Understanding Trauma

Understanding trauma isn't easy, starting with understanding exactly what trauma is. The average person thinks of trauma as a highly stressful and/or painful experience that leaves the one who went through it damaged in their mind and emotions. In other words, if you live through a tornado, you will have trauma with mental or emotional damage that needs treatment. Actually, it’s not that simple. While it’s true that anyone who, for example, sees their parents murdered in front of them will be damaged by that and “have trauma,” everyone who survives a tornado is bad car accident isn’t necessarily traumatized by it.

Understanding Trauma Begins With, What Is It?

According to the American Psychological Association, psychological trauma is “an emotional response to a terrible event.” The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration define it as “damage to a person's mind as a result of one or more events that cause overwhelming amounts of stress that exceed the person's ability to cope or integrate the emotions involved, eventually leading to serious, long-term negative consequences.”

Psychological trauma is not based on the terrible event that a person experienced. It is based on a person’s ability to cope with the event. To be clear, it is not the event that causes the trauma, but the person’s response to the event. There are certain events, such as surviving an airplane crash or growing up in an abusive home, that virtually all people would respond to in the same way, with overwhelming stress because negative experiences on that scale are beyond any normal person’s ability to cope. But there are other negative experiences, such as seeing a dead body, which a middle-schooler would respond to with trauma, but a mortician would not. That’s because people’s ability to cope with distressing experiences is different based on the tools that their age, sex, culture, knowledge, experience, personality, etc. have given them.

Trauma Is About Safety

What makes the difference in a person’s response to traumatic situations is the messages that they give themselves about safety. Our brains are always seeking safety. If something feels unsafe, our brains instantly send the “fight, flight, or freeze” signal to get us to safety. If we perceive no threats and that we are safe, we respond with calm and experience no trauma.

For example, a third grader’s family is relocated by the father’s job from the family home to Brazil. All that is safe is ripped away and replaced with a completely foreign culture, language, people, school, etc. A third grader’s brain (even some adult’s brains) would be unprepared to cope with that loss of safety and would respond with a heightened state of stress, resulting in trauma. But a child in a military family would experience little to no trauma over yet another move to a new base because his brain doesn’t perceive it as a threat to his or her safety.

So, trauma is not an event; but the brain’s response to what it perceives as a threat to or loss of safety. Because of that, trauma is not a societal standard of what is suffering and what is not. It is personal and unique to the individual. Thus, there is no reason to be too embarrassed to talk about our trauma.

Trauma Can Be Unconscious

Is it possible to have trauma and not even realize it? Could some of your behaviors be driven by traumas that you experienced along the way and have never dealt with? Yes. In fact, I would say that in an imperfect world with so many experiences that are threatening to our sense of safety and security, it would be surprising for any person to live to adulthood without experiencing some kind of trauma.

For a moment, think about your childhood. How many memories do you have from, say, first grade? A few big ones here and there, but not a lot more. That’s because your brain was mostly focused on learning how to function in the world.

The brain is an amazing organ, but it is kind of lazy. In order to process all of the thousands of pieces of information coming at it per second, it has developed a lazy system of storing information. The technical name for this is “schema.” When something happens to us, instead of stopping and deciding what to do with this experience, the brain looks for similar experiences and instantly has us respond the same way. One the brain has a system, or “schema,” in place, it doesn’t have to decide what to do anymore, it just does the same thing. Efficient, but lazy.

This means that if you felt unsafe in a certain distressing situation, whatever you did in response, your brain filed that response away and every time you have a similar situation, it has you do the same thing. If you learned a certain habit, belief, behavior that made you feel safe in some way, whether it was good or bad, your lazy brain has it stored in will send that as a command to your body in any similar situation.

This brain response is so fast that it’s unconscious. You literally do it without thinking. You don’t even know why you do it…until now. You may not even remember or be consciously aware of the trauma that began this behavior, but you do it every single time in the blink of an eye. Maybe you shut down, go silent, hide, leave the situation. Maybe you explode with anger and shout and get scary. Maybe you criticize, complain, nag, and cling to the person who makes you feel unsafe. Maybe one moment you pull the person to you in an effort to draw them close for comfort and in the next moment you push them away because your brain is telling you that people will hurt you and you can only trust yourself.

What Can Be Done About Unconscious Trauma?

The behaviors your brain has you doing don’t work. They never have. But you keep doing them because the just come out of you without your even thinking about it. But the good news is, your brain can be reprogrammed. Emotionally Focused Therapy has been found to literally rewire the brain. Your unconscious trauma can be healed and you can learn to find safety and security in your relationships. This comes from facing your trauma and learning to respond to the emotions of it in a new way.

As trained Emotionally Focused Therapy counselors, we can work with you and with your trauma and the emotions it brings up. We provide a safe environment to repair and reconnect in a healthy way. I urge you to read more about trauma therapy and about Emotionally Focused Therapy, and then reach out to us to schedule a free thirty-minute consultation and get you started on the road to healing.