Trauma is experienced when you face or witness a potentially life-threatening experience. A traumatic experience overwhelms the coping system of your mind. While most of us can deal with everyday stressors, a traumatic experience puts us in a state of permanent alert. It is an overactive and lingering stress response.
Trauma that is experienced in childhood is especially damaging because young minds are incapable of dealing with and understanding overwhelming stressors. Trauma in childhood is not only caused by bad things that happened but also by good things that didn’t happen. For instance, children expect their parents to love and meet their needs unconditionally. If that doesn’t happen, it can be traumatic.
Effects of trauma
Trauma creates the following adverse effects:
- Loss of power and control1Herman, J. L. (1998). Recovery from psychological trauma. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 52(S1), S98-S103.
- Feeling helpless
- Feeling isolated
- Loss of trust
- Loss of hope
- Loss of identity
If you could do nothing about an overwhelmingly negative event, you’re bound to feel powerless and helpless. Trauma also creates a sense of isolation and being different from others because the mind enters survival mode. In this mode, the mind’s energy and resources are directed toward ensuring survival, not connecting with others.
Trauma can also induce a loss of trust in yourself, others, and the world. Loss of trust in yourself because you couldn’t deal with it. Loss of trust in others who traumatized you or didn’t help you cope. Lastly, loss of trust in the world because you believed it to be a safe and just place.
Because of trauma, you constantly have a threat looming over your head. You believe there’s no way out of this danger. You lose hope for the future. Survival mode cares about surviving, not thriving.
Finally, trauma makes you lose parts of yourself. It prevents you from being whole. It creates protective beliefs and behavioral patterns that try to minimize the threat that you’re experiencing. Part of that is repressing traits that your mind believes led to your trauma and enhancing traits that can protect you from the re-occurrence of trauma.
For example, if you felt abandoned as a child, you might get anxiously attached to others and become a people pleaser to avoid future abandonment. The people-pleasing part of you gets enhanced, while the assertive part gets repressed.
Stages of trauma recovery
Recovering from trauma is all about reversing these effects. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not necessary to go to therapy to recover from trauma. While therapy can help, many people recover from trauma on their own.2Harvey, M. R. (1996). An ecological view of psychological trauma and trauma recovery. Journal of traumatic stress, 9(1), 3-23. That is, they naturally progress through the stages of trauma recovery. Regardless of whether or not you seek expert help, if you want to heal your trauma, you have to move through the following stages:
1. Awareness
You can’t solve a problem you’re unaware of. Acknowledging that your past is affecting your present is the first step in healing trauma.3Hansen, C. E. (2005). Psychometric properties of the trauma stages of recovery. Psychological reports, 97(1), 217-235. Because traumatic memories and feelings are painful, the mind tries to hide them from consciousness so we can go about with our daily lives unbothered. But when you get triggered, all that past pain resurfaces and typically has detrimental effects on your present.
While the mind wants to hide the trauma from you, it also wants to resolve it. It’s stuck in this dance between hiding it from you and showing it to you when you’re triggered or get flashbacks and nightmares. People are often taken aback when they are triggered, and trauma resurfaces in their consciousness. They don’t want to face the dead bodies of their painful memories that they buried on a rainy night a long time ago.
The longer you avoid facing trauma memories, the longer it will take to heal. Most people never heal themselves and pass their destructive patterns to future generations.
2. Processing
Getting triggered is an excellent opportunity to face your trauma, acknowledge it, and process it. Trauma memories tend to be fragmented. They’re unlike other memories that get stored typically and fade over time. They’re unprocessed memories that you haven’t made sense of yet. How could you, given that your mind was overwhelmed with stress at the time of trauma?
As a result, when you’re reliving a traumatic experience in the present via triggers, flashbacks, or nightmares, you experience those memories as happening in the now. They’re not part of your past like your other memories. Processing trauma is all about organizing your memories around your trauma. It’s giving your trauma memories a start, a middle, and an end. It’s to understand deeply what happened and why it happened.4Kaminer, D. (2006). Healing processes in trauma narratives: A review. South African journal of psychology, 36(3), 481-499.
When you process your trauma, you move it from the present to the past, where it belongs.
3. Reprogramming beliefs
One of the most detrimental effects of trauma, especially complex trauma, is how it changes your beliefs and, as a consequence, your identity. Before the trauma, you were likely a more expressive, whole human being. You had no trouble being who you wanted to be and meeting your needs. Because the mind has no good explanation of trauma, it is often internalized and personalized. In simple terms, that means you blame yourself, or rather parts of yourself to be more accurate, for the trauma.
As mentioned previously, those parts of yourself that your mind believes caused the trauma are shut down or repressed. Those parts of yourself that can protect you from trauma are enhanced. This results in an imbalance in personality, leading to an imbalance in attitudes and, ultimately, an imbalance in life. This accounts for a lot of individual differences between people.
For instance, someone who is hyper-independent probably went through a traumatic experience where they felt too dependent and trapped. The ‘I can ask others to meet my needs’ part of them gets repressed, and they might see seeking help as a weakness.
The things we negatively judge in others are often those we haven’t healed in ourselves.
Traumatic experiences can induce negative core beliefs such as:
- “I am helpless.”
- “I am unsafe.”
- “I am defective.”
- “I am not good enough.”
When you process trauma, you’ve already shaken these irrational beliefs. They no longer have any ground to stand on. When you understand, for instance, that the reason your parents emotionally neglected you had nothing to do with you, you stop personalizing your trauma. You stop blaming yourself.5Taute, C. (2023). Learning to Cope with Trauma and Moving Forward. Psychology, 14(6), 1033-1037.
The next critical step in reprogramming these beliefs is to prove to your mind that you’re the opposite of what these beliefs are telling you. For instance, if you believe you’re not good enough, be good enough in multiple life areas. When you become good enough, try becoming great. That will neutralize the poison of these negative core beliefs.
4. Post-traumatic growth
People grow in the areas of life where they have been traumatized. People grow to prove to themselves and others that their past (trauma) doesn’t define them. After you’ve processed your trauma and changed your negative core beliefs, you might wonder:
“What happens now?”
“Who am I now?”
This is a sort of positive identity crisis. Your entire personality was a trauma response. It no longer is. You don’t know who you are anymore. You probably lost some trauma-shaped traits that you cherished. Now is the time to grow beyond your trauma. You’ve unshackled yourself from the burden of your past. You can once again be who you choose to be, like you were before the trauma happened.
You can now choose which traits to enhance and which ones to dim down. You can choose to live a more balanced life.6Tummala-Narra, P., Liang, B., & Harvey, M. R. (2007). Aspects of safe attachment in the recovery from trauma. Journal of aggression, maltreatment & trauma, 14(3), 1-18. You’re no longer driven by survival. You’re driven by the desire to thrive.
You know you’ve healed your trauma when you:
- Regain a sense of power and control over your life
- No longer feel helpless
- Can connect with others securely
- Trust yourself and others appropriately
- Have hope for the future
- Don’t feel so different from others (See the humanity in yourself and others)
- Don’t judge or hate others unnecessarily
- Are clear about the identity you want to build for yourself
- Rebuild your self-esteem