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Is my Trauma showing?

We seem to hear this word trauma quite often today. What it means in everyday language may or may not be different from what it means to a therapist.

 The experience of trauma is subjective and is reliant upon the resources that each individual has. These resources are deeply affected by the stage of life one is at when the trauma occurs and the support that one has around them. For example , if one is abused by a family member it is  more devastating than being  abused by a stranger. Whether the trauma is an isolated incident or an ongoing event will affect the severity of the experience as well.  Of course, the support system of each individual, as well as their own self esteem and self confidence would all contribute to how this would affect them too.

In this article, I will refer to big T traumas and little t traumas. The big T traumas would be childhood sexual or physical abuse , witnessing violence in the home as a child, childhood neglect and rejection or combination of the all of the above. The other big T traumas would be wartime experiences and torture as well as type of sudden or ongoing violence.  It has been shown that the closer the relationship of the abuser to the child, the more traumatic the experience is. As you can see from these examples, children are the most vulnerable,  as this is also when our core beliefs about the world around us and other people are forming.

The small t traumas can actually become big T traumas if they are not dealt with quickly or well. These small t traumas can be things like bullying at school, accidents, hospitalisations as children, divorce of parents, care givers leaving,  change of economic status and severe anxiety left untreated. These are just a few, but I am sure you can think of many , many more. These small t traumas are also most impactful when occurring in childhood for the same reasons mentioned above. They can easily develop into big T traumas.

The process by which our brain perceives trauma has been a subject of great and in depth study over the last years. We can be very thankful for the development of the various types of brain scans that allow us an interior look into what is going on after and even during trauma.  The brain responds to the anticipation of danger with the “fight or flight response”. This is the normal protective mechanism that we all experience. The problem , however, with trauma is that the danger and the anticipated danger does not disappear and the brain remains in this state ready to go.  For those who have been under this for a short time, it is easier to help them return their brains to a peaceful state and remain there. When there is no return to peace for sometime, the individual’s brain, along with hormonal reactions become disrupted. It has also been discovered that these traumatic memories are stored in the brain in a reactive, emotional way so that they can be triggered by anything that is vaguely familiar to the original trauma. This does not require someone to consciously recognize the connection but is usually an unconscious connection causing what we usually refer to as an “over reaction”. If we measure our reaction on the scale of 1 to 10 , 10 would be the most extreme reaction that you can have. If you notice that the incident that you are reacting to deserves a reaction of 3 or 4 and you tend to give have a reaction of 9 or 10 in emotion then you can be sure that you are tapping into some trauma that is not dealt with and remains stored in the “trauma part” of the brain. I realise that this is a simplification but it is all that is necessary for us to understand what is going on. The other problem with reacting out of this part of our brain is that it disables our ability to logic, understand and plan. The emotions override any of these abilities so we are unable to reason or be reasoned with. This is called flooding. If this occurs we have to remove ourselves from the situation and will need 30 minutes to calm the brain to a place where we can understand what just happened.

We will continue this discussion at a later date with what we can do when we are flooded.