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Recognising Trauma: A personal experience

Sometimes we can experience events in our life that are highly stressful and difficult to cope with. We might see these experiences as examples of trauma. How we understand something as traumatic is very personal and subjective, other people can’t know or decide what is or has been traumatic for you. Even two people who experience the same event, where both understand it as traumatic, can react to it very differently.

Examples of traumatic events could include having a crime committed against you, being involved in an accident or an act of war, or witnessing such an event even if you are not directly involved in it. There can also be other traumatic experiences such as experiencing stress over a protracted period of time such as being bullied, or being stuck in a relationship that is abusive. There’s no clear rule of what is a traumatic experience and it is really defined by how each of us sees and reacts to these events.

How trauma can affect daily life

When we have a traumatic experience we can find ourselves feeling changed by it and unable to go about our lives as we had before. We may find ourselves reacting disproportionately to small stresses or feel strong feelings such as fear, anger or panic or even physical responses that don’t feel related or proportional to what is going on in the present moment. This in itself can feel incredibly unsettling and leave us with the unhelpful belief like that we have lost our mind or that we are unable to recover from what has happened. Sometimes this is called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

People who have experienced trauma can often carry a lot of shame and/or embarrassment for what happened and this can make it hard to talk about or seek help. If this is the case for you, it’s important to realise that however you responded to what happened, it was what you needed to do to survive that experience. The way we respond to perceived threats to ourselves, commonly known as our fight or flight response, is an ancient automated survival mechanism in our nervous system that will lead us to react in the best way we can that ensures our survival. Normally when this is triggered we are able to calm ourselves down afterwards and then process what has happened so that we can go about our lives as usual.

Coping with Trauma and Seeking Help

With traumatic experiences however this process gets interrupted and we can get trapped in one of our survival responses. From the perspective of Gestalt Therapy, the effects of trauma come not from the event in itself then but rather how we responded to them at the time and equally as important, what did or didn’t happen afterwards that might have left our natural process interrupted. This is often what may have left us stuck in part of our fight or flight response.

Gestalt Therapy works to help those who have experienced trauma by helping to identify what part of that person’s process got blocked and help with integrating these traumatic experiences so that they have less impact in your day to day life and allow you to live more fully in the present and to respond to situations more effectively. Counselling can help those who have been through trauma to be more accepting and understanding of themselves.