Trauma is a bit of a buzzword today, which is a good thing, but it has a couple of problems too.
The good part is that lots of people now understand that mental illness, addictions and problematic behaviours usually start with psychological trauma. This means that people now know they can find healing for their trauma and get these issues out of their life. So good!
However, there are some misunderstandings many people have about trauma, which are making this harder than it needs to be, and scares people off doing something about it. In this blog I want to demystify trauma a little, so you can see that your past does not have to determine your future.
Myth: Trauma is what 'happened to me'.
So bad things happen to just about everyone. The truth about life is that it is full of challenges, threats, inequities, losses and harms. No one gets through life without a scar or two. However, research tells us that approximately 80% of the time people get through these adverse events without being traumatised by them, and often they become stronger and more capable because they happened. So why do some events create trauma while others don't?
Well, it's all about how we see those events. Let me explain. If you overcome a challenge or threat, and you finish up feeling like Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard (totally a Christmas movie), you probably won't experience trauma. You won. You are the hero of that story, and your experience showed you that you are capable and powerful. Winners are grinners.
However, if you come out of an adverse experience feeling like you lost and believing something negative like you are powerless, weak, worthless or bad, there is a pretty good chance you will walk away from that one with psychological trauma. This internalised negative belief not only means that you lost back then, it sets you up to believe that you will lose now and in the future, too.
To put that another way, your loss or defeat became a story that you are a powerless loser. When we have unresolved trauma, we are believing we won't be able to meet our needs in life. Trauma is an injury to your identity, a negative story you are telling about yourself.
Myth 2: Trauma is hard to heal.
If you have ever watched a movie or TV show about someone overcoming trauma, you could be forgiven for thinking that getting past it is going to take a long time and involve a lot of very intense emotions. That's because this is how we used to do trauma healing, before we really understood it.
For a long time, people thought that the only way to heal trauma was to re-experience it by getting the person to reassociate to their trauma memory. This is called exposure therapy, and most of the time it works, but not for the reason we thought. When it didn't work, it would re-traumatise people by forcing them to re-experience their trauma memories without resolving them.
To understand this, we need to know a bit more about how trauma happens. When an event happens, your brain does a quick response processing of it. The sensory information comes into your limbic brain, which is your short-term memory system, and it gets analysed. Your limbic system assesses the threat and makes some quick decisions. I will use the example of a child getting bitten by a dog.
It decides something about the world, such as "dogs are dangerous'. It then decides something about you, such as "I can't protect myself against dogs". Finally, it comes up with a strategy to keep you safe in the future, such as "avoid all dogs". This memory and these ideas form a limbic system trauma memory and sit in the back of your brain, ready to react if you see any dogs. Logical, and smart, but not entirely accurate.
Limbic system memories are powerful because they contain all the original sensory and emotional information from that experience. So if this memory gets triggered, you feel as if this event is happening to you again, even though it isn't. The more intense the emotions are, the more they can overwhelm you.
Your body reacts as if it was just bitten by a dog, because your brain is telling it that happened. It is also telling you that you are powerless to protect yourself, which creates a panic response. Now you have a dog phobia, where the sight or even the thought of a dog can trigger you into panic.
Ideally, what should have happened is called cortical reprocessing, where your higher brain gets to analyse the event afterwards and come up with a more empowered understanding of the event.
In this example, the cortical brain might arrive at more sophisticated understandings such as "dogs can be dangerous, but most aren't" and "I can protect myself by being able to recognise the dangerous ones" and "I don't have to avoid all dogs, I only have to avoid the ones that look dangerous".
By doing this, your brain has turned a self negative idea into a self positive idea. "I can't protect myself" has become "I can protect myself". Now the real magic happens. Your brain then takes this memory out of the limbic system and refiles it in the long-term memory system. When it does this, it discards most of the sensory information and emotional information, and time stamps it as being in the past.
It also turns it from a first person to a third person memory, so instead of being in the situation looking through your eyes, you now see the event as if you were watching a video of what happened to your younger self. This means that this memory is not intense or overwhelming, doesn't feel like it's happening now and has a positive meaning. In short, you learned how to protect yourself in life, which increases your confidence.
That is why most adverse events don't become traumas, because we took positive meaning and helpful learning away from them.
It's also why healing trauma does not have to be hard, because once we know how to re-evaluate the meaning we gave to those events, our brain can easily reprocess them.
So why did exposure therapy work? Because the person was older and wiser, and they could spontaneously give the memory a more positive meaning, or the therapist could. It turns out that you don't need to 're-experience' the memory to heal it. In fact, it's usually better if you don't.
However, you need to access it a bit, so that the new understanding, which is the medicine, can get into the wound, which is the trauma memory. Fortunately, a bit is all it takes most of the time.
Trauma memories are a bit like wax. If they are too cold (dormant) you can't reshape them, but if they are too hot (over activated), they flood the system and overwhelm you. Most of the time, just naming the event will 'warm it up' enough for the healing to occur.
Myth 3: Trauma never goes away
Many people have been told they will just have to live with their trauma for the rest of their life. Not true. You have been through literally hundreds or thousands of adverse events in your life, and you have forgotten most of them. Once a trauma memory heals, it is almost like it never happened. You can remember it if you try, but it doesn't affect you any more.
Some traumas are harder than others to deal with. Very early childhood memories, or very serious threats, tend to create powerful memories. Some memories are harder to get to than others as well, because we are pretty good at repressing and avoiding them. Some traumas create bigger reactions and adaptations also, meaning that the things we do to avoid them or repress them, such as addictions, can become enormous problems in our life.
Living with unresolved trauma is hard. It's a bit like living with a piece of glass in your foot, and wondering why it hurts to do anything. Getting the glass out might involve a little bit of pain, but it's worth it to live your life again. The trick is to find someone who knows how to resolve trauma memories the easy way, using the right tools.
Exposure therapy is a bit like just squeezing the foot to force the glass out. Newer trauma therapies are more like surgery because they minimise the amount of emotional re-experiencing needed.
In conclusion
Psychological trauma is healable. We can't change our past, but we can change the meaning we gave it and heal our memories.
To heal it, we have to revisit our past, but we rarely have to re-experience it.
Modern trauma therapists have many more tools than they used to, which makes it a lot easier than it used to be.
Your past does not have to determine your future negatively. Your adverse experiences can become the memories that empower you r life, not the memories that disable you.
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