What is trauma?

In this episode we define trauma, as well as talk about why traumatic events lead to PTST for some people and not others.

*Note - we experienced technical difficulties with our sound in this episode, thanks for being patient with us as we troubleshoot this issue for future episodes!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Inner Solutions Podcast. We are your hosts, Donna Hughes and Jessica Heil. We own and operate Inner Solutions, a private practice clinic located in Calgary, Canada. We seek to understand and help our clients by providing empirically supported treatments and evidence-based practices with compassion and expertise. This podcast will provide you with information regarding complex psychological conditions as well as treatments that are available.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Hi there, everyone. Welcome back to Inner Solutions Podcast. I'm here with Jessica Heil. I'm Donna Hughes. And today we would like to talk about a very big topic. This is the topic of trauma. What is trauma? When it comes to trauma as an event or as an experience and how it leaves us, has a great deal of complexity to it. So we want to say we're going to talk about what is trauma and try and help you understand a little bit about what that would look like if you're going to get treatment for trauma. But we want to be really clear, this topic is way, way too broad for us to talk about in a podcast. We'd have to do many episodes to cover it. So we really want this to be just informative for people that need some validation that a traumatic event or an experience that they had has affected them in such a way that it's really important, it's really valid to go and get therapy or talk to a therapist and see what Eric might do to help. Say more, this is your area of expertise. You know a lot about trauma. You have worked with people of different kinds of trauma. I'll leave that for you to say. And I also want to pitch the fact that you have your own uh little website and uh not so little, it's very impactful from what the feedback we're getting. And this is about uh childhood sexual abuse. Yeah, so I actually have um I have a separate podcast, and for anyone who wants to listen, it's called Rise, Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse. And you're welcome to go find it. It's on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And yes, that's definitely the topic I'm most passionate about. And uh, but that being said, there's there's lots of different trauma, there's much more than just sexual abuse or any type of childhood abuse. And I I have a really big passion of treating any form of trauma, and so I do get all lit up talking about this topic, Donna. I think the place to start would be discussing what is a traumatic incident, just to make sure we're putting some definitions on what we're talking about here. Can I just jump in? You get all lit up. Why is that I think because I see people go from just suffering so much from these past experiences that they had no control over when they happened, things that are really awful to experience, things that have caused symptoms for a very, very long time. And it truly takes very little treatment to see people get up and on their feet and to be shedding off the symptoms that they've been carrying for years, sometimes decades. And it's just, it's it can be, it's not always a quick treatment, but it's often a quicker treatment than you would expect. So seeing people go from just such suffering to feeling like a weight has been lifted off their shoulders, there is nothing better in in my eyes than experiencing that. And this comes from the experience of seeing it improve, change. People can be built from these things. If that means getting into a very present-day functional capacity, and I do everything when your energy is big, kind of see that, yes, yeah. We'll take more about that another time, but absolutely trauma. What is it? Yeah, so many things to somebody. So many things to so many people. So today we're going to keep this pretty basic and standard. We're going to be talking about trauma from the perspective of what can cause post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. There are different types of trauma that we'll talk about in future episodes. So please don't take this as this is um a cookie cutter where everything kind of fits into what we say today. We will expand as we go forward. But trauma from a PTSD perspective, a traumatic incident is anything that a person endures where they have experienced something that's life-threatening or they've perceived it to be life-threatening, or they've perceived somebody else's life to be in danger. Okay, so hang on. An event or an experience. So this doesn't have to be something I would have seen. It's the person's experience during an event that was life-threatening. Exactly. It could be their experience. It does not have to be something that we would all objectively agree was thematic. So what I might see as life threatening isn't what somebody else would experience as life threaten. Not necessarily. There's certainly going to be some things that we would all probably agree could be traumatic. So things like going through a really significant car accident, having experienced some sort of war, having been assaulted either physically or sexually. Most of us would say that those things are traumatic, but there's other things that could be considered traumatic too, that not necessarily everybody would realize right off the bat. So, such as maybe going through a car accident that wasn't actually that significant in terms of the bodily injury, but a person had a thought at some point during that incident that they were going to lose their weight, or perhaps something that happened to them where their life was really never objectively in danger, but they had the thought that it was. For example, maybe falling through a thin sheet of ice into a river where the river was not um uh maybe it wasn't actually that deep, and they were able to get to a warm place very quickly. So their body was not injured, but perhaps then they had the thought that that was where their life would end. That's enough to eventually create PTSD. So the situation again, it's an experience that looks where your life is threatened, you're abominable, it was in that case, or that you had uh the experience of watching somebody else be right. Yes. Uh this is really pertinent to I think we use the word vicarious, yes. So vicarious traumatization, you got it. Yeah. So if you were watching something happen like the fan, where if somebody else was having their life friend, this can happen in real time, but it can also happen through images. Yeah, so if we have been witnessing some sort of uh event within the world where maybe we're listening to the news and there's something really awful that's happened to people, even halfway across the world, we can get bicarious PTSD from that. Just thinking about their experiences and the suffering, putting ourselves in their shoes, the people who have suffered, that can create PTSD as well. So PTSD is broad, it can be caused by a range of things, and it's very personal and subjective in terms of what experiences we may have gone through that would eventually create PTSD. Now, a traumatic incident is different than actually having been traumatized and is different than having eventually had a diagnosis of PTSD. We can go through traumatic incidents, and some people will go on to develop PTSD while other people may not. And there's a couple of different variables that will determine whether or not PTSD actually develops. Part of it is how the person is able to process the event after it occurs. So you may have gone through an incident and had the experience of thinking your life is threatened. But if you are able to, after that event, process it as in if you're talking about it, you experience appropriate emotions related to the event, you are able to think about your or just have out certain types of beliefs and thoughts that are a little bit more on the adaptive side. So things like, wow, that was really scary, that was a close call, but I was able to make it through and think about how you have survived, then those types of thoughts and experiences and emotions might actually help you eventually be able to shake off the symptoms that come from a traumatic incident. So you're saying you can go through a scary, traumatic, uh upsetting event, but it may not lead to a package of symptoms that affect your function. Right. It may not. Does age have anything to do with this? Like if you're, you know, three, 10, 15, 35 dose of hormones? It doesn't, but what does is whether you've been through a previous traumatic incident in the past. People who have gone through one episode of a traumatic incident are less likely to develop PTSD. But the research does show that if we've been through more than one, then for subsequent traumatic incidents, we are more likely to develop PTSD. And how does that relate to the uniqueness of some of these traumatic or life-threatening events? It might have been only you, it might not have been everybody. How does that relate to develop post-trauma symptoms? Yes. So the people who develop eventual symptoms of PTSD, generally what ends up going on is that they after the traumatic event, there's something that happens where they block their emotions. Those emotions are suppressed either by themselves or by their environment, which means they're not able to go through the natural process of experiencing those emotions that they really are just natural emotions to experience after a traumatic event. That might mean that if people are stifling their natural process of crying after an event, or if you ever see somebody who's gone through something traumatic, you'll see that they naturally shake. If there is a suppression of that shaping that occurs, or a suppression of thought is a big one, trying to just shut down the thoughts that are related to the traumatic events. Maybe they think that it's it feels really scary to think back on the event, and so they just push away, push away, push away. Any of those types of behaviors can eventually lead to PTSD. Sort of saying that somebody who's been through this event should talk about everyone. Yes. And whoever's around them should support and validate and let that talk, let how they demonstrate their stress happen, crying, comforting themselves or whatever way, let that happen. The unhealthy part is when someone minimizes or directly says that was no big deal. What's what why are you upset? Or if that person for whatever reasons has learned or a gap that they just don't talk that changed over that, they'll shut it down on their own. But sometimes so you just ever talk about something about that. That's exactly it. Sometimes it's just it's not anyone's fault that it gets shut down. Maybe we're all just reading busy lies and the person is pushing it away because they're trying to get on with their life. But yes, uh, sadly, when we don't give the traumatic incident enough time to be able to think about it, process it, talk about it, cry about it, experience our emotions, then that generally will lead to us eventually developing block TS and symptoms than the person who really takes more time to process and talk and feel about the incident. And say something about timing because I know it's never just a one-off telling what happened. And it I believe some things take longer to talk about. Some people need to talk about again now. Some people are not talkers. Yes. Can you say more about what that has to do with this symptom of post-trauma? I think so. If you, if after a traumatic incident you feel in your core that there is any need to feel something about this incident or keeps on coming up in your mind, then it's a sign that you haven't quite spent enough time with it, that we still need to push ourselves to talk about it, to feel about it, to to process. And that can be with a person that you know. You can certainly just talk to a loved one about it. Um, it doesn't have to be a therapist, but of course it could be a therapist as well. If you find that after traumatic incident, it's really not coming up that much in your mind anymore, or when you think about it, you feel pretty neutral, then that's a pretty good sign that you're probably okay. And I would say move forward with caution. We always want to make sure that a traumatic incident has truly been kind of put to bed in our own minds and that we're not just avoiding. But if you can check in with your own intuition and go, you know what, I'm actually I'm feeling okay about this. I'm not experiencing a lot of intrusive thoughts, which are those thoughts that pop up kind of over and over and over again uh when we're least expecting them. If none of that stuff is really happening, then it probably means we're doing okay, despite the fact that we went through a tematic incident. We'll still feel how we feel about the incident, but it doesn't get in the way that function that doesn't stop us to interact. That's right. When it is disrupting our functioning, that is a sign that we may be developing some PTSD symptoms. Now it's really common to have PTSD symptoms for upwards of a month after the traumatic incident. That's not abnormal, that is to be expected. But if the symptoms happen past one month, that's when we're starting to become worried that we might be developing PTSD. And PTSD involves a variety of different symptoms that include those intrusive thoughts that I mentioned. So that would be, for example, if you were in a car accident and you find that throughout your day you continually get blasted with these thoughts of the incident, or sometimes even flashbacks are a common uh intrusive is a type of intrusive thought where you are just seeing a car accident in your mind. There's kind of these blips of memory that show up over and over and over again. That's a PTSD symptom. Other ones could include avoidance, where you really are trying to do everything you're trying to avoid thinking or feeling about the incident. Probably emotional disregardation can be a PTSD symptom. So just feeling like your emotions are all enlightened. You have a really big startle response to things, husband learning jumpy, uh, those could be symptoms. Um when those things have been going on for a long time that starts to impact your sense of self, you can start to really experience a light shared vote around certain incidents that have happened and start to blame themselves for what occurred or the way you're feeling now. These are the long-term effects, right? They're offering to the series and spirits on how they essentially change their life. If we change the trajectory behind one with some sense, that's interesting. Absolutely. And and what I often see with people with PTSD is that their life becomes smaller and smaller as the symptoms continue. That avoidance tends to generalize. So first you start by avoiding, say, deer foot in your example, but then a person with attributed PTSD might then start to avoid other highways and other busy roads. And before you know it, they're avoiding any road where there's multiple um like lanes on the roads, and it just becomes smaller, smaller to the point where they may not be going to drive all where this is a topic that branch off in any because so we're talking a little bit about an event specific on a code. So yeah, it's easy to understand when we talk about time. I think we'll save it for another episode to talk about the Lynch trauma, yes, as it relates to many other like the diagnosis of inheritance solutions, but that's an important branch. And I'm highlighting that because depending on the event, the type of trauma, the duration of the trauma, the frequency of the trauma, the treatment is designed differently, is it not? It is absolutely there's treatments that are really great at treating what we're talking about today, which is that single episode traumatic incident, but then there's also treatments that are much better at treating types of trauma that were more pervasive. So the regional trauma that fall into that, certainly any types of abuse would fall into that, where these traumatic incidents happened more than one time. So, yes, I think that's a great idea, Donna, that we're going to spend some time in future episodes talking about what type of treatments would fit with what types of trauma. One thing I just wanted to quickly answer here, is there any difference if the event that was relationship, if the event was somebody personal to you, or if it was somebody say in the school, or if it was somebody in a stranger on the street, is there any difference in how a therapist would assess what's the best treatment? Absolutely. Yeah. If there's the if the incident happened from somebody who's close to you, then likely we're looking at having experiences of things like betrayal and problems with trust going forward. And therefore the treatment is going to focus a lot more on how we relate to people in our future based on the fact that we've had these experiences of betrayal and breaches of trust. Whereas if it was somebody who was just, you know, Joe Blow off the street who ended up assaulting somebody, that still is very, very significant, but it doesn't impact the way that we view the people closest to us in the future in the same way that it would if we had gone through a traumatic incident with somebody that we had trusted at the house. And I'm gonna guess that it doesn't affect how we elect to relate, how you interact with people in the future, people in their family or social circle, it's global friends as opposed to how do you relate to people when they're all gonna go? Oh, wait, a big topic. Big topic. Should we leave it here? I think this is a good place to stop for today. It's a big one, so join us in the next few episodes. We'll try and elaborate a bit more on specific treatments for specific types.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

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