FREE 30 minute telephone session
Resolving trauma counselling
Psychological trauma typically occurs after a particularly distressing event or a series of ongoing events. Experiencing trauma can affect your mental health, leading to you feeling unsafe and on high alert, or hypervigilant.
There are different severities of psychological trauma, some symptoms are mild and may go away with time, while others can be more severe (such as PTSD) and will require professional treatment. When it comes to trauma, the sooner you seek help the better.
Having a traumatic experience or witnessing extraordinarily stressful events can have a profound impact on our psychological and emotional well-being. If you’ve ever felt that your life or safety has been put at risk, it can shatter your sense of security.
The important thing to remember is that there are many different causes of trauma. It’s not the circumstance or event in itself that signals trauma, but what your emotional response was to the event. Trauma affects people in different ways and, for some, the symptoms take weeks, months or even years to surface.
Regardless of its source, an emotional trauma contains three common elements:
-
There was nothing the person could do to prevent it from happening.
-
it was unexpected.
-
the person was unprepared.
Symptoms of trauma
Symptoms of trauma vary from person to person and depend on the severity of the event. These symptoms can last anywhere from a couple of days to decades if treatment isn’t sought. Some people also find that they do not notice any symptoms immediately after the event as they can often occur sometime later.
The longer your trauma symptoms go untreated, the more psychological damage they could cause. Therefore, it’s important to know when to seek professional help.
Some common symptoms of psychological trauma include:
- Flashbacks – When you re-experience the traumatic event mentally or physically.
- Insomnia – After a traumatic experience it is common to have difficulties sleeping due to nightmares or due to mentally going over details of the event.
- Anxiety – Feeling constantly anxious after a trauma is very common. Sometimes these feelings turn into anxiety disorders such as PTSD or panic attacks.
- Stress – Even if you handled stress very well before your experience, many people find stress harder to manage after a traumatic event.
- Anger – Feeling angry after a trauma is very common. You might be angry at the person who traumatised you, at the event itself or even at the world. This can lead to outbursts and other anger management issues.
- Depression – Many people fall into a depression after experiencing something very distressing. You can be left wondering why the event happened to you – leading to dark moods and in severe cases, suicidal thoughts.
- Loss of self-esteem – It can be easy to lack self-belief and self-confidence after you have experienced something traumatic. You can be left questioning your identity and what you have to offer the world.
- Self-medication – For some, the only way they feel they can deal with what happened is by self-medicating with alcohol or drugs. This leads to very self-destructive behaviour and can isolate you from friends and family.
- Emotional detachment – For some, the emotions brought up are so severe that they cannot deal with them at all. This can lead to emotional numbness, also known as dissociation. You may refuse to deal with any psychological issues you have and could appear cold and distant to others.
