Trauma and Healing refers to the process of recovering from the psychological, emotional, cognitive, and sometimes physical effects of overwhelming or distressing experiences.
What is trauma?
Trauma may occur when an experience overwhelms a person’s ability to cope or creates a lasting sense of threat, helplessness, or loss of safety. Examples may include:
- Abuse, neglect, or violence
- Serious accidents or medical events
- Loss of a loved one
- War or displacement
- Chronic bullying, harassment, or stalking
- Repeated exposure to frightening or unsafe environments
- Interpersonal betrayal or abandonment
Not everyone exposed to the same event develops lasting trauma symptoms.
What may trauma affect?
Trauma may influence:
- Emotions: fear, anger, shame, guilt, emotional numbness
- Thinking: intrusive memories, negative beliefs, difficulty concentrating
- Body: hyperarousal, sleep problems, muscle tension, startle responses
- Relationships: mistrust, avoidance, difficulty with intimacy
- Behavior: withdrawal, compulsive behaviors, substance use, or excessive vigilance
- Sense of self: diminished self-worth, helplessness, or feeling disconnected from oneself
What does healing involve?
Trauma healing is generally may not be about forgetting what happened. It is about developing greater safety, integration, flexibility, and control over one’s responses.
A trauma informed healing process may involve:
- Safety and stabilization: establishing physical and psychological safety.
- Understanding: learning how trauma may affect the mind, body, emotions, and behavior.
- Emotional regulation: developing skills for managing overwhelming emotions and physiological arousal.
- Processing: carefully working through traumatic memories and meanings when appropriate.
- Reconnecting: rebuilding relationships, identity, purpose, and everyday functioning.
- Meaning making: developing a sense of meaning or personal growth without minimizing the trauma.
Approaches such as CBT, EMDR, CPT, Prolonged Exposure, DBT skills, mindfulness-based interventions, and other trauma focused therapies May be appropriate depending on the individual and the nature of the trauma.
An important distinction:
Healing does may not necessarily mean that a person never feels distress again. It may mean that the traumatic experience becomes something that happened to them rather than something that continues to control their present life.
Shervan K Shahhian
LIBERTY PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION 