Do I Have Trauma?
Trauma Comes In Many Forms
You might be seeking therapy or mental health counseling because you are struggling in relationships, dealing with uncontrollable reactive thoughts, or feeling depressed. Maybe you feel full of shame, or believe you are not good enough. Perhaps you keep making the same unhealthy occupational, dating, or lifestyle choices.
In fact, you may be experiencing the effects of trauma. Other effects could include addictions, inability to maintain healthy, close relationships, loss of your former belief system, compulsive behaviors, dissociative symptoms, hostility, sexual dysfunction, impulsive behaviors, or self-destructive behaviors.
Most of us experience traumatic events, whether major, life-threatening events (such as your home burning to the ground, an assault, witnessing a death, or physical or sexual abuse) or a less-identified-as-trauma event (such as being bullied, knowing you weren’t wanted, living as a child through a messy divorce, or experiencing rejection). Size doesn’t matter, when it comes to trauma, as explained in this article by Robyn E. Brickel, MA, LMFT, when it comes to trauma. All of it is painful.
To illustrate how even relatively small negative events leave an imprint on our lives, I ask my clients, and I ask you to:
Name a food that you will NEVER, EVER eat again because you vomited when you previously ate this food.
Notice any images that come up about this food.
Identify a place in your body that feels really yucky when you picture this food.
Identify an emotion (usually anxiety or disgust) that goes with that body sensation.
From this exercise you can probably recall exactly where you were and the circumstances surrounding your last experience with this food. Even if it was decades ago!
Now I ask you to try to remember what you had for lunch two Saturdays ago. That’s pretty impossible to recall, isn’t it?
The difference in the two situations is that the information is stored in two different ways in our brains, based on our innate trauma response.
When we experience any kind of trauma (or even just a negative food incident), our nervous system kicks in to high gear, which is a great protective response with which we come wired at birth. The problem is, when this protective gear gets stuck (have you ever driven a vehicle stuck in one gear?), the information from the traumatic experience seems to overwhelm us.
We may feel irritable, experience uncomfortable body sensations, or feel like the event is happening over and over again. We may develop strong negative beliefs about ourself.
Our brain gets tricked into believing this trauma is happening to us right now. In the exercise above, notice how your stomach rolled over right along with the gross images of this food that you haven’t had for 15 years. Since your brain doesn’t keep a time stamp to let you know this was 15 years ago, your nervous system reacts!
When you have experienced a traumatic event, your body must stay on high alert to monitor the danger level. It never has the chance to slow down and process or heal. You can be in the “fight/flight/freeze” state for so long that your immune system can become compromised, and mental illness can be a result.
Emotional suppression or avoidance feel like the safest way to keep this pain at bay, but in reality these keep all this trauma stored in our body in an unhealthy way.
Trauma therapy is best approached, in my opinion, from a perspective that takes into account one’s emotions, body sensations, beliefs about self and others, and even the stored images that represent the trauma. I am a certified EMDR therapist, and I approach trauma healing in just this way. Please jump over to my EMDR page for more sources of information!