Do I Have Trauma? Signs and Proven Treatments
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Trauma changes you. It shatters your sense of self. It scars your heart. It haunts your dreams. It burrows into your nervous system, affecting how you rest, sleep, and breathe.
Trauma refuses to leave you alone. No matter how much you want to forget, it calls you back to remember, again and again. The memories cut fresh pain through you like shards of glass even if the initial impact happened long ago.
Sometimes, there’s no clear memory of what happened. Instead, trauma shows up as a feeling that’s followed you since childhood. It nests in your body, flooding you with cortisol long after the danger has passed. Your animal self knows something is wrong and nudges you constantly, keeping you restless and on edge even if you can’t figure out what it wants. It remembers its need to feel safe, and it can drive you to seek comfort—or numbness—in new and unsettling ways.
How Can I Heal If I've Been Hurt by Trauma?
More and more, we understand how the insidious process of post-traumatic stress is behind so much of what we come to therapy to heal. It’s everything we thought it was, yet so much more. Those of us who once counted ourselves lucky to be among the unscathed often find out that we are its victims, too.
Whether it’s the acute trauma that comes from being a victim of violence, the complex trauma of childhood emotional abuse, or the subtle wounds of secondary trauma that helping professionals often suffer, trauma is the reason so many of us feel the way we do.
Healing trauma is rarely easy. It’s challenging and can take a long time. But it’s possible if you get the right kind of help. Thanks to the expansion of trauma-informed mental health care over the last few decades, more people than ever before are healing from trauma and stepping into fuller, happier lives.
The first step in the journey of healing is getting the right information. That’s where we come in. In this article, we’ll help you understand what trauma is, the many forms it can take, how it affects you, what you can do to start feeling better, and where to look for help when you’re ready. Read on to learn more.
What Is Trauma?
Psychological trauma is a wound to your psyche. It’s a disruption that affects you on every level.
A bullet wound is a kind of physical trauma. Psychological trauma comes in many forms, but what unites them is how their effect on the psyche can be just as devastating as a bullet wound is to the body.
Not all kinds of trauma are equally intense. But they’re all intense, in their own way. They all change you. They all overwhelm your normal coping and healing mechanisms. They all have lasting effects on your relationships and your sense of self.
At its worst, trauma can obliterate your sense of meaning and justice. It can take away your faith in other people and the world. It can leave you in terrible pain or feeling hollow and numb inside.
The traditional, textbook definition of trauma is the psychological impact of an experience in which your life, safety, or physical integrity were threatened. In other words, psychological trauma follows acts of violence. It’s the shadow violence casts on us.
Trauma is that, but it’s more, too. In the last few decades, we’ve found out that experiences we wouldn’t have previously classified as trauma can have similar effects as overt acts of violence. That’s the bad news; the good news is that with the right care, any kind of trauma can be healed.
What Are the Different Kinds of Trauma?
All types of trauma can cause post-traumatic symptoms and conditions, but some kinds of trauma can cause additional complications. This is especially true when trauma is repeated and complex.
DEEP DIVE
Acute, Chronic, and Complex Trauma
There are three main types of trauma:
- Single-episode, or acute trauma, comes from experiencing a single traumatic event. Natural and human-made disasters can cause this kind of trauma.
- Multi-episode, or chronic trauma, comes from experiencing repeated trauma over an extended period of time. Examples of chronic trauma include the emotional impact of being in a long-term abusive relationship, the extreme, repeated stress of living in a war zone, or the mental suffering caused by prolonged, serious illness.
- Long-term, repeated harm in close interpersonal relationships can cause a special kind of chronic trauma called complex trauma. This kind of trauma usually comes from being abused or neglected as a child. It can also come from certain kinds of extreme experiences in adulthood, like being held hostage as a prisoner of war or as a victim of sexual trafficking.
Any kind of trauma can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They all can cause various trauma- and stress-related disorders as well as other mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. Trauma-related conditions increase the likelihood of developing a substance use disorder.
Chronic and complex trauma can also cause complex post-traumatic stress disorder (c-PTSD). Complex trauma in childhood has been linked to borderline personality disorder.
DEEP DIVE
Direct and Indirect Trauma
There’s another way to classify trauma, too:
- Direct trauma comes from experiencing trauma yourself. Examples include being a victim of violence or being at the scene of a natural or human-made disaster.
- Indirect trauma comes from witnessing someone else’s trauma. You can be traumatized by seeing someone else harmed, by finding out a loved one went through a traumatic experience, or by listening to someone talk about their trauma. This kind of trauma is also called secondary or vicarious trauma.
How trauma affects you depends on more than just what type of trauma it is. It depends on how well you’re doing at the time it happens, whether you’ve been through a traumatic experience before, and how much emotional and social support you have at the time of the trauma.
The most important thing to understand is that any kind of trauma can have a huge impact. Regardless of how you or a professional might classify what you went through, trauma can have deep, lasting effects on your psyche. In nearly every case, trauma requires help to heal.
What Are the Effects of Trauma?
Trauma can affect you in many different ways. How it affects you depends on what kind of trauma you went through and factors that are personal to you
Movies and television shows often dramatize the effects of trauma by showing characters having flashbacks. During a flashback, you recall traumatic events so vividly that you feel as if you’re reliving them. Not everyone who suffers trauma experiences flashbacks. Other trauma symptoms can include nightmares and intrusive thoughts and memories.
Trauma can sometimes show up as depression. Unresolved trauma can make it difficult to experience a full range of emotion. You may feel numb and have little to no reaction to things that affected you before, especially things that used to bring you joy. You may feel irrational guilt or shame about what happened to you.
Sometimes, post-traumatic stress makes you feel emotionally raw. You may be “triggered” into an intense emotional reaction by events that didn’t have that effect on you before the trauma.
The most difficult part of coping with trauma can be the whiplash you get by going back and forth from feeling numb to feeling so much it’s overwhelming. Going through this long enough can shut you down.
You may become hypervigilant—more easily startled by sudden events and more reactive to them. You may avoid places or situations where you fear a similar trauma could occur. You may put a lot of effort into staying away from anything that could trigger memories, thoughts, or feelings related to the trauma.
You may use substances to blunt your emotions or to try to block traumatic memories. You may do this only for a short while or for long enough that your substance use develops into a substance use disorder.
Dissociation is a significant and widespread trauma response. When you dissociate, you disconnect from your sensations, thoughts, feelings, or sense of self.
If you suffered repeated trauma, you may have learned how to remove yourself psychologically from your experience. You may have learned how to escape into your imagination or disconnect to the extent you sometimes feel as if you are observing yourself from a distance.
Fancy clinical terms for this include “derealization” and “depersonalization.”
Another kind of dissociative trauma response is dissociative amnesia. Many people call this “having a blackout.” You may not be able to remember the trauma or remember blocks of time after the trauma when you were suffering profoundly from the effects of post-traumatic stress.
“Spacing out” or escaping into a steady stream of distractions is a dissociative strategy we all use to counter boredom or anxiety. We all need to space out sometimes. But when spacing out becomes your default mode, it can make you feel like you’re not really there. It can leave you feeling like a ghost, haunting your life instead of living it.
Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Pain and Suffering
The surprising result of research study after research study is that trauma has a similar effect on the psyche no matter what kind of trauma it is.
Complex post-traumatic stress disorder can be severe, and yet it can be caused by experiences a lot of people wouldn’t label as trauma, like childhood emotional neglect and parental abandonment.
In fact, these types of toxic childhood stress, along with other more widely recognized childhood traumas like sexual and physical abuse, are measured by the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) quiz that clinicians use to measure your risk for trauma-related disorders and other mental health conditions.
DEEP DIVE
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
The ten adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that clinicians measure with the standardized ACEs quiz are:
- Childhood sexual abuse
- Childhood physical abuse
- Childhood psychological abuse
- Childhood physical or emotional neglect
- Exposure to a parent’s substance abuse
- Exposure to a parent’s depression or other mental illness
- Parental abandonment, including through separation or divorce
- Witnessing a parent be assaulted or sexually or physically abused
- Having a member of the household, especially a parent, go to jail or prison
- Growing up in a distant and emotionally unsupportive family environment
Many people have at least one ACE. Your ACE score is linked to your risk for negative outcomes including poor mental health, substance use disorders, relationship problems, and even chronic physical health problems like heart, lung, and autoimmune conditions.
Risks go up significantly if your ACE score is 4 or higher—meaning you can be at significant risk of pretty severe effects even if you never were physically threatened or assaulted as a child.
In fact, one of the most toxic and insidious elements that leads to the development of complex PTSD—and which is something people with multiple ACEs are more likely to have endured—is the feeling of being trapped in an unsafe environment where no one cares about you or is capable of protecting you.
Prolonged abuse, severe emotional neglect, and repeated invalidation of your own needs can press you into a hostile relationship with yourself that persists into adulthood.
Childhood trauma can make you more likely to seek dissociative states as a form of comfort or escape. This puts you at greater risk of developing substance use disorders and other addictions. It can predispose you to relationships in which you are retraumatized and the invalidating emotional environment of your childhood is reinforced.
You might have grown up in a toxic home, but you don’t have to be toxic to yourself. What you went through is “a big deal.” It did affect you. Its impact on you is not less because of what someone else might have gone through. There’s a reason you feel the way you do.
The Importance of Understanding and Validating Trauma
Trauma is a word we use for some of the worst experiences we can go through as human beings.
We use “trauma” to describe the psychological impact of being a victim of war, rape, repeated sexual abuse, kidnapping, torture, and extreme violence. These experiences cause some of the worst suffering imaginable.
It’s important to have the compassion and humility to appreciate that not all experiences of trauma are the same. However, it’s equally important not to minimize what you went through—to tell yourself that it doesn’t matter or that you don’t deserve any care or attention because someone else had it worse.
The defining characteristic of trauma is the effect it has on you. Many kinds of trauma can cause post-traumatic symptoms and conditions.
Some kinds of trauma can make you feel like you don’t “deserve your suffering” even if you suffered terribly. In response, you might treat yourself the same way a neglectful parent or abuser did by shaming, mocking, or psychologically abusing yourself.
You might say to yourself, “C’mon, what happened to you wasn’t that bad. Stop being such a baby,” invalidating your own feelings and pain like someone else probably did to you in the past.
When you do this, you perpetuate the cycle of traumatization and block your healing journey from even beginning.
The most important thing to understand is that your pain and feelings are real and valid, no matter what you or anyone else thinks about them.
If you’re hurting, you’re hurting. It’s not “dramatic” to be deeply hurt by what happened. It’s real. And you deserve care.
Any kind of trauma can have powerful, life-changing effects. The effect your trauma had on you is out of your control and is not a sign of weakness. It’s natural and human and a sign it’s time to seek help.
What Should I Do If Trauma Is the Reason I Feel This Way?
The first step in recovering from trauma is accepting that you’ve been through something that changed you. The next is reaching out for help. In most cases, you can’t heal from trauma on your own.
Trauma disrupts the natural self-healing processes of the body and mind. Most of the time, it just gets worse if you try to distract yourself and wait it out.
DEEP DIVE
Complications of Unresolved Trauma
In addition to PTSD, symptoms of unresolved trauma can compound over time and lead to complications like:
- Anxiety,
- Depression,
- Dysfunctional relationships,
- Substance use disorders, and
- Problems at work and home.
Untreated trauma can affect your physical health and put you at risk of chronic health conditions. Trauma lodges in the body and can leave you with chronically elevated cortisol and stress levels. These can disrupt your life in increasingly negative ways until you get the care you need to heal the underlying trauma.
To heal from trauma, you have to talk to someone about it. You may be able to heal significantly by writing your trauma story down and sharing it with others or by telling your story to others with whom you feel safe. Most of the time, though, therapy is your best option, or at least a necessary addition to other ways of healing.
The risk of telling someone other than a therapist your story is that their defensive reactions to the difficult story you’re telling could hurt you all over again. This is especially true if your initial trauma was relational and the person you’re talking to makes you feel unsafe or invalidated in the same way as the person who originally hurt you.
A good therapist knows how to respond in ways that won’t hurt you and that will keep you safe emotionally as you tell your story. They also know how to guide you through the healing process. Many therapy methods are specifically designed to help you release and resolve trauma.
Renewed Hope for Treating Trauma
Improved understanding of trauma has revolutionized the field of mental health. New insights into the effects of trauma have led to effective new therapies for trauma-related conditions.
Evidence-Based Treatments for Trauma
Some of the most well-supported evidence-based interventions for trauma include:
Therapy methods like EMDR and PET help you explore and process memories, feelings, thoughts, and sensations related to the trauma. Cognitive processing therapy helps you understand how trauma changed how you think and feel and to learn new ways to think about what happened.
Dialectical behavior therapy was originally developed to treat borderline personality disorder (BPD) but can effectively treat many trauma-related conditions. (This may be because BPD is often caused by trauma.) It’s especially effective in treating symptoms of dissociation and emotional dysregulation, as it provides tools to help you accept and reconnect to your inner states in a healthy way.
All therapy methods help you process feelings that are overwhelming to engage on your own. They all provide a safe place to explore and confront what happened. This can help you regain a sense of power and safety and overcome the sense of helplessness traumatic events can cause.
Other kinds of therapy, including psychodynamic therapy, can help you heal from trauma as well. Psychodynamic and narrative therapists excel in helping you find and tell your story—one of the most essential elements of healing trauma.
What Is the Secret to Healing Trauma?
The secret to healing trauma is to tell your story as fully and truly as you possibly can.
Part of what causes the intrusive symptoms of trauma—the images and memories that flood into your mind when you sleep and when you wake—is your mind’s inability to reconcile what happened into a linear narrative.
You try to take the shattered glass and reassemble the mirror, but the pieces won’t fit back together. A few pieces hang in the corners of the frame. Maybe you add a few more. But there are just too many pieces that don’t fit anymore.
What you see when you look into the broken mirror is distorted and frightening. Eventually, you may stop trying to put it back together at all. Instead, you might find ways to dissociate so that you don’t have to look at your shattered image anymore or feel whatever you feel when you look at it.
The first step in healing trauma is to put the mirror back together by telling a simple story about what happened that has a beginning, middle, and end.
When you experience trauma, your brain wants to undo the damage, which it does by trying to downplay, rationalize, or even erase what happened. But to heal, you have to stop denying what happened to you. You have to tell the true story.
A therapist can help you collect the pieces and put them back together. Then, after you can tell a simple, factual, linear story about what happened to you, they can help you find meaning in what happened.
To do that, you have to figure out how this trauma story connects to the larger story of who you are. You have to answer the question: who are you now that it’s happened and now that you accept it can’t be forgotten or undone? Answering those questions can help you grieve what you lost, honor your survival, and look for strength and purpose in your story.
Only then can you rebuild your sense of self. Only then can you start to see new possibilities—a new path forward. As you step onto that path, your life will change in ways you never imagined. You’ll start to find joy again, and small victories will build into bigger ones.
But to get there, you have to start at the beginning. You have to travel through the underworld trauma takes you into. And a therapist can make that journey so much less lonely and painful.
Conclusion
In most cases, you need help to heal from trauma. You need to tell your story to someone. You may find healing in writing your story down or telling it to people who love you, but usually, the best way to heal from trauma is to tell your story to a therapist.
While even the most well-meaning loved ones might respond to your story in a way that hurts you, a good therapist won’t invalidate or react poorly to your trauma story. In addition, they’ll probably know therapy methods that have been proven to help people heal and recover from trauma.
So, if you’re suffering from the effects of trauma, please reach out. You can search for local counselors that provide trauma-informed care on OpenCounseling or look for trauma-certified providers online at BetterHelp (a sponsor). You don’t have to keep suffering in silence. With a therapist’s help, you can reclaim your sense of hope and safety and start living a full life again.