Healing from Trauma: Resting the Mind and Spirit.
When you read the word trauma, what comes to mind?
A shell-shocked war veteran?
A person afraid to drive because of that time they were in a horrific accident?
Someone who can’t shake intrusive memories of how they were mistreated as a child?
It is—or could be—any of those things. Trauma is subjective; two people can experience the same event and walk away with very different interpretations of what happened and what it means about them, the world, people in general, or even God.
Clinically, trauma must involve actual or threatened death, injury, or violence, per the DSM (the psychiatric manual we use as mental health professionals to diagnose mental disorders).
However, our minds are meaning-making machines, influenced by how our brains have connected various experiences and sensations throughout our lives. We are always trying to make sense of what is happening to or around us, so the stress we feel in an intense experience may vary from someone else with a different background of lived experiences.
We tend to forget the routine, day-to-day things and only remember the good or the bad about our pasts because the emotions around those experiences stick out more in our brains—like jagged, deep ravines or soaring mountain peaks in our emotional, historical landscape.
A really intense threat to our life, like a carjacking, is incredibly overwhelming and not something we can easily forget—partly because our stress response system and our brains are not able to categorize it as the past. In a truly traumatic event, our brain is unable to file it away as something that is no longer happening, which is why people have nightmares or flashbacks. Simple stimuli in the present can be associated with traumatic events from our past, bringing the events back up as if they were happening all over again—because our brain does not know any better.
For this reason, grounding exercises, like deep breathing, can help the brain recognize that we are in the present and merely responding to trauma-associated stimuli—not experiencing our past trauma all over again. That carjacking leaves a meteor-sized impact in our mental landscape and can then influence how we see robberies, car safety, or the place where the carjacking happened.
However, that same crater-like impact in our mental landscape can occur through steady erosion over time. Being told by an unkind parent—over and over again—that we are unworthy, stupid, or unlovable can wear us down and color how we see ourselves into adulthood. The sum effect can leave us feeling just as "low" over time as a single, very intense incident.
We can get stuck in certain patterns of thinking that contribute to depression. Our brains can come to connect cars with danger or parental figures with guilt or shame through the same mechanisms—always connecting the dots, often in ways that are below our conscious awareness.
So, what do we do about it? If we are able to recognize patterns of thinking in our lives and have an idea of where those patterns originated, how can we change them?
One of the most effective treatments for trauma is something called EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. How it works is still not fully understood, despite continual study since its development in the 1990s. However, the effectiveness of this treatment modality has been demonstrated in numerous studies.
Something about processing traumatic events with EMDR allows the brain to disconnect the dots it has linked together over the course of stressful experiences—whether those experiences are a one-time event or something a person has endured for years.
Like a person connecting several stars in the sky to picture a constellation of a bear or a hunter, the brain can connect stimuli and experiences in a way that leads us to believe the world is unsafe or that God is not good. We may know better intellectually, but the felt experience and the emotional lessons our minds have absorbed over time may make it difficult to shake emotionally rooted beliefs that we know are not true or healthy.
Through EMDR therapy, the brain is able to disconnect those dots. The experiences we've been through—those that seem to contradict what we know to be true—are worked through so that those memories and emotions are no longer as sensitive.
A car can just be a car again. Nothing will change the fact that a carjacking happened in your past, but that event can become just a chapter in your story—not a theme that keeps being lived out.
If you want to begin a new chapter and talk about your trauma with a counselor, click “Start Now” at the top of the page. Take the first step to connect with a counselor who can assist you in processing your trauma and moving toward healing.
Trent, one of our counselors, is the author of this article.
