Trauma

Trauma is the emotional impact of events or environments that are overly distressing to a person’s ability to cope. Traumatic events can either be one-time like a house fire, earthquake, rape, or prolonged situations like ongoing child neglect, long-term sexual abuse. People may develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, avoidance of similar stimuli, hypervigilance. Emotions like sadness, anger, shock, denial, fear, shame can come after traumatic events. When these symptoms are prolonged, they can damage a person’s ability to function in day-to-day life and relationships. People who have trauma can keep feeling stuck in the physical and mental responses of the past. 

If a child experiences long-term trauma like neglect, abuse, or attachment injury, we usually see them later on having difficulties with identity, forming a secure attachment with others, emotional regulation, and body-mind connections. Chronic depression and anxiety issues can very possibly stem from developmental trauma. 

Trauma also influences how a brain functions. Hippocampus reduces in size; the Default Mode Network alters; Corpus Callosum, the connection between the left and right brain, is impaired. The nervous system, especially the amygdala, is conditioned to be hypersensitive to certain signs of threat, causing fight/flight reactions or panic episodes.  If the traumatic situation is chronic and people feel trapped in it, they may turn to numbness, learned helplessness, and other dissociative symptoms. These are caused by the nervous system overly down-regulate. 

Because trauma impacts both the mind (beliefs and memories) and the body (physiological and emotional responses), the best trauma treatment is a therapy that intervenes from both the cognitive and experiential/somatic perspective. Cognitively, a person may develop negative beliefs and subsequent feelings about specific objects, situations, or people due to the trauma. These beliefs may not be accurate and need to be challenged and reformed to help clients establish a healthy sense of self and others. Experientially, a person practices mindfulness to increase their awareness of their body sensations and relax the body. Clients can also engage in activities that increase their ability to regulate their nervous systems, such as hiking and singing. Most of our felt sense of safety or danger comes from the unconscious physiological perception of the world, not conscious cognition. Breathwork and yoga can help with the somatic aspect. Popular treatment modalities include cognitive therapy, exposure therapy, and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).