How to help yourself if you’ve experienced trauma.

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Many people I work with seek out therapy because they have anxiety. They describe feeling anxious in various situations and the anxiety showing up in lots of different ways. We start working on ways to relate to their anxious experiences differently and begin moving toward a more meaningful life.

Often, as we are working together it becomes evident that the anxiety symptoms that they are experiencing are rooted in trauma. For some it could be something recent that happened and for others it could have been events from many years ago. For many people these traumatic experiences keep showing up in the form of anxiety and treating this trauma is as important as addressing the anxiety symptoms.

What is trauma?

Trauma is a psychological injury that hasn’t healed. Typically when something difficult happens to you, you are able to process it, make sense of it, and move on. The difficult experience becomes a memory but there isn’t much emotion attached to it. While you experienced a psychological injury, you were able to heal.

With trauma, your brain isn’t able to process the difficult experience. Even though the incident occurred is in the past, when you recall what happened the pain is very much in the present.

Trauma can be defined as an intrusive experience.

Here’s an important aspect of what defines trauma - it’s an intrusive experience. That means that even though things at the present moment may be just fine and you are completely safe, you experience feelings, thoughts, body sensations, memories, urges, etc. that are painful and intrude on your present experience. Sometimes trauma symptoms are called “flashbacks” because it is like you are being transported back in time to the painful thing that happened. These experiences intrude on your present life.

A trigger can be anything that is linked to the trauma experience.

It is important to clearly define what a trigger is and how it works. A trigger is anything (an image, a sound, a place, etc.) that ordinarily should not cause distress but that triggers a psychological response if you have experienced trauma. Some aspect of the trigger is linked to a trauma memory.

When you becomes triggered it means that things are perhaps just fine in the present moment but you are responding like things are not fine at all. An example would be someone who witnessed a violent incident in the past. If they go to a movie and see a similar violent incident on screen their nervous system will react as if it is really happening, even though this is not happening in real life and they are actually safe.

Simple vs complex trauma

For some people, a traumatic experience can consist of a single event such as an automobile accident. The experience can be traumatic and lead to intrusive experiences. Others, however, have experienced numerous traumas that could span many years. This complex trauma can be challenging. It can be hard to figure out what events caused the intrusive experiences and often they might be linked together.

I think it is also important to note that while a big experience like a car accident can certainly be traumatic, a series of small experiences can accumulate into trauma. For example, a single incidence of being bullied as a child might not be traumatic, but years of bullying (however subtle) can be.

How can you help yourself if you’ve experienced trauma?

The key component to helping yourself if you’ve experienced trauma is to create safety. What does safety look like? Safety is about helping your nervous system realize that things are OK in the present moment - that right here and right now you are actually safe. Two tools that can help are grounding and resourcing.

Grounding

Grounding is just what it sounds like. It is about connecting with the ground, the earth below you, here in the present moment. It is also about connecting with your body and your senses.

When you experience trauma, your body and mind move out of the present moment and into the past trauma you experienced. Grounding can be a powerful practice to gently ease yourself back into the present where you are likely safe. Here are some ways you can ground yourself:

Your breath

Your breath is an anchor in the present moment. It is always happening right here and right now. Bringing your attention to your breath, even just observing how your body breathes, can be really helpful. Changing your pacing of breathing by lengthening your exhalation to slow down your breath can also help. There are a variety of breathing practices that can help you come back into the present moment and into your body if you’ve experienced something intrusive.

Your senses

All of your senses can help you feel safer. Your senses can help you shift focus from an intrusive experience to what is happening in the present. You could start by simply noticing your feet are on the ground and how your feet connect you to the earth. You could engage one or all of your senses and begin noticing what is happening around you. For example, you could take a moment to notice what sounds you can hear in the present moment or what sensations you are noticing on your skin. You can follow a simple senses grounding exercise here.

Resourcing

Resourcing is about creating internal resources that help calm you and feel safe. Think of these as a form of guided visualization. Just like you can access a neural network in your brain that feels distressing (i.e. a trauma memory) you can also access neural networks that help you to feel OK. One of the easiest ways to do this is to take a moment to imagine a place that feels really peaceful to you. You can then take some time to use your mind’s eye and imagination to explore this place and really savor how you experience it. You can imagine doing this on your own or you might imagine someone with you that helps you feel at ease. When you practice this kind of visualization, you can create a resource that can be accessed when you feel distressed. You can imagine moving back into this peaceful place and what it is like to be there.

One other note about safety. For some people, feeling safe means not talking about or bringing up the trauma that occurred in their past. It is OK to not want to talk about the experience with others or even consider it yourself. In fact, bringing up the trauma memory can be retraumatizing! If you find yourself struggling to even access the memory working with a trauma therapist can help.

What is you need more support?

Some traumas resolve on their own and many people are able to address and process what happened to them to the point where it is no longer distressing. But for others, healing the trauma that occurred requires deeper work. Treating trauma is a combination of building tools to feel safe and also processing the trauma so that it no longer is distressing. There are a variety of interventions that a trauma therapist can use to do this. The primary intervention I use is EMDR.

EMDR

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR utilizes sounds, lights, and taps to facilitate processing of trauma memories. EMDR helps the brain to do the work of processing that it wasn’t able to do when the traumatic event happened. There is significant research that shows that for people who have PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) EMDR can help lessen the intrusive symptoms that show up and can help transform traumatic memories to more adaptive and less emotional ones. Learn more about EMDR here.

Trauma experiences can be extraordinarily painful and lead to significant suffering. It can be hard to engage with life when you feel easily triggered and intrusive memories show up. The good news is that there are a variety of techniques such as grounding that can help build safety and it is possible to heal trauma memories.