Trauma and Trauma Resources

Trauma can be a difficult condition to deal with, and the effects of it can affect every aspect of your life. Moreover, it often doesn’t just affect you because it can affect your interactions with others. Often, one of the barriers to healing from trauma is not knowing what it is, which can limit the usefulness of trauma resources.

What is Trauma?

You experience trauma when your nervous system gets overwhelmed. The nervous system can become overwhelmed from too much too soon, too much for too long, and not enough for too long. When the nervous system is overwhelmed, things (emotions, thoughts, self-beliefs, etc.) do not get stored or processed in the brain properly, and everyday things trigger them to manifest like they are happening in the present when the emotion, physical sensation, and/or perception is actually coming from the past. Not all trauma reaches the level of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but all trauma has the potential to cause suffering.

Types of Trauma

PTSD

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a disorder that can develop in people who have experienced a traumatic event. You can develop PTSD at any age. Some common traumatic events that can cause PTSD include way, terrorist attacks, abuse, assault, accidents, natural disasters, and medical crises. You don’t have to have experienced a traumatic event yourself to develop PTSD. You can develop PTSD from witnessing traumatic events, learning a close friend or family experienced trauma, or being chronically exposed to graphic material in your employment. PTSD can affect your mental, physical, social, and/or spiritual well-being.

People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts and emotions related to their traumatic experiences. They may relive or reexperience the event through flashbacks, nightmares, associated emotions or body sensations. They may avoid people, places, or situations that remind them of their trauma. People with PTSD may be triggered by ordinary things like loud noises, touch, smells, or other things connected with their trauma.

Complex PTSD

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Complex PTSD) is a disorder that may develop following ongoing, inescapable, relational trauma. It usually involves being hurt by another person in a way that is ongoing or repeated. Complex PTSD often involves a betrayal and loss of safety. It essentially is a more complex version of PTSD where all diagnostic criteria for PTSD are met, plus some additional criteria, such as problems in affect regulation and relationships.

Developmental Trauma

Developmental Trauma is used to describe childhood trauma, such as chronic abuse, neglect, or other harsh adversity. When a child is exposed to overwhelming stress, and their caregiver does not help reduce this stress or is the cause of the stress, the child experiences developmental trauma. Children who experience developmental trauma are at risk for a host of complex emotional, cognitive and physical illnesses that last throughout their lives.

Developmental traumas are also called Adverse Childhood Experiences. These are chronic family traumas such as having a parent with mental illness or substance abuse, losing a parent due to divorce, abandonment or incarceration, witnessing domestic violence, not feeling loved or that the family is close, or not having enough food or clean clothing, as well as direct verbal, physical or sexual abuse.

Neglect & Emotional Neglect

Neglect and emotional neglect are not about what happened to you but what did not happen. They are about your caregivers not providing for your developmental needs, which interferes in your healthy development and leaves you to deal with a number of symptoms due to their neglect.

Relational Trauma

Relational trauma is trauma that arises from an unhealthy relationship or devastating betrayal by someone close or is supposed to be close (Family, close friends). It is usually caused by an ongoing set of events and the nature of a relationship between two people. Abuse, neglect, and enmeshment are often the causes of relational trauma.

Psychological/Emotional Trauma

Emotional and psychological trauma is the result of extraordinarily stressful events that shatter your sense of security, making you feel helpless in a dangerous world. It can leave you struggling with upsetting emotions, memories, and anxiety that won’t go away. It can also leave you feeling numb, disconnected, and unable to trust other people.

Traumatic experiences often involve a threat to life or safety, but any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and isolated can result in trauma, even if it doesn’t involve physical harm. It’s not the objective circumstances that determine whether an event is traumatic, but your subjective emotional experience of the event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized.

Symptoms of Trauma

• Numbing
• Decreased concentration
• Anxiety, panic attacks
• Depression
• Irritability
• Headaches, chronic pain
• Loss of sense of “who I am”
• Emotional overwhelm, mood swings, emotion dysregulation
• Insomnia
• Shame, guilt, self-blame and worthlessness
• Nightmares, flashbacks
• Substance abuse, eating disorders, self-destructive behaviour
• Feeling unreal, out of body
• Hypervigilance, mistrust
• Denial, disbelief, shock
• Few or no memories
• Loss of a sense of the future, hopelessness
• Loss of interest in things you used to enjoy
• Isolation, withdrawing from others

How Trauma Affects Your Memories

Traumatic memories are “less likely to be recalled in a clear, coherent narrative” and more likely to be “remembered in the form of sensory elements without words,” such as emotions, changes in breathing or heart rate, body sensations, tensing, or feelings overwhelmed (Fisher, 2021).

Semantic Memory

Semantic memory is the memory of general knowledge and facts. Trauma can prevent information from different parts of the brain from combining to create semantic memory. The temporal lobe and inferior parietal cortex collect information from different brain areas to create semantic memory.

Episodic Memory

Episodic Memory is the autobiographical memory of an event or experience, including the who, what, and where. Trauma can shut down episodic memory and fragment the sequence of events. The hippocampus is responsible for creating and recalling episodic memory.

Emotional Memory

Emotional memory is the memory of the emotions you felt during an experience. After trauma, a person may get triggered and experience painful emotions, often without context. The amygdala plays a key role in supporting memory for emotionally charged experiences.

Procedural Memory

Procedural memory is the memory of how to perform a common task without actively thinking. Trauma can change patterns of procedural memory. For example, a person might tense up and unconsciously alter their posture, which could lead to pain or numbness. The striatum is associated with producing procedural memory and creating new habits.

What Works Best for Trauma?

Trauma can be very individual and unique. So, what works for one person may not work for another.

Trauma therapy should involve some brain retraining through the overcoming or changing of beliefs that prevent the natural healing process of the brain and nervous system from operating properly. This retraining can be done through a variety of techniques.

Grounding Techniques and Resources

Grounding Techniques are strategies that can calm an overactive nervous system. There are different ways of calming the nervous system. Grounding techniques can bring someone back into their window of tolerance. They can bring someone who is in a reactive (hyperarousal) state back to a calmer state through activation of the prefrontal cortex (thinking part of the brain) or through somatic calming. Some may work for people in a hypoarousal state by activating the nervous system, which is numb or frozen. They are an essential resource for trauma recovery. It can be good to have a card with the grounding techniques that work best for you in different situations so you can reference it when you are not able to think straight and enable yourself to get back on track.

EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a therapeutic modality designed to help people overcome traumatic events and other distressing situations. EMDR is a structured therapy that encourages the patient to focus briefly on a distressing symptom or trauma memory while simultaneously experiencing bilateral stimulation (traditionally eye movements, but also can include tones, tapping, and somatic techniques), which is associated with a reduction in the intensity and emotion associated with the trauma memories. Research has shown that EMDR therapy is effective in helping people recover from trauma and PTSD symptoms. It is also effective for chronic pain, anxiety, panic attacks, OCD, depression, addictions, and other distressing life experiences.

EMDR therapy is a process in which the therapist prepares the client with appropriate resources, skills, and techniques to be able to do the processing of EMDR. During the processing, the therapist acts as a guide and safety net, helping the client desensitize and overcome the dysfunctional or traumatic material that has been holding them back.

Flash Technique

Flash Technique was developed for use with EMDR who find the recall of a traumatic memory to be too disturbing or overwhelming. It can be effective for people who dissociate when they get overwhelmed. As opposed to other trauma techniques that focus on recalling the details of trauma memories, Flash only uses very brief exposure to the target. Flash was found to reduce avoidance during recall of traumatic memories, disturbance or emotionality of traumatic memories, PTSD symptoms, symptoms of depression, and symptoms of dissociation.

Cognitive Processing Therapy

Cognitive processing therapy (CPT) helps people understand how trauma alters the ways they think and feel and develop new ways to think about the experience. It is a specific type of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) designed to treat PTSD and comorbid symptoms. It focuses on changing painful negative emotions and beliefs due to the trauma by resolving stuck points.

Polyvagal Theory

Polyvagal Theory emphasizes the role the autonomic nervous system – especially the vagus nerve – plays in regulating our health and behaviour. Created and developed by Stephen Porges, PhD, the theory describes the physiological/psychological states which underlie our daily behavior as well as challenges related to our wellness and mental health. You can apply the concepts of Polyvagal Theory to increase safety, connection and co-regulation in your life after trauma.

Conclusion

Trauma can be confusing and devastating to deal with. However, there is hope to mitigate the harms of trauma and bring your life back into a more settled state. There are therapies and strategies that work with trauma.

Trauma Resources:

Trauma Resources: Recommended Reading

Peter A. Levine – Healing Trauma

This book provides a good summary of trauma, and it comes with a CD that contains 12 Guided Somatic Experiencing exercises.

Bessel Van der Kolk – The Body Keeps the Score

This is an incredible book that describes the experience of trauma, how trauma affects the brain, and different treatments for trauma that have been successful. Bessel Van der Kolk is one of the top experts in trauma. This book has been an NYT bestseller and can probably be borrowed from your local library.

Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma – Janina Fisher

This is an incredible workbook that has essential psychoeducation about trauma as well as step-by-step strategies to start to heal the trauma and cope better with triggers. Janina Fisher is one of the top experts on trauma.

Getting Unstuck from PTSD – Patricia A. Resick, Shannon Wiltsey Stirman, and Stefanie T. LoSavio

This is a self-help workbook that is based on Cognitive Processing Therapy, which is an evidence-based psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.

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