Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Trauma involves living through an experience or experiences that involve the threat of physical harm or death, or seeing someone else get seriously hurt or killed. Examples of trauma include: physical abuse; sexual abuse; severe neglect; being in a war, where you could be harmed or killed or where you see it happen to others; being held up or mugged; living through a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or flood, or living through an accident. PTSD can result from this, but by no means does it have to. People respond in different ways to trauma and age of onset can be an important factor. The younger we are when the trauma occurs, the more we tend to be affected by it. Severity is another factor. The more severe the trauma, the more it tends to affect us. Duration also matters. The longer the trauma continues over time, the more we tend to be affected by it.
In therapy, my aim is to help clients work through emotions related to the trauma. The experience of trauma may cause us to become highly anxious and overly alert to any threat, whether the threat exists or not. We may perceive threat when there is none. Trauma may also result in extreme avoidance. In other words, we may withdraw socially or completely shut down our feelings, often becoming numb. I aim to help clients process their trauma-related emotions in a way that allows them to deal with what happened to them. This way, they can work towards resolving internal conflicts over the trauma and feel less anxious or less depressed as a result.