Stress and Trauma

You may associate a trauma with big scale terrible or horrific events, such as a major disaster or environmental catastrophe or war or bombing. Yet trauma can involve any experience that was experienced as frightening and totally overwhelming by you at the time. Therefore, whether an event is experienced as traumatic is subjective and linked to a number of factors.

It depends on the nature of the actual event, how long it lasted, how you coped with it at the time, the particular circumstances that you found yourself in at the time, the resources that were available to you, your inner resilience, how others around you responded, the after-effects and further consequences of the event, your developmental age and level of understanding when this happened, and several other factors. Nobody can choose whether an event will be experienced as traumatic or not and trauma can affect any one of us.

Once an event is registered as traumatic by our body and mind, a number of survival-based processes are automatically set in motion which are not under conscious control. These are neurochemical reactions that are mobilised by our brain to help us to survive. They might provide us with specific endurance or enable us to respond in specific ways that, within the context of the trauma, can be understood to be adaptive.

After the trauma people can feel highly agitated, very emotional or more vigilant or quite numb and shut down. Most people suffer from some reactions, such as thinking the event over and over again, or having nightmares, or feeling very restless. For some people these reactions don’t last and the system can re-settle and calm down after the traumatic event. However, for others the effect of trauma can have long-lasting consequences and a profoundly disruptive impact on functioning and can devastate life.

One of the consequences of trauma can be the development of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which has been claimed to be the most disabling of all psychological problems. When a trauma has been very severe and complex people often develop dissociative responses, such as a sense of detachment from the body or a sense of things feeling not quite right or unreal (derealisation). Dissociation can happen with or without the development of PTSD.

Some trauma has been so severe, especially when it happened in childhood and few resources were available to the person at the time, that the traumatic events may be dissociated and the person remembers only fragments or very little of what happened to them.  Sometimes, people had to develop different parts or personalities to enable them to survive the traumatic events. This can result in various dissociative problems, including Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). At the time when the trauma happened dissociation was an automatic and adaptive response, but now it may be highly disabling.

Trauma and Dissociation

“Your trauma is not who you are. It is something that was done to you or happened to you. Healing involves embracing and transforming the emotional pain so that out of that place of darkness can grow your own shimmering light”

When there has been trauma or overwhelming life experiences, most people have to let go of parts of their authentic Self (dissociate) and adopt coping strategies in order to survive their specific circumstances as best as they can. While highly adaptive initially – because this blocks out the pain of these experiences at the time – in later life there are often great personal costs attached to these trauma-related, survival-based strategies.

While dissociated, the emotional and physical sensations connected to your past experiences have not been able to be processed and integrated. This can cause very uncomfortable symptoms such as sudden intrusive, overwhelming images or memories, flashbacks and reliving experiences and nightmares.  You may also experience strong emotional or physical reactions, such as panic attacks, feelings of numbing or detachment, hypervigilance, safety behaviours, guilt, including survivor guilt or dissociative symptoms, such as feeling disconnected from life. Often events in daily life, such as close personal relationships with family or partners, can trigger and intensify these symptoms.

However, situations which confront us with great inner pain, such as past trauma or abuse or a current disaster or life crisis, can often move us into a process of enormous positive inner growth and healing. This journey can be difficult to make on your own, especially when you are caught up in the midst of extremely distressing and overwhelming trauma symptoms.

Trauma Can Arise From Many Different Experiences

Dr Claudia Herbert’s work as one of the leading trauma specialists within the field has enabled her to work with a wide range of Trauma cases, all of which help to show how varied the causes of trauma can be. These examples of the types of incidents she has helped people recover from help highlight how diverse the range of traumatic and stressful life events which cause PTSD can be:

• Accidents, including road accidents, industrial, domestic or medical accidents
• Sudden loss, traumatic loss, for example loss of a child or loss by suicide
• Natural and man-made disasters such as earthquakes, storms, floods, avalanches, train crashes, gas explosions, building collapses or environmental disasters
• Domestic violence, including physical, sexual or emotional abuse
• Hostage experiences and the Stockholm Syndrome
• Crime or terror, including suicide bombings or terrorist attacks
• Acts of war and political crime, including torture
• Rape and date rape
• Childhood abuse, including organised sexual abuse and crime, abuse by clergy and other authority figures, institutional abuse
• Perinatal, postnatal and early pre-verbal trauma
• Miscarriage, stillbirth or fertility related traumas
• Medical trauma

Treating PTSD and Trauma Effectively

“Effective trauma treatment is able to guide and facilitate your journey from trauma to positive growth and healing in a safe, paced and compassionate manner.”

– Dr Claudia Herbert

Successful trauma treatment works with all responses to trauma to assess and help you understand what effect a trauma may have had on you and which condition you might be suffering from. Assessment can take several sessions and, when at its best, results in a collaboratively developed treatment plan guiding your healing going forwards.

Trauma treatment helps develop strategies to build and strengthen your sense of safety and inner resources enabling you to process, integrate and heal from your traumatic or stressful life experiences. Working within a positive growth model, in many cases helps clients find that, once they process their painful traumatic experiences, they discover a new inner strength and feel more alive and able to engage in the positive aspects of life.

A Holistic Approach to Stress and Trauma Therapy     

An effective approach to treating stress and trauma should be individually tailored to the specific needs of each client and based on the most up-to-date research and expertise including integrative and holistic approaches to working with trauma. It’s important that your therapist recognises that the imprints of trauma are stored in bodily and sensory form and in order to process trauma it’s necessary to work with the information processing systems of body, mind and soul.

The most valuable trauma work does not believe in quick-fix cures or short-cuts to by-pass your journey of recovery, instead that specialist trauma therapy must be individually paced within each person’s window of tolerance so that deep and lasting healing can take place.

Stress and trauma treatment often draws on a range of therapeutic approaches including, Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (T-CBT), Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), Schema Therapy, Transpersonal and Depth Psychology, and body-focused strategies, such as Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Havening Techniques®, and Calatonia.