Trauma is any unhealed psychological wound. It’s the response our nervous system has to a frightening and distressing experience. This could be a single event, or the culmination of long-term stress, such as abuse.
If the threat is severe, repetitive, or ongoing then this could lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and often this arises when the person does not go through the realisation that the threat has now passed.
Most of us will experience an event in our lives that could be considered traumatic, but we won’t all be affected in the same way. Trauma can happen at any age and can affect us at any time, including long after the event has happened.
What Experiences Might be Traumatic?
There’s no rule about what experiences can be traumatic, it’s more about how you react to them.
What’s traumatic is personal. Other people can’t know how you feel about your own experiences or if they’re traumatic for you.
Trauma can stem from events where you feel:
• Frightened
• Under threat
• Humiliated
• Rejected
• Abandoned
• Invalidated
• Unsafe
• Unsupported
• Trapped
• Ashamed
• Powerless
Ways trauma can happen include:
• One-off or ongoing events
• Being directly harmed or neglected
• Witnessing harm to someone else
• Living in a traumatic atmosphere
• Being affected by trauma in a family of community, including trauma that happened before you were born.
Types of Trauma
Some experiences or events that lead to trauma are grouped together and given a name. These terms normally describe how trauma affects people from certain groups or in specific situations.
Childhood Trauma
You may have experienced trauma during your childhood, these experiences could make you more likely to have mental health problems as an adult. This is especially true if you didn’t have support to manage the trauma or if you experienced trauma continuously over a long period of time.
You can read more about childhood trauma in my blog ‘Childhood Trauma and The Brain’ here.
Collective Trauma
Collective trauma is when a traumatic event happens to a large number of people at the same time. This doesn’t mean that everyone who experienced the event feels the same way about it or that they all feel it was traumatic for them. Everyone still copes with it in their own way.
Experiencing collective trauma can mean you experience personal symptoms and social symptoms. Social symptoms can include how society has dealt with or reacted to the trauma. For example:
• If it isn’t socially acceptable to talk about the event or only being able to talk about it in certain ways.
• If people avoid or discriminate against certain groups that might be unfairly blamed for the trauma.
The anniversaries of a collective trauma event might lead to memorials and media coverage. You might find these events comforting ways of managing collective trauma or you may find them very difficult. How you feel about these anniversaries might also change over time.
Generational Trauma
Generational trauma, or intergenerational trauma is a type of trauma that’s experienced across generations of a family, culture, or group. For example, there’s some evidence that shows children and grandchildren of people who survived the Holocaust experience higher rates of mental health problems.
Trauma that happened in the past has an impact on the mental health of current generations but it’s not always clear how. Some researchers think trauma might affect our genes, but it’s more likely that trauma affects the environment we grow up in. This can be through things like:
• Stories or warning older generations have passed on about the trauma they experienced. This could make you wary of the world around you.
• The legacy of trauma continuing to impact your wellbeing and safety, such as the ongoing effects of colonialism on the health and wellbeing of people of colour.
• Trauma affecting how older generations have raised and looked after us. For example, if you parents avoided certain places due to their experience of trauma, you might also feel anxious in those places. This might be more likely to happen if older generations haven’t had support for their traumatic experiences when they needed them.
Moral Injury
Moral injury means how you feel when you’re put in a situation that goes against your morals, values, or beliefs. It’s often seen in people who have been in situations where they need to make big decisions about other people’s lives.
Moral injury might happen due to:
• Lack of resources provided by a workplace, Government, or ruling body to treat everyone equally.
• Poor safety practices.
• Regulations or order from people in charge that don’t seem to be in people’s best interests.
• Unsafe or immoral behaviour from others, particularly those in charge.
• Working in a system you see as failing but have no power to fix.
This kind of trauma can impact your view of the world, your Government, or the organisation you work for. Along with other effects of trauma, you might:
• Feel a lack of purpose in your personal or professional life.
• Feel disconnected from the people around you.
• Feel betrayed, alienated, or ashamed.
• Question your moral codes and ethics.
Racial Trauma
The impact that racism can have on your mind and body is sometimes described as racial trauma. There’s no universal definition of racial trauma. Some people use it to mean all the effects that encountering racism can have on how we think, feel, and behave. Others use it to describe a specific set of symptoms.
Secondary Trauma
Secondary trauma is when you witness trauma or you’re closely connected to it, but you don’t experience the trauma directly. It’s sometimes called vicarious trauma.
For example, you might be a journalist who often reports on traumatic events or are a medical professional working in an A&E department.
Effects of secondary trauma are similar to general trauma, but you might find you also begin to feel detached from the trauma or treat it as a very separate part of your life.
What is the Impact of Trauma on Relationships?
Regardless of the type of trauma a person has experienced, traumatic experiences impact relationships. This includes, but is not limited to, relationships betwwn people, communities, and the delivery systems that support individuals’ health and social needs. When a person experiences trauma, they might feel unsafe, betrayed, or have difficulty trusting others. This can lead to heightened emotions, such as anger or aggression, or a tendency toward shame, numbing, or isolation. In the context of healthcare, this can negatively impact the relationship between a patient and provider, and thus a patient’s engagement in care.
Experiences You Might Have After Trauma
The physical and emotion effects of trauma can lead to certain experiences such as:
Flashbacks
Reliving aspects of a traumatic event or feeling as if it’s happening now. It could involve seeing images of what happened, or experiencing it through other senses like taste, sound, or physical sensations in your body.
Panic Attacks
A type of fear response. They’re an exaggeration of your body’s response to danger, stress, or excitement.
Dissociation
One way your mind copes with overwhelming stress. You might feel numb, spaced out, detached from your body, or as though the world around you is unreal.
Sleep Problems
You might find it hard to fall or stay asleep, feel unsafe at night, or have nightmares.
Self-Neglect
This is when you’re not able to look after yourself and meet basic needs like eating, keeping clean, or keeping your home safe. You might neglect yourself because of low self-esteem, or because you’re having trouble adjusting to life following a trauma. Trauma might disrupt your regular routine; this can make it harder than usual to look after yourself. Some trauma might put us in situations where we have limited resources to meet these basic needs.
Self-Harm
When you hurt yourself as a way of dealing with very difficult feelings, painful memories, or overwhelming situations and experiences.
Suicidal Feeling
Including being preoccupied by thoughts of ending your own life, thinking about methods of suicide, or making plans to take your own life.
Alcohol and Substance Misuse
A way you might try to cope with difficult emotions or memories.
Can the Effects of Trauma be Avoided or Addressed?
Protective factors, such as supportive relationships with family members, a teacher, others in the community, can help shield individuals from the effects of trauma and build resilience to help overcome adversity and confront challenges. Trauma-informed approaches to care, including relational healing and trauma-specific treatments can help patients begin processing their experiences in a healthy way.
Diagnosis and Treatment
Some common approaches to trauma therapy include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), psychodynamic therapy, sensorimotor therapy, and eye movement and desensitisation reprocessing (EMDR).
More generally, patients offer benefit greatly from treatment approaches that are ‘trauma-informed’. Trauma-informed care refers to therapeutic approaches that validate and are tailored to the unique experience of a person coping with trauma. It understands the symptoms of trauma to be coping strategies that have developed in reaction to a traumatic experience.
Simon Dowling Therapy
I am dedicated to providing compassionate and specialised care for individuals who have experienced childhood abuse and/or trauma. I offer a safe and supportive environment where clients can explore their experiences and begin the healing process, utilising evidence-based therapies to address the psychological, emotional, and physical effects of abuse. I’m committed to helping survivors regain their sense of self, build resilience, and achieve a better quality of life.
If you’re struggling with the on-going effects of childhood abuse or trauma, counselling and therapy can help. Get in touch and we will work through your healing together.