Hi,
This is Dr.
Tracey Moreno,
Psychologist,
And today we're going to talk about trauma.
There are different forms of trauma.
There's simple,
Complex,
And developmental.
Simple trauma refers to a single incident of trauma where in therapy you're only going to be dealing with that one event.
That could be an auto accident,
A house fire,
A robbery,
Anything that's just that single event that you're treating.
Complex trauma refers to several traumatic events that are being treated.
This could be a pattern of recurring trauma such as being in an abusive or violent relationship or abuse or neglect as a child,
Or it can be a string of different events that are not correlated with one another at all.
But the point being that in therapy you're dealing with multiple traumatic events.
Developmental trauma is anything that could have traumatized us during our stages of development.
So usually that would be in childhood and adolescence.
That could be maybe our parents' divorce,
A child custody situation,
Being bullied,
Being in a bad relationship or a breakup,
Being cheated on,
Any sort of sibling rivalry,
Problems at school,
Things like that.
So when we experience trauma,
There are very appropriate and normal responses to being a part of such a scary event.
And the thing that people,
When they first come to therapy,
That's probably the biggest thing that they have to overcome is the judgment that they have on themselves for not being able to get over it,
People say,
Or let it go or just move on.
Instead they're very judgmental of themselves and they think that they're weak,
They just can't handle life anymore,
They're going crazy,
They're losing their minds,
They're a burden to other people,
All kinds of different problems.
So I really want to take a moment and normalize some of these very normal and appropriate responses to trauma.
So when we experience trauma,
Our body sends us into survival mode,
Which means we either fight,
We go into flight or we freeze.
Flight is we attack,
Flight is we run away,
And freeze is we freeze in place and we're unable to respond at all.
Common symptoms of trauma would be having nightmares about the event,
Having a startle response,
Being scared very easily,
And avoidance.
Usually the avoidance has to do with avoiding our triggers,
Which triggers is just a fancy word for anything that reminds us of the event.
We also have impairments in our day-to-day functioning.
This could be emotional instability,
Fear,
Lifestyle changes,
And our inability to maintain relationships and work.
We can also begin to develop false beliefs.
Some of these beliefs could be that whatever happened to us will happen again.
We could believe that we caused this to happen or that we could have prevented it from happening to us.
We also begin to catastrophize where everything,
No matter how big or small,
Is now a catastrophe.
We have black and white thinking,
Which is like all or nothing thinking.
There's no balance.
We have all or nothing experiences in life where we're either very hypersensitive and overly dramatic or we're just kind of numb and disconnected.
We begin to perceive more things as a threat,
As an actual life or death threat.
We make generalizations about things.
Our thinking becomes very fear-based and our thought process becomes negative and pessimistic.
Although these are normal responses to trauma,
There are three factors that we need to take into consideration because we don't want to be experiencing these things for too long of a period of time.
At some point,
We have to get ourselves through the recovery and healing process.
Three factors to consider is the severity of symptoms,
The level of functioning,
And how long we have the symptoms in terms of time.
If our symptom severity is low and our functioning is high,
A normal amount of time would be about six months until we can try to regain some normalcy in our lives.
But if the symptom severity is moderate to high and our functioning is low,
You only want to give that time period about one month.
And after that,
If your symptoms are still causing you such daily impairment,
Then it's really important that if you're able to receive professional mental health treatment or be more proactive in your own treatment plan.
Now let's talk about the effects of the mind and body.
When we experience trauma,
We are stuck there.
So we're not present anymore.
We're stuck in the past or worrying about the future.
With trauma,
Our symptoms are held in the body and there's a disconnect between our mind and body.
Our mind knows we're not in danger,
But our body doesn't.
That's why we end up putting ourselves in an internal conflict because our mind is telling us we're fine.
There's nothing to worry about.
We're overreacting,
But our body is signaling us that we're in danger.
So now our neural pathways have changed and we're no longer able to process information in a rational,
Logical way because our experiences are trapped in the right hemisphere of our brain and our ability to produce language and think logically is trapped in the left hemisphere of our brain.
And the two hemispheres are no longer communicating with each other.
As if that's not enough,
Our frontal lobe,
Which is responsible for executive functioning,
Planning,
Problem solving,
Emotional regulation is now shut down and our limbic system takes over.
When our limbic system is in control,
It means we're functioning purely off emotions and perception and we're now unable to think rationally.
Now imagine how well someone with PTSD could actually function day to day.
Even at their best,
They're still going to be struggling.
And this is all happening biologically and unconsciously.
So who's affected by trauma and who's more predisposed to PTSD?
The million dollar question when I was in doctoral school was why is it that people could experience the same exact traumatic event,
Yet one person can end up with PTSD and not the other?
Research now shows that it has to do with feeling safe as a child.
People who generally felt safe as children and knew they had someone there to protect them were less likely to get PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event.
However,
People who did not feel safe as children and had no one there to protect them were predisposed and more likely to get PTSD.
And the part about not feeling as if they had anyone to protect them as children also seems to be why trauma is less about the traumatic event and more about who was there for them and helped them through it.
In fact,
In therapy,
The focus is usually more about the person healing from who they think should have protected them rather than focusing on the perpetrator or the situation itself.
So let's talk about treatment.
Given what we now know about trauma and what happens in the brain,
Does it really make sense to start with traditional talk therapy?
When our left brain hemisphere that's responsible for producing language is shut down and our frontal lobe that's responsible for emotional regulation is also shut down,
At that point,
If we proceed with talk therapy,
We could probably end up just being re-traumatized.
And then that usually leads to people feeling like they failed at therapy or that therapy failed them.
This is why treatment must have a mind-body approach.
And I always add a mind-body-spirit approach as well.
We must connect the mind and body and recreate our neural pathways in the brain so that we can begin processing our experience,
Our experiences with a balance of emotion and logic.
Bodywork engages the limbic system and we have to calm the limbic system down so that it feels safe and protected and doesn't feel the need to take over our brain in order to protect us.
Once the limbic system can calm down,
So does our fight,
Flight and freeze response,
Which means we'll already start experiencing symptom relief.
And it will allow our left brain hemisphere and frontal lobe to begin functioning properly again,
Putting our entire brain back in balance.
Let's review some treatments and coping skills that can help us do this.
We can start by participating in activities that brings us back into our body and able to feel again,
Things like acupuncture,
Massage,
Hugging,
Hand-holding,
Mindfulness,
Tapping,
Yoga,
Grounding exercises,
Breathing techniques,
And meditation.
If you're not familiar with mindfulness,
It involves exercises that engage all of our five senses to help bring us present.
Tapping is an ancient Chinese technique that involves taking our fingers and tapping pressure points on our face and upper body to increase our stress tolerance and help calm our limbic system.
Yoga has actually been shown to be better than medication.
Yoga teaches us how to be in our body,
Be present,
And learn how to use and synchronize our body and mind.
All of these techniques are explained and taught online and most are free.
One more helpful technique is to be mindful about the positioning of your body.
Remember,
Emotions are held in the body,
So our body dictates our emotions.
For trauma survivors,
The body is usually stressed and uncomfortable,
And so it's important to use relaxation techniques to adjust your physical position when needed.
We can do a quick exercise to show what this means.
If you want to just take a moment and pull up in your mind a stressful situation,
If you are a trauma survivor,
Don't pull up the trauma.
Just pull up another,
Not a traumatic experience,
Just a stressful situation that you're having either currently or in the past or even maybe something you worry about in the future.
I want you to just take a moment and I want you to visualize that and pull that up in your body.
I want you to feel that stress in your body.
There's usually a tightness,
Contracting of muscles,
Maybe a little bit of labored breathing,
Maybe even a temperature change in our body,
I want you to feel that for a second.
Now when you're ready,
I want you to just sit back in a very relaxed position or maybe even lay down.
As you're doing that,
I want you to try to keep that stress,
That feeling of stress in your body and see if you're able to do it.
You actually should not be able to do it.
It's actually physically impossible.
So this is a really easy technique that we can use anywhere,
Anytime.
Is to just kind of like sit back in our chair,
Take a deep breath,
Open ourselves up,
Open our hands,
Uncross our body language,
Just open up our body and relax our body and our mind will follow.
Our mind will naturally become less stressed.
So once we're more comfortable in our body and more calm mentally,
We can move into other forms of intervention that begin to actually address the trauma.
Drawing as a form of expression to convey our experiences and drawing something that expresses a way out of the trauma is even better.
Try to draw something that would have helped or saved you during the traumatic event.
This gives us a way out,
Right?
It gives us and it allows us to express that.
Another option is to write a trauma narrative.
This is one of my favorite ones.
This is your story,
But you're going to write it in third person involving other characters and you're going to write it with an ending the way you wish it had happened.
This is a safe way to begin addressing the trauma without connecting to it.
If you are able to participate in therapy,
Group therapy is recommended before individual therapy because once people get used to individual therapy,
They usually become uncomfortable and resistant to participating and sharing within a group,
Which is only natural.
But group therapy is very important because we often feel like we're alone and we're the only ones going through something like this.
So this helps to know that we're not alone.
We're not going crazy.
We're not weak.
Remember all that judgment we talked about earlier.
So this helps normalize our experience.
Once we're ready for individual therapy,
EMDR is the recommended treatment.
Now this stands for eye movement desensitization reprocessing.
So this tends to work better if you're a visual person and can visualize things easily in your mind.
If you're not,
I recommend practicing guided meditations that guide you through imagery and other visualizations so that you can improve and this will help prepare you for EMDR.
In EMDR,
It forces the left and right brain hemispheres to communicate to each other.
EMDR emphasizes a beginning,
A middle,
And an end to our trauma.
Our brain knows that the trauma has ended,
But remember our body does not.
So EMDR helps make this connection and bring our body up to speed with our brain.
I hope this helps and I wish you the best on your journey and to remain hopeful that you can find peace in your life again.
We do not have to live with trauma.
We'll always remember,
Unfortunately we don't forget,
But we don't have to live with it,
Controlling us and weighing us down every day.
There is hope.
Good luck.
