If you follow any mental health, wellness, or relationship accounts on social media, you’ve probably encountered a lot of content about trauma. It can seem as though anything uncomfortable gets defined as “traumatic” and any reaction as a “trauma response.”

What’s the deal? Are we all traumatized? If we all are, is that just the human experience? What even is trauma?

Defining Trauma and Why it Matters

Before the mental health field got a handle on what trauma is and how it impacts us (think 100+ years ago), people who had experienced traumatic events and then suffered from the effects were called crazy, cast out of societies, or blamed for not being tough enough.

As is stands, trauma as a concept has come a long way legitimizing the echo of such events that haunt us daily, weekly, or on triggering occasions like independence day fireworks shows or a big family gathering for a holiday.

We typically define a traumatic event as something that is outside the scope of typical human experience, in which we didn’t have control, and where there was a real or perceived threat to our lives or the lives of people around us. These events overwhelm our capacity to cope in the moment. We can’t fully process what happened or what it means. And our brains can end up bringing back memories of the thing when we don’t want them or causing us to “overreact” to situations that seem similar (even in small ways) to the traumatic event.

There is usually much to consider when exploring this topic, especially in therapy, while even more complexity is added in couples and family work. Is this a trauma trigger, an anger problem, or just how we talk to each other?

Questions like these are frequently the topics of conversation in sessions that are trying to identify, uncover the origins of and make sense of the downstream behavioral effects that may be related to coping with trauma.

What is Acute Trauma?

And what makes it so pervasive to well-being and personal growth? Acute trauma is defined as a singular experience that is brief in duration and narrowly focused. This could include many things, but is typically likened to violent one-off type of events like a car accident, physical assaults, sexual assaults, shootings or environmental disasters.

I believe it necessary to mention that experiencing an acutely traumatic event does not necessarily mean that you will develop or experience a long-lasting or even short-term trauma response, but they do increase the likelihood of onset.

There is another type of ongoing or complex trauma that happens in relationships where there is abuse, neglect, betrayal, and/or violence.

Navigating Daily Life After Traumatic Events

If you’ve been through a traumatic event, you’d like nothing more than for it to just be over. But the trauma or it’s effects keep showing up in our daily life, we begin to have a hard time concentrating on our day-to-day with memories surrounding a difficult experience like this that causes us to feel:

• not safe,

• left behind,

• angry,

• fearful,

• hyper-vigilant,

• exhausted from lack of sleep and

• even difficulties in our relationships.

You don’t have to keep living like this every day. Therapy can help!

I work with clients in a safety-first, non-judgmental way full of empathy and compassion. We can often connect the dots to uncover a link between something acutely traumatic in your past to how we view, process, and navigate through life in the present.

If you suspect that you or someone you love is suffering from something linked to acute trauma, it is important to know that there are mental health clinicians, like myself and my colleagues, who are educated in trauma-informed care and that it is vital to understand and process these experiences so that we have a fighting chance at healing from or managing them in a meaningful way.

Why Trauma-Informed Therapy Matters in Trauma Recovery

Trauma shows up for everyone differently, but there are some telltale signs that you’re dealing with a trauma response. There are psychological or emotional signs that are sometimes an after effect of being “triggered” that could include things like:

• fear,

• sadness,

• shame,

• guilt,

• hopelessness, or

• depression.

  It is likely though that these signs get missed or go unnoticed and what shows up is irritability or anger.

The presence of anger is actually quite normal as it is what we call “ a bodyguard for deeper emotions”. Anger seems to be more culturally acceptable and, when expressed, may give us some temporary emotional relief. Unfortunately, the deeper emotion gets unnoticed and we continue on feeling the way we would have regardless of an angry explosion.

This is the nature of complex emotional responses to stressors and why I always recommend a mental health professional who is trauma-informed. You don’t want to be working with someone who thinks you have an “anger problem” and shames you for it when what’s really going on is a trauma response. The difference between anger related to something from your everyday, versus anger guarding something deeper is a fine line with nuances that are missed by someone who is not providing care from a trauma-informed perspective.

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