What is Trauma?
Trauma can effect anyone, at any age.
Trauma is an experience that overwhelms a person’s natural adaptive coping mechanisms, often leaving them feeling powerless and hopeless. Trauma can occur to a person of any age, even an infant, and is dependent on the perceptions of the person involved.
Trauma triggers the fundamental human survivor mechanisms of fight, flight or freeze. Following a traumatic experience people can experience a variety of stress symptoms, including nightmares, intrusive thoughts and memories, flashbacks, heightened arousal symptoms such as an exaggerated startle response, withdrawal, depression, numbness, and dissociation.
Children who experience trauma can demonstrate emotional and behavioral regulation problems, developmental delays, and attachment problems. People who survive trauma often experience somatic complaints or chronic health problems.
If you’ve experienced trauma in your life, you might be tempted to cope in ways that help you feel better in the short term, but hurt in the long term. This can include turning to alcohol or drugs, self-harming behaviors including suicide thoughts or attempts, eating problems, or other behaviors that interfere with your health and relationships.
There is hope and there can be an end to the oppressive tunnel that trauma survivors sometimes feel trapped in. Therapy is one tool that can help guide survivors from helplessness to empowerment.