I've helped hundreds of people recover from trauma-related difficulties. I notice that trauma tends to develop when an experience overwhelms our capacity to cope at the time; when we face a serious physical or psychological threat, when we feel powerless, humiliated or alone, when all of our resources go into simply surviving the moment, leaving nothing available to process what is happening. At times of severe threat, we will either fight, flee, freeze, flop or fawn, depending on what the threat system in the brain decides is most helpful for our survival.

​

Research has shown that dissociating during an event, feeling unreal, detached or disconnected, is a predictor of later post-traumatic stress, because it interrupts the way the brain processes the experience. This can leave us with fragmented memories that feel very vivid and current, with a "happening now" quality that makes us feel as though we are back there again.

​

A meta-analysis by Brewin and colleagues (2000) concluded that factors related to what happened during or after the trauma, such as the severity of the experience, lack of social support, and additional life stress, were bigger predictors of post-traumatic stress than pre-trauma characteristics. Similarly, Ozer and colleagues (2003) found that what happens psychologically around the time of the event, not a person's prior characteristics, was the strongest predictor of PTSD. This shows that trauma is more about what happened than who it happened to.

​

When trauma dysregulates your nervous system, the "window" within which you can comfortably handle stress, often called the window of tolerance, narrows. With a narrower window, it takes much less to push you out of it. Above the window is hyperarousal, where we are more easily tipped into intense states: feeling panicky or on edge, snapping at others, irritability, anger. Below the window is hypoarousal, which can happen when we feel overwhelmed and we may experience shutdown, zoning out, numbness, flatness, exhaustion, or a sense of disconnection from ourselves, other people or the world. Many people swing between the two, sometimes in the same day and may have few times when they feel joyful, calm, content or relaxed. This tells us we need to find ways to widen the window.

​

To put it simply, trauma dysregulates the way the nervous system responds to the world. This is why you can't "just move on" or "think positive". Those instructions speak to your rational mind, but trauma responses live in both the mind and the body. Recovery usually involves working with your nervous system by first helping your body to feel safer, then helping the brain to process the memory and file it away with all your other long-term memories.

​

If you'd like to get some trauma-focused strategies that will help you to to cope with flashbacks, distressing thoughts or strong emotions, you might like to download my free Trauma Recovery Starter Kit.

 

It includes

• The What is trauma? guide, which takes these ideas a step further and includes four trauma-focused coping strategies.

• A coping card that you can save to your camera roll that includes a reminder of three strategies for hyperarousal and aso strategies for hypoarousal too.

• Three audio files where I guide you through three helpful strategies in real time.

• A guide for anyone who is supporting you at the moment, so that they can better understand what you are experiencing and helpful ways to support you. 

​

I've included the ideas and strategies that have helped my clients, click the button below to get immediate access.