Understanding Trauma: Causes, Responses, Symptoms, and Treatment
What is Trauma?
Trauma can be defined as any event or series of events that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope. It’s not just the event itself that causes trauma, but how the individual processes and perceives it. Trauma can manifest in various ways, including:
Emotional Symptoms: Anxiety, depression, feelings of hopelessness, anger, or emotional numbness.
Cognitive Symptoms: Intrusive memories, flashbacks, nightmares, difficulty concentrating, or a sense of detachment from reality.
Physical Symptoms: Fatigue, headaches, chronic pain, or a heightened startle response.
Behavioral Symptoms: Avoidance of certain places or activities, substance abuse, or withdrawal from social interactions.
It’s important to recognize that trauma is highly individual. Two people may experience the same event, but their emotional responses and long-term effects can be vastly different.
The experience of trauma disrupts our whole-person ability to connect with ourselves, others, and the world in safe or predictable ways. Traumatic events include a wide range of experiences, which can involve interpersonal violence (physical, sexual, emotional or psychological, and financial abuse or neglect), complex trauma in childhood (chronic, interpersonal, and relational), and singular-traumatic instances (car accidents, traumatic loss, disasters). Psychological trauma can harm multiple aspects of our lives and functioning beyond the initial event.
What are the Causes of Trauma?
Trauma can be complex. It can come from repetitive and hurtful childhood experiences, such as physical, emotional, financial, or sexual abuse, or caregivers/family systems experiencing addiction, or creating attachment wounds, insecurities, abandonment, or neglect.
Trauma can also be from single-incidents or multiple experiences as an adult. It can come from experiences such as work/professional situations, relationship betrayals, grief or loss, chronic pain or health diagnoses, cancer treatment, medical surgeries, parenting challenges, car crashes, financial insecurity, immigration/displacement or moves, navigating neurodiversity or education settings, bullying, infertility/reproductive health or miscarriages, interpersonal violence, or coercive control.
What are Trauma Responses and Symptoms?
The physical and emotional responses to trauma are normal responses to abnormal events. When trauma occurs, our nervous system gets overwhelmed, and we may get stuck on in hyperarousal or stuck off in hypoarousal in our fight-flight-freeze response.
Trauma restricts our world, making it smaller and isolating due to the immense experience of fear and distrust it creates. Psychological trauma also makes us cope in any way we can and can create negative beliefs about ourselves, others, or the world. This can create challenges in our personal and professional lives, as well as within our relationships and families. The use of alcohol and substances to cope with trauma responses can be common and create additional issues.
Responses to traumatic experiences can include depression, irritability, loss of interest, numbing, decreased concentration, insomnia, emotional overwhelm, loss of a sense of the future, hopelessness, shame, worthlessness, hypervigilance, mistrust, little or no memories, generalized anxiety, panic attacks, nightmares, flashbacks, chronic pain headaches, substance abuse, eating disorders, feeling unreal or out of the body, self-destructive behaviours, dissociation, and loss of sense of self.
Trauma responses can create intense emotional distress, nervous system hyperarousal, flashbacks or intrusive thoughts, avoidance or numbing behaviours, and impacts to relationships or functioning.
What is Traumatic Grief and Loss?
Traumatic grief is multi-faceted and complex. The traumatic experiences or aspects behind a death of a loved one can create intense and prolonged responses.
Examples of losses that can be experienced as traumatic or that have complex/challenging circumstances to them are car crashes, fires, accidents, degenerative diseases, terminal illnesses, cancer, man-made natural disasters, deaths by suicide, homicides, overdose/addictions, loss of an abusive person, loss of a child, and loss of a home/identity through war or immigration.
Traumatic grief can lead to other mental health responses, such as anxiety, depression, or anger. It can also lead to behaviours of using alcohol or substances to emotionally numb, cope, or disconnect. In these instances, grief therapy can be beneficial in supporting a person to examine the impact of trauma on the loss and their responses.
What is Trauma Therapy Treatment?
Human beings who survive trauma heal through the physical and emotional safety they receive within their relationships with families, loved ones, communities, organizations, and professional therapists.
Childhood experiences of emotional neglect, violence, and/or abuse are often chronic and interpersonal in nature creating significant impacts on relationships and identity. Through trauma counselling, people can be supported with understanding how traumatic experiences impact multiple aspects of the individual and family system. Counselling can support healing, resilience, and recovery after traumatic experiences or adverse events.
Counselling with those who have experienced trauma focuses on safety and stabilization with clients driving the process of therapy. A therapist works within the client's levels of comfort to ensure feelings of safety are established before moving to processes of accepting and integrating the traumatic losses.
In creating emotional and physical safety, the use of containment and grounding strategies can support clients who are stuck in survival mode to feel safe in their bodies, minds, hearts, relationships, and world.
A key goal of counselling involves supporting clients to move away from the alienation, isolation, and emotional distress trauma creates, and towards increased meaning, experiences of safety, capacity for trust, engagement in meaningful relationships, and healing.
What is Trauma-Informed Care?
Trauma-informed care is an approach to therapy that acknowledges the impact of trauma on an individual’s mental, emotional, and physical well-being. It emphasizes understanding, recognizing, and responding to the effects of all types of trauma.
It also views trauma responses and attempts to cope as a person’s best and most resilient attempts to manage and cope with the challenges they have faced.
Trauma-informed therapy focuses on safety, trustworthiness, transparency, collaboration, and empowerment. It honours the innate healing and resilience people possess supporting them to find a way forward.
How Can Trauma Therapy Help?
Trauma-informed care can help individuals to process distressing events to better understand them and their response. This can help individuals to begin healing.
It can be helpful to work with a therapist with experiences supporting individuals and families who have been faced with traumatic experiences. I have supported clients of all ages as well as first responders or Public Safety Personnel (PSP). My trauma-informed approach is guided by attachment, interpersonal neurobiology, and family systems lenses to examine the developmental impacts of complex trauma. I am grateful to be able to witness the change and growth a person and family can experience through trauma therapy.
There are multiple approaches to trauma-informed therapies specializing in supporting individuals of all ages, as well as families, with trauma therapy. EMDR can be a helpful approach for those experiencing trauma or PTSD. I have specialized EMDR training, from an approved EMDR International Association (EMDRIA) training and certification program. I continue to engage in clinical supervision surrounding my EMDR work, which is part of psychotherapy best practice, to ensure ethical and best care for those I work with.
Moving Toward Healing
If you are struggling with trauma responses or are reliving traumatic past events in the present, I invite you to reach out and explore how trauma therapy can help. Together, we can work towards healing and finding peace after loss.
How to Begin
I offer phone consultations at no cost and am honoured to be able to connect with those wanting to explore trauma therapy options at my trauma-informed practice. You have the option of in-person sessions at my clinic in Squamish or online therapy. Please feel free to reach out to further discuss what may be most supportive to you in processing difficult or traumatic experiences.
