What is Trauma & PTSD?

Trauma can be defined by the American Psychological Association as a near death experience for oneself or threatened death, witnessing the death of someone else, or experienced or witnessed serious injury or sexual assault. A traumatic experience is an event in which you perceive your survival to be threatened, or where your entire worldview is completely thrown off its axis. These often go hand in hand. Importantly, not everyone who experiences stress or a stressful event develops trauma. Trauma can cause a wide range of psychological, physical, behavioural and emotional symptoms.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the term that is given when individuals experience a number of symptoms after a traumatic event, such as a car accident, sexual assault, robbery or war. While not an exhaustive list, these are common experiences from which individuals can develop PTSD. Symptoms of trauma can become severe and can lead to intrusive thoughts, dissociation, nightmares, depression, addiction, insomnia, lack of appetite, addiction, rage, avoidance, digestive issues, and chronic pain.

Unfortunately, with PTSD, individuals’ brains will adapt to the trauma in an attempt to protect themselves against further threat. The problem is that these adaptations persist beyond the original threat and tend to cause serious problems in ordinary life.

Types of Trauma

PTSD and Acute Stress Disorder

What distinguishes Acute Stress Disorder from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is usually the time line. Acute Stress Disorder is more immediate (3-30 days following a trauma) and PTSD requires at least a month to have passed following the trauma, before a diagnosis can be made.

Complex PTSD

The individual has a history of trauma, in that the history is more complex, longer in duration, and repeated in terms of trauma experiences. Experiences like ongoing abuse, being a prisoner of war, being a victim of ongoing hate or war crimes etc. The individual will experience symptoms of PTSD, experience ongoing episodes of depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking, may have chronic personality struggles like those that characterize Borderline Personality Disorder and have chronic relationship / interpersonal problems.

Traumatic Grief

Part of the trauma definition is also learning that a relative or close friend was exposed to trauma. This can be known as bereavement, grief and loss. Traumatic Grief can be seen when an individual expresses bereavement or loss characterized by symptoms of PTSD.

War, Historical and Intergenerational Trauma

Historical Trauma is a term that emerged following the Holocaust and has since been applied to a variety of genocide torn countries and communities. It has been found that survivors of Holocaust and other experiences of genocide suffered for several generations after with a high level of illness. Research has shown that the impact of massive traumatic events may have a greater effect on survivors if both parents were exposed to the event, that the trauma may be differentially experienced by men and women; and that the trauma can present as poor mental and physical health outcomes in descendant generations.

“Historical trauma can be conceptualized as an event or set of events perpetrated on a group of people, including their environment, who share a specific group identity e.g., nationality, tribal affiliation, ethnicity, religious affiliation, with genocidal or ethnocidal intent (i.e., annihilation or disruption to traditional lifeways, culture, and identity)” (Walters et al., 2011).

“Intergenerational trauma, also recognizes collective traumatic events but is inclusive of natural disasters and other traumatic events (e.g., famine) that are man-made but not targeted with intention upon a particular group for social, cultural, ethnic, or political decimation or annihilation” (Walters et al., 2011).

Interpersonal Trauma

Interpersonal violence includes a wide array of violent verbal and physical acts, perpetrated by someone usually that the victim trusts or should feel safe with. Types of interpersonal trauma include: physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, financial abuse, domestic and family violence and neglect. With regards to PTSD, interpersonal violence is the largest category of trauma to increase the risk of PTSD.

Profession Related Trauma

There are certain professionals that continuously encounter traumatic stressors and are at high risk of developing PTSD such as nurses, police officers, paramedics, firefighters, military and mental health/health care workers.

How I Treat PTSD

The good news is, counselling has been proven to be extremely effective in treating PTSD.

I am trained in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Trauma as well as Cognitive Processing Therapy, specifically used for trauma, which has been proven to be highly effective in treating PTSD. Along with CBT-T, a big dollop of compassionate counselling is used to offer support and skills to manage the emotional triggers and strengthen adaptive management of the impact of the experience.