What is Trauma?
Trauma is a pervasive problem that results from exposure to an incident or a series of disturbing events, with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning.
It may impact you mentally, physically, socially, emotionally, and/or spiritually. Often the event shatters your sense of security, making you feel helpless in a dangerous world.
It’s not the objective circumstances that determines whether an event is traumatic, but your subjective emotional experience of the event.
We all react differently and experience various physical and psychological / emotional reactions, including:
- Shock
- Denial / Disbelief
- Shame
- Guilt / Self-blame
- Nightmares
- Racing heartbeat
- Difficulty concentrating
- Feeling disconnected or unable to trust
What is PTSD?
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can emerge after exposure to a traumatic event. Whilst feeling frightened, anxious or disconnected after a traumatic experience is normal, PTSD can happen when fear, anxiety and memories of a traumatic event don’t fade away. These feelings can last for a long time and can impact a person’s capacity to cope in everyday life.
PTSD occurs when something prevents the natural recovery process after trauma. Often a person can be overwhelmed by the beliefs of hopelessness and helplessness, a sense of unpredictability and loss of control. These beliefs cause people to feel strong emotions, leading to avoidance (of anything associated with the trauma) and preventing clear thinking about the trauma.
What to do if you experience trauma
No matter the trauma or when it happened, you can make healing changes and move on with your life. By reaching out, you can develop new coping skills, learn to manage your symptoms, develop emotional balance, reduce pain and learn to trust and connect with others again.
Working through the trauma can be scary and painful. But to heal from trauma, you’ll need to resolve the unpleasant feelings and memories, discharge pent-up fight or flight energy, learn to regulate strong emotions and rebuild your ability to trust.
Trauma-informed approaches to care, including trauma-specific treatments and can help individuals begin to processing their experience healthily. This can include EMDR, CPT, TFCBT, exposure therapy, and Cognitive behavioural therapy.
Trauma-Specific Treatments
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR)
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidence-based therapy particularly effective in treating PTSD. It was established on the theory that negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviours stem from unprocessed memories of stressful or traumatic experiences.
The structured treatment focuses simultaneously on the traumatic memory and its associated thoughts, feelings and sensations. Then, bilateral stimulation – most commonly in the form of repeated eye movements or other rhythmic left-right stimulations, can “unfreeze” traumatic memories.
EMDR releases traumatic experiences trapped in the nervous system by repeatedly activating opposite sides of the brain. EMDR therapy doesn’t require talking in detail about a distressing issue, instead it focuses on changing the emotions, thoughts or behaviours that result from a distressing experience.
There is growing evidence that EMDR can also be helpful with a wide range of mental health conditions across all ages.
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is an evidence-based therapy for Post traumatic Stress Disorder. It has helped survivors of interpersonal trauma (both childhood and adulthood experiences), rape, and natural disasters – as well as veterans, military personnel, and those who have experienced single-incident type traumas.
CPT has been shown to help reduce the symptoms of PTSD, by focusing on assisting the person to understand the traumatic event and their experiences, helping to develop more helpful and balanced beliefs around the event.
Typically, the therapy consists of 12 weekly sessions to help the individual reflect, redefine and evaluate the event via learning skills to consider alternate viewpoints of the trauma, oneself and the world. This will lead to recovery in terms of reduced distress, reduced feelings of anxiety, guilt, shame and anger, and improve day-to-day living.
