How to Determine if You Have Trauma
Many of us have faced the threat of violence or experienced severe stress at least once in our lives. It is these events that are called trauma in psychology. Trauma always has a negative impact on our view of the world. Without working through the experience, we give the remote control of our own emotions to events from the past, losing control over our lives and losing our ability to manage them.
The main sign of trauma is a subjective loss of peace of mind. Specific manifestations of loss of equilibrium can be seen in changes in behavior.
- You try, but cannot avoid memories or experiences related to the traumatic event: “I cannot stop thinking about it, memories and thoughts won’t leave me, I cannot stop the spiral sucking me down.
- You avoid activities related to the trauma: you don’t visit the place where the event occurred; you don’t wear the clothes you wore then; you don’t communicate with witnesses to the event; you stop doing what you experienced at that moment; you no longer allow intimacy or hugs; you can’t cry.
- You feel a sense of stopped time and an emotional pause: “The world has stopped, and I stayed where it happened; I don’t know what date it is today; nothing has happened in my life since then, everything is frozen.
- You feel emotionally indifferent: cold, distant, and detached from events that used to interest you.
These or other criteria are familiar to everyone, but if the symptoms listed above persist for more than a month, post-traumatic stress disorder occurs — our brain cannot classify the trauma as past. The world here and now becomes fundamentally dangerous and unpredictable. That is, neuropsychologically your brain cannot relate the trauma to other memory content, your memories are stored “haphazardly” and are like a cut-up film with fragments scattered chaotically.
The worst thing about trauma is the unpredictable fragments of the experience: voices, tastes, smells, tactile sensations, feelings of panic and fear, anxiety, shallow breathing, trembling. These are what psychology calls triggers. The mechanisms that trigger these reactions are hidden from consciousness and run in the background. What is noticeable is restlessness or anxiety in your sleep, a feeling that something is suffocating you, heaviness in your chest, falling out of reality, hallucinations in your waking state, sweaty palms, or rapid heartbeat for no apparent reason.
Trigger is not the cause. Reasons lie much deeper, but often there is a substitution of concepts, and it seems to us that it is some action or situation that deprives us of peace.
Imagine if I asked you how your day was yesterday. You would be able to fully recreate the chronological sequence and tell me what you heard, did, thought, what the smell was around you, how the light fell, how you smiled, what you wore, what you talked about, and what you felt. With trauma, chronological recreation on all levels is impossible. That is, hearing, vision, tactile sensation, taste, emotion, smell are all preserved haphazardly and cut into incoherent segments.
Most often at first there is an avoidance of all thoughts that remind of traumatic experience. In the short term, this protective reaction of our psyche is regarded as normal, since it helps to prevent fear and ensures survival. In the long term, such behavior blocks the corrective restructuring of your memory and, consequently, causes the symptoms I described above. This all affects the quality of your life and the patterns of building (or destroying) relationships with yourself and loved ones.
The first step is for the therapist to help you understand that your feelings and reactions to trauma are normal. Validating (confirming, accepting) the memories is one of the basic and important concepts in trauma therapy: “Yes, what you experienced was terrible. Yes, it was unbearable. Yes, there was no one to whom you could share your fear and to whom you could tell your pain. At this same stage, the therapist also gives you specific self-regulation and stabilization mechanisms. You will not dive into your memories until he makes sure that you are confident in at least three techniques to return to reality on your own.
The second step is to work through the memories in a structured way. The goal of this process is to connect the pictures of your experiences in your memory. Scattered frames are glued together into a coherent full-length film, recreating sound, voices, taste and smell. This happens through the exploration of the traumatic experience. It is often this phase that patients dread. I can tell you from the experience of many of them: it takes more energy to “look away, avoid and ignore the trauma” than it does to work through these experiences. Because it is “motivation from” that blocks the possibility of “motivation to.
The goal of this phase of work is to integrate the trauma into one’s own biography. The client who has undergone psychotherapy can tell about these events without emotion, without fear, without shame, without guilt, as a story that has become part of his past along with other experiences: “This is part of my life, my biography and my identity. It made me who I am, and this part of me does not live apart from me.
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