Blog Posts

Hey friends, welcome back to the blog.  Today I wanted to talk more about trauma, what it is, and how we treat it.  

What is Trauma?

Trauma, by definition, is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.  Not everyone experiences trauma the same.  People who have had similar experiences can have a varying range of distress or disturbance level.  Trauma can have lasting negative effects on our personal, physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being.  Trauma can harm a person’s sense of safety, sense of self, and ability to regulate emotions and navigate relationships.  People may experience feeling anxious, sad, or angry, trouble concentrating, trouble sleeping, thinking about what happened, feeling shame, hopeless, powerless, and fear.  Trauma can range from natural disasters, acts of violence, car accidents, abuse, bullying, long-term illness, living in an unstable environment, or seeing someone else get hurt.

Let’s be real, I have experienced some of my own trauma this year.  I have come to learn that often we don’t end up seeing clients until they have experienced PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) for longer than a month and usually less often after an initial traumatic experience.  PTSD is a mental health condition that can develop after someone experiences or witnesses a traumatic event.  Usually PTSD results if symptoms last more than a month after a traumatic event and be severe enough to interfere with aspects of daily life.  Most often we see it cause negative thoughts about ourselves, others, and the world, ongoing negative emotions like fear, shame, and anger, reduced interest in normally enjoyable activities, sleep problems, feeling numb or detached, irritability, behaving recklessly, being easily startled, and trouble with concentration and focus.  

In general there are 3 phases of trauma recovery.  As we work with clients with PTSD it is important to consider these phases of recovery.  It also is important to understand that trauma recovery, similar to grief, is not a linear process.  Phases can be repeated, triggers can happen, and we can also significantly heal so that aspects of daily life are not so interfered with.  Let’s review the phases.  

Phases of Trauma Recovery

1. Safety and stabilization: It’s not uncommon after experiencing trauma to feel less safe, isolate, and withdraw from others.  This can include feeling unsafe in your own mind and body, questioning relationships, and more fear of the world in general.  The initial phase of recovery includes focusing on establishing a sense of safety and security.  This includes managing overwhelming emotions by developing ways to cope.  

In therapy we may start off by focusing addressing basic needs.  It’s not uncommon to have difficulty at times addressing even the most basic of needs (we explored the needs hierarchy in my previous blog post).  After basic needs are being addressed, next comes the safety and security needs.  This may include mindfulness, grounding exercises, mind-body connection to enhance ability to feel safe in our own body, addressing our physical environments, and any safety and security concerns there may be.  There is no timeline on this phase, we can’t fully process through trauma until we can establish a level of safety and security.  

2. Remembering and mourning: This stage of the process is about processing and making meaning of trauma.  During this phase confronting memories, emotions, and the impact of the trauma are part of processing through it.  Sometimes it takes time to get to this phase and safety and stabilization continue to need to be addressed during this phase.  Part of this process is going through the grief process that comes with experiencing traumatic events.  People often feel a sense of loss that include loss of self, time, relationships, ability to function, and cope.  This phase can include talking about emotions, allowing the processing and release of painful thoughts and emotions.  This phase also has no timeline or right timing.  Sometimes these things take as long as they take.  Practice self compassion and patience are helpful coping mechanisms during this phase.    

In therapy, we often use EMDR therapy to help people review traumatic events while also focusing on safety.  Therapy can help to process the trauma and emotions associated with it while focusing on stabilization and safety in the process.  

3. Reconnection and integration: This phase involves rebuilding relationships, creating a new sense of self, and integrating the experience into life in a healthy way.  The main focus of this phase is empowerment.  Sense of self may change after trauma.  As they say, “trauma changes people.”  It’s not uncommon during the initial phases of trauma recovery to experience negative beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and a negative self view.  Part of this phase is focusing on more positive beliefs or beliefs that will serve you more moving forward.  Empowerment comes from creating a new sense of self.  This phase also includes reconnecting with others and redefining meaningful relationships.  

In therapy, we may work on empowering people to create new narratives, establish beliefs that will serve them moving forward, how they can gain more emotional control of their environment or triggers, explore their relationships and if boundaries may be needed moving forward.  This phase is all about moving forward and bringing with us all of the good lessons learned.  

Trauma is Normal and Common

It is important to note that trauma is part of the human experience.  We may never understand why us or others have to go through the bad experiences we do.  Some people spend most of their life focused on why bad things have happened, the unfairness of life and trauma, and never truly healing.  Our hope is to use these experiences as tools for learning to cope effectively and making more meaning out of life after establishing a new sense of safety, processing the trauma, and creating a new sense of self and life.  

Thanks for reading, until next time.

Emilie Barragan, LCSW

“Tackling physical and emotional pain” – Therapeuo Health