Understanding Trauma and Traumatic Events
What Is Trauma?
Trauma is any event, situation, or circumstance that results in physical, emotional, and or life-threatening harm.
What Are Traumatic Events?
Traumatic events are any event, series of events, or circumstances that shock or scare you, harm you, or rob you of your sense of safety.
Experiencing a traumatic event can mean the event happened to you, happened to someone you know, or you witnessed the trauma.
How Do Traumatic Experiences Affect Mental Health?
Responses to traumatic experiences can vary, but many may feel fear, anxiety, sadness, shame, guilt, or anger.
Traumatic responses can lead to mental health problems like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Can Everyday Stressors Become Trauma?
Everyday stressors can result in trauma when those stressors are chronic and overwhelm your ability to cope.
Types of Trauma and Traumatic Experiences
What Are the Three Types of Trauma?
The three main types of trauma are acute trauma, chronic trauma, and complex trauma.
What Is Acute vs. Chronic vs. Complex Trauma?
Acute trauma is a single event, chronic trauma is repeated or prolonged trauma, and complex trauma is exposure to multiple chronic and varied traumatic events.
Different types of trauma that make up acute, chronic, and complex trauma include:
- Acute: Car accident, natural disaster, sudden death, and a mugging
- Chronic: Sexual and emotional abuse, chronic health conditions, and systemic discrimination
- Complex: Childhood neglect, bullying, domestic violence, and human trafficking
What Is Childhood Trauma and How Does It Develop?
Childhood trauma is an event, situation, or circumstance in which a child experiences distressing, emotionally painful, or physically threatening experiences.
Common events that can lead to childhood trauma include:
- Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse
- Emotional and physical neglect
- Witnessing domestic or community violence
- Being unhoused
- Health issues
- Death of a caregiver
- Separation from caregiver due to divorce, foster care, or imprisonment
How Do Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Impact Long-Term Health?
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can lead to long-term health consequences, such as:
- High blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer
- Depression, anxiety, PTSD, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse
- Self-harm and poor brain development
Can Natural Disasters or Life-Threatening Events Cause Trauma?
Yes. After a natural disaster or other life-threatening events, like a hurricane, pandemic, or mass shooting, people often experience significant stress.
You may feel scared, loss, helpless, and overwhelmed in the aftermath, but for most people, these emotional reactions naturally decrease over time. However, others, with specific risk factors, can experience prolonged effects of trauma, like PTSD, depression, and anxiety.
Some of the risk factors that contribute to long-term traumatic stress reactions include:
- Level of exposure to trauma
- Poverty or low income
- Racial and gender disparities
- A history of mental illness
- Lack of social support
Common Causes of Trauma
What Situations Are Considered Traumatic Experiences?
Any situation that is deeply distressing and overwhelms your ability to cope, often involving threats to life, safety, or integrity, is considered a traumatic experience.
Common situations people consider traumatic experiences include abuse and violence, life-threatening accidents, medical events, and sudden or violent death.
How Do Events Like Sexual Abuse or Sexual Assault Impact Survivors?
Survivors of sexual abuse and sexual assaults often experience mental, emotional, and physical impacts.
There is no right or wrong way to respond to sexual abuse or an assault. You may feel guilt and shame, confused, angry, or numb. You may also develop depression or PTSD.
Sexual abuse can also lead to physical injuries, including gastrointestinal problems and sexual health problems.
Can Serious Injury or Medical Emergencies Lead to Trauma?
Yes, serious injuries or other medical emergencies can lead to what is commonly called medical trauma.
According to Medical Education Online, medical trauma is a psychological and physiological response to pain, injury, serious illness, medical procedures, and invasive or frightening treatment experiences.
Receiving a serious or life-threatening medical diagnosis, undergoing a procedure, an unexpected medical intervention, or being mistreated by medical staff can cause psychological trauma.
Medical trauma comes with high rates of re-traumatization as you encounter parts of the healthcare system regularly. Whether the trauma is acute, like emergency surgery, or long-term, like cancer treatment, medical trauma can have a profound impact on your physical and psychological well-being.
How Does Trauma Affect Family Members and Caregivers?
Trauma can have a ripple effect on family members and caregivers as the initial trauma causes a secondary traumatic response that destabilizes the family.
Destabilization can lead to emotional distress and miscommunication, disrupt daily life, heighten tension, cause behavioral changes, and shift family roles.
The Effects of Trauma on Mental and Physical Health
What Does Trauma Do to a Person?
The effects of trauma leave a lasting mark on your brain, thoughts, emotions, and body that impacts how you function in your daily life.
Some of the ways trauma impacts your sense of self, your body, and life include:
- Feeling on edge and unsafe in the world
- Difficulty managing emotions
- Muscle tension and pain, poor immune system, and sleep disturbances
- High-risk activities and aggression
How Does Trauma Impact Mental Health Conditions?
The stress of trauma disrupts your nervous system and alters your brain chemistry to create a perfect storm for the development of mental health problems.
Your nervous system goes into fight-flight-freeze-fawn, where your responses either become hyperactive or blunted as a survival mechanism. In this survival mode, your emotional response may manifest as irritability, aggression, panic, avoidance, numbness, dissociation, people-pleasing, or poor boundaries.
These protective traumatic responses can develop into a mental health condition like PTSD, anxiety disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, or borderline personality disorder (BPD).
Can Trauma Affect Physical Health and Well-Being?
Yes, trauma impairs the body’s stress response system, rooted in the nervous system, which plays an important role in how the brain and body function.
The nervous system regulates vital aspects of your health, from movement to bodily functions, such as your heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, balance and coordination, body temperature, heart health, and immune function. When the nervous system is deregulated by trauma, it can lead to long-term health issues.
Long-term health conditions that stem from trauma include:
- Heart disease, diabetes, stroke, heart attack, cancer, obesity, and high blood pressure
- Chronic pain and gastrointestinal issues
- Compromised immune system, including infections, inflammation, and autoimmune disorders
- Somatic symptoms of trauma, such as muscle tension, racing heart, and fatigue
- Increased risk for substance abuse and substance use-related health issues
Where Does Trauma Sit in Your Body?
Trauma affects many areas of the body that the nervous system regulates, including your muscles, stomach, chest, and brain.
The trauma that sits in your body often manifests as tension in the shoulders and neck, pain in the hips and back, nausea, digestive issues, headaches, and tightness in the chest.
Signs and Symptoms of Trauma
What Are the 7 Signs of Trauma?
The seven signs of trauma are:
- Intrusive thoughts, vivid memories, nightmares, and flashbacks of the trauma
- Avoiding people, places, and situations that remind you of the trauma
- Emotional numbness and detachment
- Hyperarousal and hypervigilance: feeling on guard all the time and easily startled
- Increased irritability and angry outbursts
- Difficulty falling asleep and insomnia
- Memory lapses
How Do You Tell If You Have Trauma?
Trauma often manifests as persistent anxiety, nightmares, emotional numbness, or avoidance of triggers related to a distressing event.
You may also experience chronic exhaustion, easily startle, or feel constantly on edge.
What Are Common Emotional Reactions to Trauma?
Common emotional reactions to trauma include feeling detached from people, difficulty concentrating, feeling like no one understands, and unexpected mood swings.
What Are Signs of Unhealed Trauma?
Unhealed trauma can manifest itself in unexplained aches and pains, dysfunctional relationships, emotional difficulties, and unhealthy coping strategies, such as substance abuse, disordered eating, self-harm, or risky sexual behaviors.
Can Trauma Cause Flashbacks or Distressing Thoughts?
Yes, flashbacks and unwanted, distressing thoughts are a core symptom of trauma and PTSD.
Trauma flashbacks and distressing thoughts happen when your brain is unable to fully process the traumatic event. Your trauma gets stuck as an active memory that’s still happening rather than a past experience.
Trauma and Mental Health Disorders
What Is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?
PTSD is a mental health condition that can develop after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event.
Following a trauma, many people may have common emotional reactions, such as, anxiety, sadness, anger, poor concentration, and sleep issues without developing PTSD. However, you may have PTSD if you continue to experience these and other distressing symptoms for longer than a month.
How Is Trauma Linked to Anxiety, Depression, or Substance Use?
Traumatic events or chronic stress can impair brain development and cause brain chemistry changes that make you more susceptible to mental health problems and self-medicating to suppress the distressing trauma symptoms.
Can Trauma Increase the Risk of Substance Abuse?
Yes, trauma can greatly increase your risk for substance abuse due to stress damaging the brain’s reward circuits that affect reward, motivation, and learning.
Damaged reward circuits contribute to impulse control and reward craving issues, which make you more vulnerable to substance use.
How Trauma Affects Daily Life and Relationships
How Does Trauma Impact a Person’s Sense of Safety?
Trauma can shatter your sense of safety in yourself, others, and the world as your brain’s alarm system becomes overactive, which causes it to misinterpret everything as a threat.
Having a sense of safety is vital to health and well-being as it impacts rest, growth, learning, belonging, and healing. Your sense of safety calms the mind and body, helps you sleep, see things more clearly, form healthy relationships, and create more freely in your daily life.
How Can Trauma Affect Relationships With Loved Ones?
Trauma can strain or destroy relationships with loved ones as your emotional response shatters trust and safety and erodes communication and closeness.
How Does Trauma Show Up in Daily Life?
Emotional reactions can show up in daily life through jumpiness, panic attacks, isolating yourself from others, fatigue, and avoiding activities and hobbies.
Trauma-Informed Care and Treatment Options
What Is Trauma-Informed Care?
Trauma-informed care is a person-centered approach to treatment that recognizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands responsive paths to recovery for whole-person healing.
Components of trauma-informed care include:
- Recognizing the signs and symptoms of trauma in clients, families, and staff in the healthcare system
- Fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices
- Actively seeking to avoid re-traumatization
How Do Healthcare Providers Treat Trauma?
Rather than focusing only on symptoms, healthcare providers use trauma-informed care to emphasize safety, trust, collaboration, and empowerment for a supportive recovery environment.
What Types of Therapy Help With Trauma Recovery?
Effective evidence-based therapies for trauma recovery include:
- Trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (TF-CBT)
- Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)
- Prolonged exposure therapy (PE)
- Cognitive processing therapy (CPT)
- Somatic experiencing (SE)
- Narrative exposure therapy (NET)
- Internal family systems (IFS)
- Art and music therapy
When Should You Seek Help From a Health Professional?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by emotional distress or it feels impossible to function in your daily life, it’s time to seek help from a health professional.
Healing From Trauma and Moving Forward
How Do You Heal From Trauma?
Healing from trauma starts with acknowledging that there’s a problem and seeking support from family members and health professionals.
With support, you can establish emotional safety to start processing your emotions and build healthier coping strategies.
Does Trauma Ever Go Away?
Traumatic experiences happen, and they can’t be erased, but with treatment and support, the symptoms of trauma don’t have to control you or your life.
Healing isn’t about forgetting the memories or pain, but about giving yourself the grace, coping tools, and support to still lead a full life.
What Coping Strategies Support Recovery and Well-Being?
Effective trauma coping strategies include:
- Therapy to understand trauma and your symptoms
- Talking to your support people
- Practicing deep breathing, meditation, and grounding techniques
- Creative activities, such as art, music, journaling, and other hobbies you enjoy
- Physical activity, such as walking, biking, swimming, dancing, yoga, and exercise
- Developing a self-care routine
How Can Mental Health Services Support Long-Term Healing?
Mental health services, such as evidence-based therapy and medication management, can help you manage triggers, reduce symptoms, improve emotional regulation, and rebuild your sense of safety.
Alta Health provides outpatient mental health services for adults struggling with low-to-moderate acuity mental health concerns, including trauma and PTSD.
Supporting a Loved One Who Has Experienced Trauma
How Can You Help a Loved One Who Experienced Trauma?
You can help a loved one who has experienced trauma by providing a quiet, safe place where they feel heard and supported without judgment.
Reassure and validate their feelings and experiences, encourage them to seek professional help, and provide practical support, such as running errands and spending time together doing enjoyable activities.
What Should You Not Say to a Traumatized Person?
Avoid saying or doing things that invalidate, blame, or judge their experience.
Don’t compare experiences or ask them to share more than they’re comfortable with.
Harmful phrases you should consider avoiding include:
- “It could have been worse.”
- “Just get over it already.”
- “You’re being crazy.”
- “Why didn’t you just leave?”
- “Everything happens for a reason.”
- “I understand how you feel.”
How Can Caregivers Provide Effective Support?
You can provide effective support by helping your loved one find a mental health service provider.
Caregivers can also help by being active participants in their loved one’s mental health treatment.
By participating in Alta Health’s family guidance and psychoeducation resources, you can better understand trauma and your loved one and learn how to build coping strategies together.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, distressing and life-threatening events increase the risk of long-term mental health problems.
Understanding trauma and your treatment options is an important step toward making an informed decision for your well-being. If you think trauma is impacting your quality of life, Alta Health is here to provide guidance and resources to help you navigate your mental health care journey. Contact us at (866) 415-5071 to take your first step toward trauma recovery.