Trauma Recovery
Understanding Trauma
Trauma: A lasting emotional response to a distressing event. Trauma can impact a person’s sense of self, safety, and ability to regulate emotions.*
What is Trauma?
Trauma is an event that negatively affects your mental well-being for a considerable period of time. Many people struggle with recovering from traumatic events and it is often a difficult process. If you are struggling and are unsure how to return to normalcy after traumatic events, we are here to help you learn how to cope with your experience and gain back your power over negative thoughts and behaviors.
Many people struggle to determine if their experience can be counted as trauma and will therefore refrain from seeking help. Trauma, however, looks different for everyone who has dealt with it and no traumatic experience is too insignificant to treat. Trauma types include mental, physical, and emotional. If an event from your past has negatively affected your mental state or behaviors for 1-3 months, you may want to consider looking into ways to help you cope with your experience. First, it is important to identify the behaviors that are indicators of past trauma.
Trauma Responses
Common emotional responses of someone who is dealing with a traumatic experience include shock, fear, anger, blame, guilt, sorrow, and a wide range of other emotions that can occur after the event. These can be subtle and occasional, or overwhelming and constant depending on the person and situation. Physical and behavioral responses include insomnia, headaches, loss of appetite, social isolation, and decreased interest in daily activities. As with emotional responses, these physical responses can appear in varying forms. If you are noticing any of these emotions or behaviors within yourself and it is affecting your everyday life, this is a sign to consider seeking help. One of the first steps towards recovery is understanding that these responses (and many others you may experience) are very normal, and are actually part of your healing process. In the next part of this blog, we will discuss how to understand and deal with these responses as they occur.
Delayed Response
After a traumatic event, it is also common to experience a delayed response. Perhaps you did not immediately experience a negative reaction after your experience, but you are now noticing mental or behavioral effects. This can be due to trauma blocking, which is when an individual blocks out any unwanted emotions or behaviors that start to occur in response to a traumatic event. This can happen intentionally or unintentionally. Unfortunately, trauma blocking usually only results in the delay of a response, rather than the elimination of one. A response will typically still resurface, only it could occur weeks, months, or years after the event.
Whether you or someone you know is working through how to heal from a recent event, or something that happened a long time ago, handling responses to trauma takes time and patience. In part two of this blog, we will cover how to manage flashbacks and intrusive thoughts, and provide practical coping strategies for your recovery process.