Taking Back Control: Life After Trauma
June was PTSD awareness month and June 27th was PTSD awareness day. Trauma is more than just the diagnosis of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Trauma is more than just a day or a month in a year. For those who have experienced trauma or repeated trauma, it’s every day and every month. It’s also not just a diagnosis exclusive to military veterans. It’s your neighbor, your friend, your colleague, and your significant other. Trauma does not discriminate. Trauma affects everyone either personally or as a secondary victim. We can see it first hand, we can hear about it or we can see it on tv.
A traumatic event has various impacts on all aspects of your life: your feelings, thoughts, behaviors, dreams, relationships, aspirations, and goals. It can change the direction of your life, for better or for worse. It can be a natural disaster, an accident, an intentional act, or a combination of anything and everything in between. Trauma usually involved the loss of control or at least the feeling of being in control. When we let someone or something take that power away, we feel loss and helplessness. But the point of this blog is to provide you with what we call psychoeducation as well as steps to start taking back control of your life.
According to the authors of The PTSD Workbook, there are 3 types of factors that influence whether or not someone develops PTSD: pre-event factors, event factors, and post-event factors. Pre-event factors include such things as previous exposure to trauma, underlying mental health diagnoses, substance abuse, instability, lack of support, identifying as a female, age, genetics, and so on. Event factors include the threat to life, events meaningful to the victim, geographic nearness, repeated exposure, length of exposure, close relationships to the perpetrator, coping skills, and much more. Post-event factors include lack of support, identifying as male, inability to find meaning in the suffering, self-blame, and lack of support.
When we experience trauma, it’s recorded in what we refer to as “implicit memory.” Implicit memory is referred to as unconscious or automatic memory. This type of memory uses past experiences to remember things without thinking about them, no matter how long ago those experiences occurred. They’re memories and subsequent behaviors that have been conditioned. Our brain associates things like sights, sounds, smells, or other stimuli with these memories. These queues can trigger memories as if they’re currently happening. This is both good and bad. How many of you have a certain favorite smell that reminds you of your childhood or your loving grandmother? For my fellow Lodians, you know that smile that came across your face as you drove past General Mills because of the smell of Cheerios. Or when I smell Oil of Olay or Aquanet, I have fond memories of my grandmother who has since passed. So imagine how this link could be distressing to triggers like fireworks on the 4th of July to a combat veteran who saw her entire platoon blown up by an IED as she hunkers down in the safety of her bedroom. Sometimes these triggers are so deeply buried that we don’t even know the cause but it feels real and then wonder if we’ve “gone crazy.”
Trauma memories are not stored in a linear manner in our brain, they are often jumbled, vague or just don’t make any sense. This is because our brain often has the memory with no words due to the decrease in the area of our brain responsible for speech during a traumatic event. Trauma expert, Bessel Van der Kolk, states in his book The Body Keeps Score, “All trauma is preverbal.” This explains why certain things can trigger an unexpected trauma reaction or why it is difficult for victims of various abuses to recall and/or report their experiences. It’s not because they’re making it up, it’s because their brain has done a good job of protecting them from the atrocities that have been done to them.
There are various ways to go about trying to retrieve or process these memories and I highly encourage you to reach out to a professional who specializes in trauma-informed care to help you do so. You can find links to mental health provider directories on my Resources page. Continuously avoiding the memories further ingrain them into your brain, every time your memories are triggered it creates a new “event.” The pain, rage, shame, anxiety, and other negative feelings are reinforced. It’s important to explore and process what happened to you to decrease the fear associated with those memories. It can help you regain your sense of safety and control over these memories. It’s not about erasing the memory or event from your brain but rather allowing you to take back the control you were robbed of.
If you would like to learn more about various trauma processing techniques or get more information on trauma and/or a provider who specializes in it you can email me at Colleen@scatteredpotential.com, subscribe to my blog, or my newsletter by filling out the form below. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.