Recognizing Trauma and How You Can Heal
Many people often think of trauma as something resulting from only big, catastrophic events. Trauma can be big, but it can also be small. Major trauma can result from war, sudden loss of life, violence, major injuries, and or natural disasters, but it can also be caused by very common things like getting bullied, verbal abuse, forgetting a speech in front of a crowd, going to the dentist, going on a bad date, or having a bad job. It can be the result of anything that happens in our life that comes at us too quickly or at a magnitude greater than we can handle in the moment. When we look at it through this lens, we realize it begins to encapsulate a lot of things in our lives. We have all experienced some degree of trauma.
The Different Types of Trauma
1. Acute trauma: This is caused by a singular event. For example, a big traumatic event could be being held up at gun point or a natural disaster that destroys your home. But acute trauma can also be caused by smaller, more commonplace events such as a presentation going terribly wrong and feeling mortified, a fender bender, or being pulled over for a traffic violation.
2. Chronic trauma: This is caused by ongoing events. For example, being bullied, going to the doctor’s every month because of a chronic illness, or working at a bad job. You can experience ongoing trauma even if other areas of your life are going well.
3. Complex (or systemic) trauma: This is caused by chronic, invasive, and interpersonal events. This may be growing up in a house of neglect or abuse, growing up in a war zone, ongoing discrimination based on race, romantic preference, or gender, or growing up with a large level of dysfunction even if it’s not malice. For example, your parent has bipolar disorder and they are loving, but erratic.
How to Tell If You’ve Experienced Trauma
You might have experienced trauma and not even realize it, so when the symptoms arise, you don’t recognize it as a traumatic response. Noticing the moments in your life when you are more sensitive, quicker to lose your temper, or more irritable, and noticing the pattern of when these things arise in you can help you recognize if you’ve experienced trauma. If you are already in therapy, it suggests that you’ve noticed the pattern and it's impacting you enough to look into it with help from a professional. You are ready to improve the situation and that’s great.
It’s ok to recognize that even normal, common events like a fender bender, a mistake, or a misunderstanding can also overwhelm us to a degree that leaves a long lasting wound. If the wound is left untreated, it can result in trauma-like symptoms. When something triggers it, you might feel like you are overreacting and think, “Why am I acting like this? It’s not that big of a deal.” This might stem from a small traumatic event that was never resolved.
How EMDR Can Help
EMDR is a trauma-informed therapy. It is an effective way to treat acute and chronic trauma caused from both major traumatic events and small, common events.
Traumatic events have many facets to it and there are ancillary memories of associations that need to be addressed. EMDR endeavors to address all the ancillary memories. For example, if you were in a car crash and the accident was in part caused by rain, it is possible you would have mild traumatic responses to rain. Let’s say the trauma trigger is specifically the shine of water on pavement. You might encounter that many times in your life and not even realize you are responding to it, even mildly - increased heart rate, rapid breathing, feeling frustrated, snappy, or slightly more emotional as a reaction to increased adrenaline. EMDR can help identify those ancillary associations and treat them. Imagine how much more regulated your body and emotions would be if you were to address all those little triggers.
Spending time exploring those associations, why you’ve become irritable in certain environments or circumstances, and treating them through EMDR can help mitigate those responses, even if the traumatic event was an everyday or mundane occurrence. It’s okay if you don’t want to call what you experienced trauma because it was small (for example if you were giving a presentation and forgot your notes). Because EMDR is trauma intervention, it conceptualizes the experience - however small - as trauma and can be effective in helping you heal.
If you have experienced trauma, or even if you are unsure if you have, EMDR therapy may help. Katey Kingra, LMHC offers telehealth therapy in New York State. If you are ready to improve your life, let’s talk.