and motivation.

While the desire to tame trauma responses is natural, it is counter productive to try and change them through the same tactics we use when we need to change patterns, solve problems, or break old habits in other areas of our life. When we use these tactics and don’t see changes we can dig in and tell ourselves to “try harder”, “get it together” or “endure through” leaving us angry, critical, and judgmental at our lack of progress.  Unfortunately, this lends itself to shame, feelings of inadequacy, hopelessness, and giving up none of which helps us heal, change, or grow. 

Our work, instead, is to retrain our brains to no longer need the trauma responses. The core of that work is in finding safety. More on that in another post. For now, consider your life and relationships through the lens of trauma and its impacts.

Comments:

1. Trauma doesn’t just have to be a single incident, in fact most often it is not. For more on understanding trauma see this post on relational trauma.
2. Another way to think about trauma is having to operate / function / live outside of our window of tolerance without the ability to bring ourselves back within the window.
3. Our brains are always working to try and to keep us safe. This prior post addresses how the past can inform the present.
4. As Bessel Van Der Kolk explains, “Traumatized people become stuck, stopped in their growth because they can’t integrate new experiences into their life”. While this language is strong, what he communicates is that trauma interferes with our ability to be objective and adaptive in the present moment, especially in scenarios that trigger a trauma response. We are less able to appropriately “read” threats accurately when we have a trauma history because our brains are so busy trying to protect us from getting hurt again. We can get unstuck, but to do so we first must accept trauma responses for what they are, and then work to heal from our trauma so we no longer need the response. The quote is from Page 53 of “The Body Keeps the Score”.
5. There are many useful resources out there on trauma. A personal favorite that I often encourage my clients to read is “Trauma is Really Strange” by Steve Haines. He accessibly explains what trauma is, how it effects you, and steps towards healing in a 30 minute read filled with pictures, scientific evidence, and explanations of the biology behind trauma and trauma responses.
6. More on the Biology of Trauma from Bessel Van Der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score”: “Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together….when something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as it the traumatic event were happening in the present”. He goes on to explain the left side of the brain essentially shuts down while the right brain is so activated, which means the part of our brains that helps us find words and internally organize our experience is inaccessible. At that moment, we can’t “grasp the long-term effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future”. (Page 45).  He goes on to explain that “the stress hormones of traumatized people… take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli” (Page 46), what this means is that the stress our bodies experience when we have a history of trauma is actually higher than the stress on a body without the same history. The repeated presence of these stress hormones have detrimental impacts on our brains, “The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders” (Page 46). Full Citation: van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin.