TRAUMA
RELATES TO A WIDE RANGE OF DISTURBING EVENTS THAT...
Because we are all different, what could be perceived as “traumatic” to one person, might not be to another. What is significant is how you experience an event. Trauma can happen as a single incident trauma or be longer term developmental or complex trauma. |
SINGLE INCIDENT TRAUMA
An example of a single incident trauma is something like a horse-riding accident. After a bad fall from a horse, you might be scared to ride again overcome by intense anxiety as you think about falling. You might lose confidence in your riding ability and become extremely cautious to make sure you are safe. When you go to the barn, you might feel your heart racing and have an overwhelming sense of dread. You might give up riding altogether even though it was an important part of your life. Your life can become split into the time before the fall and the time afterwards. Everyone’s experience is different. Sometimes you can overcome the experience on your own. Other times we get stuck in the way we react and need support to move forward like when we become physically ill and need help to recover.
SIGNS OF TRAUMA Everyone’s experience and reactions are different. Someone suffering from the effects of trauma might struggle with some of the following:
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COMPLEX TRAUMA
Complex trauma happens when you are repeatedly impacted by difficult experiences. When this happens to a child, it affects the child’s neurophysiological development in a wide range of ways. In an ideal world, a child grows up knowing that the world is a safe and friendly place where you can trust and depend on people who love you. You learn that you have the ability to make things happen or get support if you need it. You develop resilience and an ability to handle a wide range of situations knowing that you have the skills you need.
On the other hand, when you grow up in an environment that is often stressful and without the emotional support you need to cope with this, you learn that the world is unsafe and that you can’t depend on others to meet your needs. You might learn ways to escape from your experience such as numbing out or dissociating or rely on emotional eating or drugs or alcohol to cope. Children are very adaptable so you might learn to ignore how you think or feel in an effort to present as functional in the world. Meanwhile you might feel guilty or terribly ashamed that you are “not normal”.
It can be very distressing, painful, and intensely lonely to wrestle with the long-term effects of childhood trauma. You can be so used to thinking, feeling, and behaving in certain ways that you think it’s your personality and that you are ‘crazy’. You may not realize that what you are experiencing is your way of coping with things that happened to you that were not your fault.
On the other hand, when you grow up in an environment that is often stressful and without the emotional support you need to cope with this, you learn that the world is unsafe and that you can’t depend on others to meet your needs. You might learn ways to escape from your experience such as numbing out or dissociating or rely on emotional eating or drugs or alcohol to cope. Children are very adaptable so you might learn to ignore how you think or feel in an effort to present as functional in the world. Meanwhile you might feel guilty or terribly ashamed that you are “not normal”.
It can be very distressing, painful, and intensely lonely to wrestle with the long-term effects of childhood trauma. You can be so used to thinking, feeling, and behaving in certain ways that you think it’s your personality and that you are ‘crazy’. You may not realize that what you are experiencing is your way of coping with things that happened to you that were not your fault.
SIGNS OF Complex TRAUMAIf you experienced complex trauma you might experience some of the signs of trauma above as well as some of the following:
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