Five Surprising Ways Trauma Impacts On Your Life.

Trigger Warning – this blog briefly mentions trauma events, drug use and self-harm.

“If everything is trauma then nothing is trauma”, this was something an eminent trauma therapist and writer recently said at a course I was attending on trauma and somatics.  In a sense this is accurate. Trauma is a word that’s bandied around a lot in pop-culture and social justice circles, but not everything that is difficult or upsetting equates to trauma.

Usually, trauma is used to describe a disturbing, deeply distressing experience of overwhelm.  However, the thresholds of distress and disturbance and the capacity to tolerate overwhelm are different for each of us.

Something that I take in my stride may be the very thing that pushes you into dysregulation and traumatic stress response. And we live in very traumatic times; collectively and individually each day exposes us to more and more potentially traumatising material – whether that’s news about the world or the encounters we have with other traumatised people.

Some (most) of us also carry (inter)generational trauma in our bodies and nervous systems too: our social location in terms of race, class, gender, disability and culture can amplify and intensify the intersectional experience(s) of trauma across time(s) and place(s).

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines trauma as:

“…. an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships, and even physical symptoms like headaches or nausea.

While these feelings are normal, some people have difficulty moving on with their lives. Psychologists can help them find constructive ways of managing their emotions.”

However, this definition of trauma has a few problems – it’s ahistorical and episodic, locating trauma in one-off “shock” events with a clear beginning, middle and end. It fails to account for the experiences of slavery, war, migration, environmental catastrophe, homo/transphobia, domestic violence, or white supremacy – ongoing, unfolding experiences of trauma that aren’t over. As I write this blog the “cost of living crisis” is escalating in the UK, and it could be argued that this is an ongoing trauma that those already experiencing poverty and marginalisation have been deep in the midst of for many decades, whereas the more privileged wider population are only just experiencing the initial impact of what’s to come…

Trauma then is complex and more than the sum of Type 1 (one off trauma) or Type 2 (repeated trauma) it’s an interplay of many macro and micro factors which Mark Sanders has described as a series of paper cuts that build up over time into a deeper wound. Trauma may overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which adds the dimension of reliving the trauma over and over again through the experience of intrusive flashbacks. Flashbacks can be emotional, visual or sensory.

Trauma can show up in our lives in a number of surprising ways:

1.       Feeling Isolated
Trauma (like depression which is often co-morbid) does a number on us by leading us to withdraw from the world and from our connections to others. The world becomes a frightening place and other people become potential threats to be on guard against. We may also blame ourselves for feeling this way and believe that everyone else apart from us is able to cope, which of course then feeds right back into the belief that there’s something wrong or defective about us and that’s why we feel like we do.  

2.       Aches and Pains Including Autoimmune Issues
The longer we live with trauma the more it impacts on the body. Many of the people I see clinically have been holding in their feelings for years. That has to go somewhere, and being stuck in the stress cycle for long periods of time inevitably impacts on the nervous system, the digestion, the musculoskeletal system and our hormonal regulation. We’ve been tensing ourselves up for so long that in the words of a well-known trauma book, “The Body Keeps the Score”.

3.       Spacing Out
One way we try to protect ourselves from the impact of trauma is to quite literally dissociate or “check out”. This is called depersonalisation; when we lose contact with the body, or derealisation when we lose contact with the moment-to-moment integrity of a situation. It can feel like looking through the wrong end of a telescope lens or that we’re watching our lives one step removed like it’s a film or on a screen. We can lose periods of time and turn up somewhere without realising how we got there or why, and this contributes to an ongoing sense of dislocation and isolation. We feel like we’re losing it.

4.       Self Harm and Disordered Eating
If it feels unsafe in the body and/or unsafe in the world, we will try anything to calm things down and get our systems back into balance (homeostasis) again. These kind of strategies are known as (unhelpful) self-soothing behaviours. Self-harm and disordered eating also fall into this category. What’s usually happening is that the threat system of the brain is switched full on, and certain foods (sugars, carbohydrates, caffeine, fats) and certain chemicals such as cortisol released during self-harm create short term calming effects, release tension and give a sense of control.

Once the short term gain wears off though, we are left feeling worse than ever with the trauma unresolved, and now the added dimensions of guilt, shame and disgust generated by the things we did to try and help ourselves.

5.       “Reckless” Behaviour
In a similar way to self-harm and disordered eating, trauma can lead us into doing all sorts of things to try and calm the body, obliterate the feelings of anxiety, or quell the electrifying desire to jump out of our own skin.

The most obvious behaviours here centre on sex and substances. Feelings of isolation can be temporarily overcome if we self-medicate using drugs or alcohol and then seek out environments where boundaries are more porous – chill out parties, raves, sex clubs and so on – to connect, transcend and feel safe. Sometimes we may even find ourselves replaying the trauma in our interactions in these scenes and play spaces as a way to try and heal.

Of course, these behaviours are effective because they provide such powerful short term rewards – the flood of serotonin, oxytocin and the brain’s opiates are a powerful cocktail and can be extremely good fun when you throw in sex, drugs and your music genre of choice. To be clear, we’re sex and kink positive here at Rhizome Towers and don't equate these practices as inevitable indicators of trauma. Long term though, if underlying trauma isn't addressed, for some people, things can spiral out of control very quickly as jobs, relationships and finances all go to the wall.

Other types of “daredevil” behaviour can also show up here – driving drunk at high speed with your eyes closed, standing on the edges of high places, unsafe sex with randoms off the internet, picking a fight in a biker bar or pushing the body to its limits through sport, steroids or self-neglect.

If any of these surprising ways trauma shows up are ringing a bell for you, we have a number of therapies that might be able to help.

• Trauma focused CBT can help with processing trauma memories and meanings;

• Eye Movement and Desensitisation Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy can also help with making sense of the trauma memory and putting it in its place;

• Mindfulness and embodiment practices such as yoga can help you reconnect safely with the body again;

• ACT and Compassion Focused Therapy provide a set of gentle tools to help activate the soothing system of the brain.

Trauma is a nuanced and complex area which can take a long time to recover from and may also require a number of tools and modalities. If you feel that trauma informed psychological therapy may be one of the tools that could help, feel free to contact us at Rhizome Practice to see how we work with trauma and PTSD.