There is a lot to trauma recovery. While there is never a single path to healing and definitely no timeline, there are certain areas that should be addressed for deep and lasting recovery. Becoming aware of your needs and some of the things that should be prioritized can help in making decisions for counseling and mental health support.
Managing Symptoms of Trauma
While treating symptoms is never the final solution, it is an important starting place. Trauma is in fact defined by the individual reaction or response. This means that to meet criteria for traumatic-stress reaction you are experiencing something. This might be behaviors that are out of character or intense and disabling emotions.
These symptoms are often confused with other issues or even diagnosed as a mental health illness. The difference is trauma responses are directly connected with an overwhelming experience or series of experiences. It’s never helpful to self-diagnose, but if you feel unlike yourself or notice that life is getting more difficult, talking with a mental health professional about how certain events may have impacted you is a great place to start.
A trauma-informed therapist should be able to help you recognize and name your trauma-responses and evaluate which need the most focus. This could be symptoms that are impairing your ability to do life, for example work, relationships, eating, and sleeping.
Trauma responses show up in three major domains: the way we think, the size and intensity of feelings and the ways we attempt to cope with those emotions. Addictive behaviors, angry outbursts, shutting people out, even emotional numbness—these are ways that a person may be attempting to manage a world that no longer feels safe. Suicidality and self-harm are other possible ways that individuals try to cope with the suffering loss of hope, powerful or debilitating emotions, or shattered relationships.
Seeking support with addictions, self-harm and grief and trust issues can be important for overall trauma recovery. If these painful ways of coping are not addressed, it will be nearly impossible to prevent further damage and even further trauma.
Understanding What Happened
Trauma changes our worldview. The intense experience of danger, loss or abuse that may have happened create new ways of explaining ourselves and our world. Unfortunately, those are not always true and accurate. Formed in the forge of intense feelings and survival responses, we can begin to believe that there is no safety and that danger is everywhere. From hypervigilance to difficulty trusting, these are helpful and adaptive responses when they are accurate reflections of the danger.
Good trauma- therapy seeks to help you recognize the ways you are looking at yourself, at others and your world. It allows time and space for you to reckon with the cynicism, pessimism and grief that certain events have brought in your life. Telling your story is can be a big part of that.
Note, can be. It might also be that understanding is not just re-telling the story. It is also digging deep into the distorted views that remain in place and predict many behaviors. Regaining control over our responses is a sign of true trauma healing. If we continue to tell our story as if it is our current reality, we won’t ever move into our future.
What is amazing about the human psyche is that we process best with full integration of our emotions, meaning and physical regulation. Learning to calm the body and mind so that we can make meaning can come through art, poetry, music, journaling and many mindfulness tools. Counselors can be important advisors on how to keep facing fears and moving forward at a pace that is healthy. Trauma recovery can not be forced; but it must be faced.
Improving Relationships with Others
Dr. Gabor Mate, M.D. a major contributor in the treatment and understanding of addiction, notes the deep connections between childhood trauma and recovery. Humanizing the individuals struggling with addiction, Gabor has educated us on the mind-body connection and how intergenerational and early trauma, especially to attachment, are predictors of lifelong addiction patterns.
There can be trauma that is “single-event” in nature, a devastating house fire for example. But many times trauma is the layers of loss and harm that have come repeatedly. Multiple events, early in life experiences, or chronic trauma such as relational abuse, become what we know as “Complex trauma”.
In either scenario, positive social connectedness is needed for healing. When isolating, lashing out, fearfulness or even toxic-relationships become the norm, these factors must be addressed in trauma therapy. It might be reclaiming trust and connection or ongoing work on trusting yourself and others (boundaries).
Seeking a trauma-informed counselor means that evaluating damage to your relationships, with yourself, others, or God, will be part of the healing. Healthy attachment helps prevent and moderate trauma symptoms, just as chronic trauma can deteriorate a persons connection and support systems.Involvement in support groups, family therapy and even recreational clubs can be ancillary supports for trauma treatment.
Re-building a Value-Based Life
Dr. Mate also talks about the important final step of recovery as “Step 4 Plus 1”. The bonus of fully reclaiming our lives after trauma or destructive trauma-coping is choosing what life we want to live.
From the first steps of feeling capable of protecting ourselves, saying no, or choosing healthy people in our life we can start to see that there is a bigger picture: we have a life. Trauma can feel as if it has stolen life. But it exists, just on the other side of the pain and confusion. When we begin to re-orient and feel grounded again, it is important to regularly name and set intentions around the values and outcomes we want in our life. No longer dictated by fear, we can step into our given ability to choose. Taking advantage of freedom of choice is exercising all the “muscles” that felt weak or overstrained from life. These are signs of life.
If you or a loved one has experienced a difficult and disempowering event that resulted in extreme fear, changes in mood and behavior you may want to seek a trauma-informed therapist to help.
