Table Of Contents
Mental Trauma
Every single human being experiences some sort of mental trauma at some point in their lives. How you uniquely experience it depends on many factors. By the end of this article you will know about the causes of mental trauma, mental disorders caused by trauma, effects of trauma on the body, and how to recover from mental trauma.
Causes of Mental Trauma
First thing’s first: your brain can interpret anything as trauma. Very simply put, what makes something traumatic is when your brain shuts down its rational tools and uses its survival tools instead. Its goal is to survive, so it must only use the tools that it needs at any given time to keep you alive. It really is a wonderful tool because your brain is very good at filtering out the bad stuff!
Unfortunately, your brain may want you to stay in this state long term if you have been exposed to chronic (re-occuring) trauma like forms of relationship abuse, parental abuse, or other forms of long-term abuse. Even seemingly minor things like being rejected or talked down to as a child can engage your survival brain without you even knowing. This may be why you or someone you know may be responding in certain ways to people that seem intense or “irrational”.
The takeaway here is that mental trauma is independently subjective to you as the experiencer. I have seen kids who have experienced unspeakable things and have walked away from it (seemingly) unscathed emotionally. Of course, this does not mean it did not affect them. But their outward resilience was very high. Conversely, I have worked with people who struggle to be in simple situations where they do not have control. These people in particular seemingly struggle much more in their day-to-day than the folks with higher resilience. Both interpret their experience as mental trauma, but the severity of the two are vastly different.
Experiencing events as traumatic does NOT say anything negative about the person experiencing it. Regardless of the severity of the event, you are human and your brain is not wired 100% the same as other’s are. This is the beautiful fact of being human, you are the only you in the world! As a result, your experiences with mental trauma are only going to take place in your nervous system.
Mental Disorders Caused by Trauma
Given that we all experience trauma differently, there are many common symptoms that humans share after traumatic events. The DSM V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders) section on “Trauma and Stress Disorders” has identified the following disorders that humans may develop after experiencing a traumatic event:
-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its features
-Acute Stress Disorder
-Adjustment Disorders
-Other Specified Trauma/Stressor-Related Disorder
-Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD)
-Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder
-All of the Dissociative Disorders
-Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder (PCBD)
For more information on any of the previously listed disorders feel free to google them. However, in clinical practice the importance of picking one of these labels for you is not entirely helpful. Read my article on my thoughts regarding diagnosing in a mental health setting (link this).
In popular culture PTSD is the posterchild for labeling someone with a mental trauma disorder and is commonly known by many people by its presentation of flashbacks, hypervigilance, and intrusive thoughts. Many of the disorders listed share a lot of the same symptoms, however the common piece of all of them is that many times they begin to manifest after you have been exposed to a traumatic event.
IMPORTANTLY, this does NOT mean that if you have the symptoms I listed above or others related that you have PTSD. These diagnoses are only meant for use in insurance based settings. Your experience and feelings deserve to be validated just as you are–individually. Please seek therapy if you are wanting to know if your traumatic event may have affected you in ways similar to the above disorders.
Effects of Trauma on the Body
Mental trauma not only affects your brain, but it also affects your body. This looks different based on so many factors it would be a bit overwhelming to list them all. As the repeated mantra of this article: your body is affected individually to you after a traumatic event.
Your central nervous system (CNS) has nerve endings that can travel to every inch of your body. All of these nerves report to the brain. In order to get up to your rational thinking brain, they have to go through your survival brain located just beneath it. So if you experience trauma, your rational brain does not have access to be able to store the information from the traumatic event due to your survival brain protecting it from being overwhelmed. As a result, your survival brain stores those neural networks isolated from networks that can access your smart brain.
If you have ever heard the phrase “trauma is stored in the body”, this is what that means. Your survival brain has stored the experience in a way that if something triggering happens to you, you are now wired to react vs manage it.
If you are experiencing physical symptoms in your body, like pain for seemingly no reason, this could be due to your body’s trauma response trying to get you to pay attention to it. You can imagine this gets to be too much if it happens chronically.
Example
For example, let’s say you unfortunately experienced a very bad car accident in the springtime that left you with serious injuries in your left arm and head. The car that hit you in oncoming traffic was a red pickup truck. After some time in the hospital and physical therapy, you were able to be fully rehabilitated. Now the experience is over, right?
Well, your survival brain has some things to say about that. For some reason, now whenever that time of year rolls around you begin to feel similar pain in your left arm and head. Ever since then you experience pretty high levels of anxiety in the car and now drive so cautiously it can be seen to others as “overly cautious” or “timid driving”. One day when you are walking into the store you notice a red truck in your peripherals and begin to have a panic attack. After reading the article up to this point you may be thinking “yea, all that makes sense”. Let me explain briefly.
The pain in your arm and head at the same time of year was kept there by your survival brain in order to remind you to be cautious about that time of year on the road because the experience happened at that time. Your anxiety in the car is related to the fact that you were in a car when the accident happened, and now you drive cautiously to avoid another similar experience. When you walked into the store and saw the red truck, your brain has associated that with danger since the truck that hit you was a red pickup truck from the story. The reason you get a panic attack is because your CNS is telling you to get out of there and get to safety. Pretty wild, right?
How to Recover from Emotional Trauma
Looking at your central nervous system responding to mental trauma may seem a little bit like fishing for random answers to a complex problem. In some sense it is. There are many resources that confirm that this is how your body works. I will always recommend you read the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk, one of my favorites that describes how trauma affects your body and mind.
So how do we deal with all of this? Well, luckily there is a plethora of techniques, both long and short term, that can help you with your mental trauma.
Quick Techniques
Identify
The first quick technique for addressing a moment of overwhelm relating to your traumatic experience may seem like nothing at all: identify that your feeling(s) are related to your traumatic experience. Simply by admitting to yourself that these feelings are related to your mental trauma is the first step to allowing your CNS to begin the calming process in the body. Say something similar to “My feelings come from a place of hurt and they are valid.” Learning to self-validate is an incredibly important component to your healing.
5 Senses
The second quick technique that I will offer is the 5 senses skill. Often times when you are experiencing strong feelings related to a traumatic event, your brain and body are, for all intents and purposes, disconnected. Set the intention for grounding yourself to your surroundings by identifying any number of things you can taste, smell, see, hear, and touch. A common way to run this skill is as follows:
1. Name 5 things you can see
2. Name 3 things you can touch
3. Name 2 things you can hear
4. Name 1 thing you can smell
5. Name 1 thing you can taste
Usually, running this skill is enough to stabilize you at least for the moment. Once you feel grounded, you need to assess whether you feel that you are okay to continue with your day or seek additional crisis help from 211 or 911.
Breathe
The final quick technique I will offer is to simply breathe. Breathing and connecting to your breath is probably the best “bang for your buck” skill you can do to quickly center yourself. After you have identified that you are struggling with intense emotions, simply breathing into your belly by expanding and contracting it will send a “safe” signal to your brain and the negative thoughts and feelings should stop. Keep in mind this may take anywhere from 60 seconds to 10-15 minutes depending on you. Hold this important space and do not rush yourself in recovering from your anxious thoughts. Your best results will come with the most patience.
Long Term Solutions
The number one best and most researched method for long-term success in working through mental trauma is therapy. Particularly, I will talk about EMDR therapy, the therapy that I am trained in! EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. its primary goal is to integrate your experience into your working memory so that your environment does not trigger you any longer as it relates to your traumatic experience.
The way EMDR therapy is administered is exactly how it sounds. You tell your therapist about the mental trauma in however much or little detail you desire. You then identify a negative belief about yourself that you have associated with that experience along with a positive belief that you want to believe about the experience. Then, using back-and-forth eye movements your brain is able to effectively process the experience and store it with no significant feelings attached to it. So this way you can get back to living your life with little to no triggers that come from that memory!
You may be thinking that this sounds way too good to be true. For many who have experienced mental trauma, any life without the constant anxiety and pain they are used to seems too good to be true. I am here to tell you that this therapy works! My humble opinion would be that it is the most efficient and effective therapy for treating mental trauma. There are other types of therapies that work for mental trauma, as well. It is important that you find the therapist and the therapy that works best for you.
If you are more interested in discussing or learning more about traumatic experiences and how they affect you, feel free to contact me.
If you are located in Michigan and are interested in finding a therapist for your mental trauma, feel free to consult me using my contact form! I am happy to discuss therapy with me or referring you to the best provider that fits your needs.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). Washington DC: Author.
