By Gill Seaton-Jardine, Counsellor/Psychotherapist and Louisa Magnussen, Founder of Minds Anonymous and Wizmedia. 

What shall we say about trauma?

There seems to be so much to explore here:

What is trauma? Who experiences it? How does it affect people both short and long term? How do we know that what we have experienced, perhaps a significant event, is indeed trauma? How should we deal with it? Can life be ‘normal’ again after trauma, or, does that trauma stay with us and will it affect us for the rest of our lives?

As you can see, very quickly there are so many questions that need an answer for us to begin to know what trauma is. Not to mention how we could/should try to approach healing from it if we discover it is causing us psychological difficulties, or even practical difficulties in our lives – the two can go together sometimes with one leading to the other, as we have explored in our series of support articles before.

We could start with a definition but when I started to research it I found myself drowning in various explanations. All of which came from different sources such as dictionaries, AI overviews, mental health organisations, support groups and many more. And, significantly, every single one seemed to say something different. It felt difficult to pin down what trauma is in a clear, concise and even unmuddled fashion. Therefore it felt challenging to begin to understand it. With the topic so prominent in the media currently, I wonder how many of you have done a similar search online and quickly become overwhelmed by the whole topic. Perhaps some of you shared my knee-jerk reaction to online offerings on it, feeling after just a few pages on the internet that this is a topic impossible to understand, perhaps even that is not understood at all. This could leave a person feeling quite alone. 

In this article we will attempt to demystify and simplify this topic. We may just scratch the surface here, so we will be following this article up with more depth on trauma in the coming months. 

It struck me that if there are that many definitions, trauma must come in many different guises.

Perhaps it is an entirely individual phenomenon, in other words, no two people experience the same thing, even if the trauma was caused by the same event.

If this is the case, then we can know that trauma can cause a sense of isolation, a loneliness which is peculiar to each of us. So, do we have our first idea of one of the effects of trauma? Something has happened to us that we can’t share, or at least we can’t hope that anyone else could understand.

Here we have stumbled across a concept of pain so we have now identified two negative effects of trauma without even having defined what it is, that is pain and isolation. These two will affect how we behave. For example; we may stop going out, stop chatting to friends and family or stop going to work, all of which affect our feelings and can cause us to feel low in mood or like our usual life or even our sense of self is slipping away. If this continues our sleep patterns may also be affected as well as our eating habits. Now we’re heading towards depression.

Clearly whatever has happened to us has had a devastating effect and we haven’t even started to consider the details of the situation.

I started by saying ‘what shall we say about trauma’ – it strikes me that there is a huge amount to say starting with a request for compassion should you come across a friend, family member or colleague who is demonstrating the three things we have identified that may be present where there is trauma. We probably should also say that if this is you and you’re feeling this way, try your hardest to ask for some help. You don’t need to go into what has happened to you, just speak about how you are feeling to someone you trust who will listen.

Don’t stay lonely with your feelings – try reaching out, if we all did, we just might start to combat those difficult times.

As mentioned, we have only scratched the surface of this huge and significant topic in this piece. But we’ll leave it there for now and allow you to digest what we’ve suggested here. 

Look out for part two and beyond in the coming months in our SUPPORT section on Minds Anonymous. 

Good luck and take care all.