What is Trauma?
Recently, I asked a person in therapy if they had any history of trauma. The examples I gave were bullying, abuse, car accidents, or anything of the sort. She asked me, “What is the difference between trauma and a bad experience?” Great question. Plenty of other people have asked if what they have gone through qualifies as “trauma.” People often think their trauma is “not that bad,” or make comparisons to war veterans. Trauma happens to people from all walks of life and happens in a wide variety of ways, both big and small.
Definition of Trauma
Simply put, trauma is when an overwhelming or disturbing event happens, and it overpowers your ability to cope. Trauma changes what you think about yourself and the world around you. It leaves you feeling helpless, threatens your survival, and causes distress for a long time after. It is perceived as negative and impacts your present life. Often, people are unable to process what happened. Further, they can struggle to understand the impact it has had and continues to have on their life.
To illustrate, one time I thought I would likely die on a chairlift while snowboarding. The high winds were causing the lift to whip back and forth very high in the air. It was a moment of panic as I was trying to figure out how to survive. It was disturbing. I felt helpless and knew that if I fell or the chair fell, I would die. Fortunately, my brain was able to fully process this experience, instead of getting stuck on it. So now, it is a good story and something I barely think about. While it was scary, it did not result in a traumatic response for me. For someone else, due to temperance, biology, history of trauma, and many other factors out of their control, this event might result in a trauma response. It might stick with them, preventing them from getting on a chairlift again, or cause distressing symptoms when they attempt to do so. Experiencing trauma responses does not mean anything about the person, other than memory was processed in the trauma center of their brain differently than it was in my brain.
Symptoms of Trauma
When something is traumatic, people often experience some of the following symptoms.
Difficulty concentrating
Sleep problems
Nightmares
Feeling hyper-aware of the danger
A general sense that something bad will happen
Seeming detached from others
Emotional numbness
Irritability
Intrusive thoughts about what happened
Depression
Anxiety
Substance abuse problems
Avoiding anything related to the trauma
Trauma and traumatic memories are often accompanied by physical symptoms such as tension, nausea, chronic soreness or stiffness, and sometimes pain. Something less talked about is that trauma attacks the soul, and can affect people spiritually too. Sometimes, people question their faith, question what they are doing in life, or otherwise feel spiritually depleted or lost as a result of a traumatic experience.
Types of Trauma
Complex Trauma
More often, trauma can be complex and more generalized in nature. This can be the result of years of repetitive scary experiences which your brain organizes as a persistent threat. These patterns can often be difficult to identify. This can happen in a variety of ways, including chronic childhood bullying, inadequate or harmful parenting, manipulative relationships, or repeated exposure to harm against persons you care for or identify with. While it can be difficult to pinpoint, these forms of trauma are still treatable with EMDR therapy.
Vicarious Trauma
Vicarious trauma is also a significant issue that can be treated with EMDR. This type of trauma occurs when the trauma center of the brain is activated by something we observe. This could be images of the recent insurrection at the capitol, images of people terrorized by the police, or even hearing about trauma. This past year, many people are feeling traumatized by COVID: the death toll, long-term isolation, ongoing grief, and the chronic fear of getting sick can be experienced as trauma. Furthermore, being raised in a marginalized community may elicit a trauma response in your brain, due to both direct and vicarious traumas. In these cases, one often feels there are ongoing vague threats to one’s life or a general feeling of being unsafe due to an environment.
EMDR Therapy Can Help
Sometimes, trauma can be focused and easy to identify, like a car accident or a physical assault. On the other hand, we can experience a trauma response when we have no memory of an event. For example, maybe you have an extreme fear response to dogs, and unbeknownst to you, you were bitten by a dog as a small child. Fortunately, you don’t need to be able to recall a memory to resolve its trauma response. EMDR therapy works with the way your brain is currently organized, including the triggers that affect you today. So, you don’t need to have that memory of the dog in order to resolve the responses you experience now. Further, EMDR can help you reduce and even remove your unreasonable fear of dogs.
Most people who experience these things will not develop a persistent trauma response. Our brain is capable of processing and resolving difficult experiences. In fact, we do it all the time. But, sometimes, that system processes these experiences differently, and your brain determines that the threats are persistent. This makes it so that you feel you cannot ever let your guard down. It is another way your brain is trying to protect you.
Healing from Trauma
Whatever the trauma is, trauma responses are not an indicator that you are weak. They are not a character flaw. There is nothing wrong with you as a person. It is something you have experienced, but it is not who you are now. Trauma is also not a life sentence, but it is something that you can recover from. In fact, many people do. Often, people even grow from trauma, not that anyone would want it to happen in the first place.
If this article is resonating with you, then yes, you may have experienced trauma and could use some help recovering. EMDR can access and assist your brain in engaging its normal recovery and resolution process. This allows you to return to having a healthy and appropriate response to life’s experiences and adventures in the future.
I’ll leave you with a definition from therapist and author, Robert Stolorow.
“Trauma is an unbearable emotional experience that lacks a relational home.”
There are two parts to that. First, there is an unbearable emotional experience, meaning that it is overwhelming, disturbing, hard to make sense of, and causes psychological distress. The second part is what makes it unbearable. “Lacks a relational home” means that the experience is hard to integrate into the rest of one’s life. It is out of place, other people might not understand, and one feels they must endure the pain alone. Trauma is a single person’s experience that only that individual person fully understands. However, EMDR therapy can provide a relational home. The relational home of therapy gives you a place to put the trauma, make sense of it, integrate it into your life, and heal.