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Trauma

Trauma

The topic of trauma is becoming increasingly relevant, and we are learning more about how trauma is connected to overall functioning and mental health.

Trauma is measured by the impact of an event or situation on us. Certain events have a high potential to traumatize, such as wartime situations, physical or other assaults, falls, accidents, natural disasters, and the like. Sometimes, seemingly innocuous events can also be traumatic if they evoke feelings of indescribable horror, fear, and helplessness in a person.

The traumatic effect is an experience in which we undergo what is incomprehensible to us, what we would want to avoid at all costs, but we feel a sense of complete helplessness instead of control. Sometimes individual events lead to traumatic experiences, while other times it's a pervasive sense of insecurity that lasted throughout childhood. Traumatic experiences cannot be processed, digested, integrated into life, and we can’t continue living as before trauma.

Trauma is an internal injury that changes us, altering our ability for bodily self-regulation, where the natural and easy interchange of alertness, tension, relaxation, and peace becomes a difficult task. Trauma breaches our boundary of normalcy, and now we are filled with much unprocessed pain, easily overwhelmed, tense, and reactive. Or numb, heavy, absent. It becomes harder to connect with others, and instead of through contact with oneself and others, relief is found through distractions and dissociation from oneself, often through addictions. Trauma creates internal chaos; we can no longer rely on our inner compass, interpret, or regulate our bodily sensations.

As time passes, memories of the traumatic event are generally less intrusive, but its impact on our nervous system continues to operate until we process the trauma. How can we do that?

It is essential to restore the internal sense of safety, to teach our nervous system that it can feel safe again. Conscious and safe at the same time. One of the most effective ways is the psychotherapeutic method called Somatic Experiencing (SE) by Dr. Peter Levine. SE helps reduce the impact of trauma on our automatic nervous system, change the bodily memory of events, and restore coherent functioning.  

In SE, the person is primarily supported to recognize and regulate bodily sensations. To re-teach the nervous system how to be simultaneously aware and safe. That's the key. Capacitating oneself for the sense of safety. Step by step. Only when we have the experience that we can self-regulate in the face of horrific memories and that they will not dysregulate and overwhelm us, can we take the next step, which is approaching the traumatic experience a little closer in memory. In other words, in working with trauma, initially, working with bodily sensations is much more important than with the trauma narrative.