Trauma

What is trauma?

It's a normal part of life to sometimes encounter situations where we feel distressed or unsafe. Ideally when this happens, our knowledge and survival instincts kick in to help us get through that tricky moment until we're safe again. Then we get to reflect on what happened, and if or how we could avoid or better manage a similar situation in future. The experience adjusts our system's responses in some small way, and we move on.

There are a few ways this can go wrong. To name a few:

Being stuck in an unsafe situation for a prolonged period of time and being unable to escape. This is known as complex trauma, and can lead to your system adapting to life in a traumatic environment as the norm, making it hard to fully embrace a life of safety.
Shutting away the experience because it feels too big - this leads to in some ways staying sort of stuck in place due to the inability to process what has happened, adjust, and keep going.
Struggling to be able to feel safe again after what happened. Shortly after a traumatic event it's normal for there to be a period of not understanding how it's possible to ever feel safe again. But sometimes that feeling doesn't go away, causing a constant state of feeling under threat, waiting for the next bad thing to happen - this might be PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

Trauma models and theories

There are a lot of different models and theories that can be used to understand trauma. Here are a couple that I sometimes use in my work:

Polyvagal theory. This theory concerns how our nervous system manages stress and threats. This can include things like the fight or flight response, freezing up, or disconnecting from the situation. Sometimes our reactions can feel outside of our control. By learning more about what happens to our systems in these moments and what can help calm our nervous state, we can learn to better manage when our system perceives a stressful situation.
Internal Family Systems (IFS). Sometimes difficult previous experiences can lead to us burying or adapting parts of ourselves to help protect us from encountering a similar situation in future. Even though this happens as a means of protection, it can prevent us from being able to act as our true selves. In IFS we get familiar with these parts of us that are buried, or that kick in automatically to try and keep us safe and happy. We work on understanding these parts and the roles they play, and work on trusting our own abilities to let our true selves show through while still keeping safe.
Attachment theory. We learn how to interact and bond with others based on our very early childhood experiences with our caregivers. This means that understanding our early experiences can really help us understand any relational difficulties we have in the present.

Exploring trauma in counselling

The most important first step in working through trauma in counselling is ensuring that you feel safe! Trying to address things with someone you don't feel at ease with, or trying to push to open up about things before you feel comfortable with doing so, isn't going to work.

It's not going to feel natural or comfortable to talk about your true vulnerabilities to a complete stranger, so it will take a few sessions for this to start happening naturally. But it's worth taking this time, because this slow start is what allows solid progress further down the line.

Throughout this process, I trust you and your instincts as to whether the time is right to start diving a little deeper. And all the surrounding things that we talk about in the process will help us in that journey, even if they aren't the main things that you've come to counselling for. All of you is valuable, and will have space to be seen and worked through when the time is right.