What is trauma?
Trauma is something that you perceive as a negative experience. Oftentimes when we think of trauma, we think of “Big T” trauma’s like a catastrophic event, natural disasters, death, abuse, but we often don’t recognize “little t” traumas as traumas we have experienced. We tend to write these traumas off saying “it wasn’t that bad,” “I survived,” “It could have been worse,” “I’m lucky, you should have seen the other person.” Yes, those might be true statements, but we also cannot deny that your body went through a stressful event. Our body does not know how to compare. It only knows what is happening right now in your own life experience.
This takes me back a couple weeks when I was giving blood. I was talking to the phlebotomist and they said they get so frustrated when people don’t tell them as soon as they start to feel symptoms. My naive response, especially for a trauma therapist, was, “Oh, you want us to tell you? I thought I would sound wimpy! I’m trying to be brave here and power through.” They responded back with, “your body has no idea that you are doing something courageous for someone else, all it knows is that you just lost a pint of blood and it is responding to that blood loss.” I was like, wow so true thank you for that reminder. So yes, I was being brave, yes I survived, but the phlebotomist still had to take appropriate measures to keep me from passing out because the bottom line, my body lost blood regardless of the cause.
I tend to use these two metaphors when talking to clients about trauma and healing.
Metaphor 1: The necklace
Your life is like a necklace. When you experience a negative event (a trauma) a knot is formed in the chain. Depending on the stress of the event and the support system you had to recover from the event depends on how tight that knot was pulled. If that negative event keeps happening, then multiple knots keep getting tied on top of one another. You keep making it through life, but for every negative event your experience without being able to recover from it, another knot is formed. In therapy, we help you loosen the knots with the ultimate goal of you untying your knots. The more knots you experience and the tighter they are, the longer it will take, but they will eventually become loose or untied - trust me, I wouldn’t be in this business if we couldn’t loosen or untie the knots! We cannot erase the experience from your life, so there will always be that crease in the chain, but our hope is that you will no longer feel knotted up.
Metaphor 2: Healing the open wound
The hurt, the pain, or the trauma you experienced in life causes wounds. Imagine that an emotional wound is like an open wound on your knee. If you were able to get the proper medical care and support system, that would enable the wound to heal properly. However, if you weren’t able to get the proper support system it inhibits your wound from healing properly. It becomes more painful and you notice the pain with every movement. Most people who come to therapy come because they have wound(s) that have been untreated, infected, or opened up multiple times. Our goal is to heal your wounds. It will take time. Sometimes the healing is painful, just like when you have to clean a wound. As therapists, we like to call that pain good pain or clean pain. It is uncomfortable but necessary. We will go slow and you will not be alone during the cleaning process. We will go at your body’s pace. Your therapist will be there to hold your hand so you won’t be alone. As you work on healing your wound, you will eventually notice the wound is no longer open, but scabbing over. You are able to move around a bit more freely, still aware of the wound, but not as hypervigilant about it. Unfortunately we don’t have complete control of life and something might bump into your scab. Sometimes that bump will reopen the scab and we have to go back and nurture it, other times that bump will hurt it and you will learn to notice the hurt, but it doesn’t keep you from doing what you want to do. Eventually the scab will heal into a scar. That is our ultimate goal in therapy - to heal your open wound to a scar - the memory will always be there, but it will be healed to the point where you can freely put on a pair of jeans without any pain! You’ll be able to look down at your knee and say, “yeah, that happened to me, but I am okay now. I am safe now.” The scare will always be there. And if you get bumped again in that same spot, it might be a little bit more sensitive than getting bumped somewhere else, but it won’t stop you. And if it does slow you down for a moment, allow yourself to slow down, feel the hurt, and then continue along.
Trauma is inevitable in life. We all experience it. It is important we allow ourselves to heal from our wounds so we can freely live life the way we want to. Trauma doesn’t care what caused the wound or how the knot got tied, the point is something happened to you that caused you pain. You are worthy and deserving to heal that pain, give yourself permission to release its burdens from your life.
Did you know, 1 in 4 children experience a trauma? I did not realize the extent and frequency of trauma until I started to study trauma and work in the field. My first experience of working with people through trauma was when I was a teacher. I didn’t have the knowledge to know what I was witnessing, but I knew there was something getting in the way of me being able to teach a certain group of kids. I felt like there was this barrier and no matter how fun, exciting, engaging I made class, I couldn’t get them to learn. I knew the barrier went beyond the academic brain because these kids were smart - I could tell by the conversations I had with them. I once heard someone say that kids cannot learn unless they feel safe. That word “safe” rang through my brain. What does it mean to be safe? They are safe, they are at school, why aren’t they able to learn (and this was before the increase in school shootings - so a different sense of safety at school when I had this original thought)? As I pondered, I started to realize a correlation with my kiddos who struggled to learn at school to their homelife. Most of them came from an unpredictable homelife and I realized they might not feel safe at home. How do I make them feel safe at school? How can I reach behind this emotional void and help them learn? This is what took me to grad school and it was through grad school when I started to learn about the impact of trauma. I devoured books by authors/researchers such as Dr. Bruce Perry and Dr. Dan Siegel. It was then when I took off on my own learning on what trauma is and how it affects learning.
Over the last five years, I feel like I have only scratched the surface on trying to understand what trauma is and how it affects our body, beyond just learning. My library has expanded with books overflowing on every table stand in our house! There are so many different types of trauma. Some trauma comes from a specific event, other trauma comes from a recurrence of events. Some trauma is attached to relationships, other trauma is attached to beliefs you were told about yourself. There is medical trauma, religious trauma, generational trauma, racial trauma, utero trauma, relational trauma, complex trauma, vicarious trauma, and the list goes on.
Through this learning, I have discovered I do have trauma in my life and that is okay. I have made the decision to work with it and continue to work on releasing it from my body.
When recognizing your own trauma, remember not to compare your experience to someone else’s and no matter how big or small it feels, it is there. I will admit it, while writing this post, it became clear to me that I have trauma from writing in school! I was doing everything I can to avoid this task and hoping (after a week of avoidance) Ilyse, the owner of our group practice, would stop reminding me to write this post! Finally, I set a deadline and told her I would send her something by the end of the day. Whoa, did my procrastination kick in and my perfectionism followed suit. All of a sudden the house needed to be clean, laundry needed to be folded, webinars needed to be watched, and the five years of research I have done on trauma became a blank slate in my mind and I needed to start all over with my research (which later I identified as a freeze response). I noticed my heart racing and my chest compressing in. I then did some therapy on myself to help me work through this freeze response.
So remember, trauma doesn’t have to be this catastrophic life changing event, it can also be something so small as a person critiquing your writing over and over. If you have ever felt hurt, pain, or distress, then you deserve to heal regardless of how you got the wound or the knot.
If you feel like you have experienced trauma or are holding unresolved trauma in your body, reach out to a therapist. If you feel like you are always living in flight or fight mode, reach out! There are therapists who are trained and want to help you. You are worthy and deserving of getting help. Healing is possible!
