Trauma Therapy
It feels like therapists use the word “trauma” and awful lot, and I know it can feel like someone is actually calling you damaged goods on the receiving end of that. Which can feel really disheartening.
Therapists have started using the word “trauma” more recently because we’re understanding more things actually fall into this category than was previously included. Most people think of either huge singular events (such as surviving a natural disaster) or surviving life-threatening and incredibly intense events (such as being a solider in war are the only things that count as trauma.
But trauma is clinically less about having a pre-approved specific experience and more about what your nervous system clocks as a trauma. The definition that I hold of trauma includes: things that happened too suddenly, too intensely, and/or too consistently for our nervous system to make sense of easily.
What does “trauma” even mean?
So how do I know if I might have trauma?
How you experience trauma will relate to what your trauma experience was and what coping tools you adopted to get through that experience. Some common experiences I have seen of people who have been through a traumatic experience can include:
Hyper vigilance: being hyper-aware of others movements/tone/emotions, their situation and surroundings, never really feeling like they’re able to relax.
Intrusive experiences: memories and flashbacks to difficult experiences, getting old feelings and memories triggered by a smell or something that reminds you of that time/
Hyper-independence: feeling like you cannot trust or rely on other people, no matter how reliably or consistently they try to show up.
Very little awareness of/high tolerance for people being hurtful or abusive toward you.
A high startle response…less like “gosh you scared me” and more like “my nervous system is ready to fight for my life right now”.
Memory struggles of stressful periods in your life.
Avoiding confrontation like the plague. Others’ anger or disappointment? Terrifying.
People-pleasing: making everyone around you feel comfortable and feeling responsible for others’ emotional well-being. This can include over-apologizing, over-explaining, jumping in to soothe others’ emotions before they escalate, quickly going to self-blame and taking all the responsibility when something goes sideways.
Unable to commit to relationships…or falling really hard, really fast.
Feeling a lot of numbness — struggling to feel sensations in your body, emotions, motivation, connection.
There are so many other ways that trauma can feel and show up in your life. I believe that a huge part of working effectively with trauma is beginning with understanding your personal experience of it, and this list is really just a starting place to consider.
I think of trauma as your nervous system trying to hold a really complicated and important story…but all the pages have been ripped out, mixed up given back to you in an unorganized pile, and you’re trying to sort it out while still continuing to move forward. Kind of hard to do, right? This is why trauma hangs with us for so long — we often have to keep living our lives in the meantime.
I approach trauma processing through what is considered a “narrative” approach, which means we go through the “story” of your experience and put it together in a cohesive and understandable “story” that your nervous system and brain can hold more easily. Sometimes this is done verbally and sometimes this works better for people in a written format. My goal isn't to make it no longer painful (usually impossible), but to make it organized for your mind to hold.
How do you treat trauma in therapy?
How do people usually feel after going through therapy for trauma?
At the end of trauma therapy the goal is that you feel like your past has less of a hold on you. It stops sneaking up on you to jump-scare you and make you act in ways that don’t align with who you want to be, because you have worked to accept that it happened and to make sense of the pieces that were keeping you in painful holding patterns.
I won’t sugar-coat it: therapy for trauma can feel rocky and painful during the process. It can feel frustrating that it isn’t usually linear and clear-cut, and that there are sometimes painful realizations throughout.
But I also know that working through past painful experiences in therapy can make your world and life feel completely different. My hope for you after trauma therapy work would be that you are able to move forward with your head held high, to be able to consistently choose how to show up in relationships and situations, and to be blindsided by your trauma less often. Your trauma experience will never go away because we can’t erase the past, but it doesn’t have to control your life.
