How to Deal with Trauma

Various types of reactions are often seen in trauma survivors. Some experience immediate reactions that typically sort out without any severe long-term complications. This is most likely because of the high resilience and the appropriate coping strategies that many trauma survivors learn. Many recover from trauma with time, function effectively through life, and show very little distress. A tiny percentage of people develop symptoms that fit the criteria of a mental illness, such as mood and anxiety disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nevertheless, a trauma in any form and intensity may make seeking help for trauma a necessity.

The following four domains are the most common ones to get exploited due to singular or multiple traumatic experiences. It is important to remember that most of them are often normal responses to trauma but can be highly distressing; hence, seeking help can be considered.

Emotional Changes

The emotional response to trauma can significantly vary from one individual to another and greatly influences the victim’s socio-cultural history. In addition to the initial emotional response that happens during the triggering event, other symptoms include feelings of sadness, shame, fear, or anger. Identifying these emotions might be difficult for different reasons. They might lack the experience to identify them or may negate their existence due to the social stigma attached to them.

Emotional dysregulation

Trauma survivors often find it difficult to regulate the emotions of anxiety, sadness, shame, or anger, especially when the trauma has taken place in childhood. For adults, this effect is short-lived and mostly occurs as an immediate response and immediately subsides instead of becoming an ongoing pattern. For people with emotional dysregulation, self-medication is a common habit to regain control of their emotions, but regrettably, it mostly leads to further dysregulation.

Other common responses of the victims under emotional dysregulation include disordered eating, self-injurious behaviours, denial of emotions, and compulsive behaviours. Not all of the behaviours are negative; in fact, some may even lead to acquiring healthy and creative ways to answer their quest of how to get over a traumatic event.

In most cases, traumatic stress leads to two extremes of emotions: feeling too little or numb or feeling too much or overwhelming. With the right kind of treatment and therapies to treat trauma in the UK, such individuals can learn how to balance their emotions while coping with overwhelming situations better.

Numbing

Numbing refers to a biological process in which emotions separate from behaviours, memories, and thoughts. It is characterised by a reduction in the range of emotions in maintaining interpersonal interactions and other symptoms like a foreshortened future. Because this numbing reaction is often able to mask the emotional changes in the mind, it can make it difficult for the victims, their family members, and even the healthcare professionals dealing with them to pinpoint the exact intensity of the problem and perceive it as less severe than it actually is.

 Physical Symptoms

Another critical aspect to keep in mind while learning how to overcome trauma is the physical side of a traumatic event. While most people do not appreciate the physical effects of trauma, they are very much real and often overlooked. Research, however, believes that many trauma survivors initially suffer from physical symptoms and sometimes develop chronic health conditions. Some common physical manifestations of trauma are related to cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, respiratory, musculoskeletal, neurological, and even dermatological disorders.