By Jason Wu, Ph.D.
“Trauma,” and “traumatic,” are words that tend to be thrown around pretty loosely nowadays, but there are a lot of complexities around trauma and the (very normal) trauma response that often leads people to struggle with relationships, managing their emotions, and even with their own sense of self.
Traditionally, trauma was described as a reaction to a significantly stressful event that is either experienced by an individual or that they were directly or indirectly exposed to. Such stressors may include seeing a violent accident or fight, experiencing a violation of personal space or sexual assault, or even learning that a close friend or family member experienced or was exposed to a stressful event. The overwhelming nature of these stressors can lead to a trauma response, which is essentially the brain and body trying to cope with the distressing thoughts, memories, and emotions as best they can.
However, recent research has shown that there are even more layers to trauma that we’d initially thought. (http://www.nctsn.org/trauma-types/complex-trauma)
Complex trauma is similar to the above mentioned definition of trauma, but can also involved “smaller” stressors that are spread out over a long period of time. For example, a person may have experienced chronic neglect, emotional abuse, were constantly separated from their family, or work in a field where they are constantly exposed to difficult experiences, such as an emergency response medic who sees horrible things over and over again.
Trauma can manifest in various ways, and here are some of the categories (disclaimer – this is really over-simplified):
- Intrusive thoughts or experiences (nightmares, re-experiencing or flashing back to the event)
- Avoidance (going out of your way to avoid things that remind you of the event)
- Negative thoughts or feelings (can be similar to depression in some ways)
- Changes in arousal levels (feeling constantly on edge, unsafe, engaging in dangerous behavior like drug use, sexual practices that could put you at risk of harm, difficulty sleeping)
As a result, what tends to happen for people with trauma experiences is that they become more “closed” rather than “open” in order to avoid stressful reminders of the trauma – so if your day used to involve going to the gym, the market, a friend’s house, and then a restaurant, you might begin to stop going to the gym because something there reminds you of the event. Then something at the market might click and remind you of the event, and you’ll stop going there too. Your friend might say something or have something at their house that also reminds you of the event, and that’s gone too – and so on and so forth. But as is true with everything, there’s hope!
In super clinical terms, I use a combination of Prolonged Exposure, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Internal Family Systems Therapy to help you learn how to gradually approach the avoided thoughts, feelings, and situations to increase your ability to tolerate the distress as well as decrease your experiential avoidance. In other words, we very gradually (at your pace) move towards those things that you have been avoiding to “re-open” your life. You were hurt and understandably sought to protect yourself, which makes sense – we put on armor to protect our fragile bodies underneath. But if we’re always wearing the armor, what kind of life would that be? We wouldn’t be able to feel the warmth of the sun on our skin, the wind in our hair, or experience the physical intimacy (if you’re into that) of a relationship. And to take it even further, we can also work towards being compassionate towards the trauma response/armor that was working so hard to protect us and help us feel safe.
If you have any questions, feel free to call (650-517-3213) for a free phone consultation or email me at jasonwu87@gmail.com – note, email is not a secure form of communication but we can always use email to schedule a free phone appointment.