What is the impact of trauma?
Trauma can overwhelm a person’s ability to cope with challenging events or experiences.
There are so many ways of thinking about how we respond to trauma, the five Fs is a very simple way of starting:
Freeze
people might be startled by what they are experiencing, may hold their breath, and find themselves unable to move.
Fold
people might play dead until the threat has passed to try to preserve themselves, and survive it.
Fight
People might want to bite, shout and attack to defend themselves or fight off a threat.
Fawn or Befriend
people might try to be nice to, praise or make friends with someone who is threatening them in an attempt to calm them or convince them not to attack or neglect them.
Flight
sensing or experiencing danger, people might look for an exit from the situation, prepare themselves to escape, and run towards it
What are the common changes resulting from trauma?
As a human-focused network, we talk about the impacts and changes that children, young people and adults experience following trauma. Some people refer to these are symptoms of trauma stress, but we know that lots of people will experience some of these changes, and still not need or get a clinical or medical diagnosis, for example of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
To deal with the overwhelming experiences of trauma, people are forced to adapt their thoughts, memories, emotions, behaviours, and relationships with others. These in some way help them to survive in their environment and make sense of their experiences. Some of the most commonly reported adaptations are:
Anxiety:
becoming very anxious because of feelings of a lack of safety, trust or control in relation to themselves, other people or the environment around them. This could include create magical beliefs or behaviours that they hope will protect them from further threat or danger in the future.
Avoidance:
attempting to avoid anything that could remind them of a traumatic experience, including specific places, kinds of people, objects or forms of touch or intimacy.
Depression and low self-esteem:
feelings of low self-worth, powerlessness, humiliation or shame resulting from a traumatic experience. This could include increased feelings of isolation and/or withdrawal from specific places or social interactions.
Dissociation:
experiencing ourselves as disconnected from our surroundings, a traumatic experience, or our sense of self. This can include common accounts of feeling like we were ‘outside of our body’ or ‘watching a film’ when we had a traumatic experience.
Emotional Dysregulation:
having intense and overwhelming emotions, and emotional responses, which do not seem to reflect every day experiences; including seemingly unexplainable bursts of anger, sadness, or fear.
Hyperarousal and hypervigilance:
perceiving the world and other people as dangerous and threatening. This could include becoming very focused on changes in other people’s emotions, movements or behaviours or constantly scanning for threats in an environment.
Intrusive memories or thoughts:
unwanted images, words or sensations that enter people’s minds, which remind them of the trauma they have experienced. Sometimes these are accompanied with shaking and sweating and could be experienced as waking terrors or nightmares.
What do these changes mean?
Too quickly professionals can incorrectly label these common adaptations as problematic, challenging, pathological, criminal. Such labels are harming as they risk retraumatising the person, giving them the impression they are responsible for the trauma they have experienced, and undermining any trust or safety that could be offered.
We need to always remember that behaviour is communication, and that we need to see what the reasons for a child, young people or adult acting in this way might be.
Following the Childhood Trauma Recovery Network’s human-focused approach, we can best understand these changes people’s attempts to:
survive in their immediate (traumatic) environment,
find ways of mitigating or tolerating the experience, by using the resources they have available to them,
establish a sense of safety or control,
make sense of the experiences they have had.
(adapted from Bush, 2018).
What are traumatised systems?
In addition to people being traumatised in childhood, they can live in wider systems that are also traumatised. For example, families, communities, institutions, and societies can be traumatised by conflict, violence, abuse, and neglect.
This is why the Childhood Trauma Recovery Network talks about the importance of trauma-informed approaches being embedded in all services and community interventions.
We believe that sometimes you have to work with a whole family, community or system to address the impact of a trauma, end a cycle of violence or tackle the intergenerational transmission of traumatic stress (following Bloom, 2013),
How can we support people to recover from childhood trauma?
Recovery and growth beyond trauma starts by recognising the ways that people and communities have survived in the face of traumatic experiences.
We must celebrate the different ways that children, young people, families and adults have tried to come to terms with trauma, and offer hope by giving people new knowledge, skills and resources that better respond to the impact trauma has had on their lives and experiences.
As Dr Karen Triesman (2017) suggests, in trauma-informed approaches ‘every interaction is an intervention’ and a chance for healing.
You can read more about how we can support people to recover from trauma here.