by Sarah Postich, LAPC, NCC, Lead Counselor
Trauma occurs when a crisis is so bad that
meaning is destroyed. You cannot make meaning out of your experience. Along with the loss of meaning is terror,
helplessness and extreme emotionality or numbing. What is traumatic for one individual may not
be traumatic for another person. For some individuals, a hurricane, fire, or
other natural disaster can be traumatic. Being physically, sexually, or
emotionally abused at any point in one’s life can be traumatic. For others,
being in a car accident, in jail, or being adopted was traumatic. It all
depends on the individual.
The majority of the women in our program
have experienced at least one traumatic event in their life, if not multiple
traumatic events. In general, trauma can impact a person in several ways. It
can lead to hyperarousal, where a person is physiologically aroused all the
time because they are on the lookout for danger. They may have an extreme
startle response to unexpected stimuli, or difficulty sleeping. Another way
trauma affects a person is that they may experience flashbacks where memories
of the event intrude into their mind unexpectedly. There may be dreams that occur that include
fragments of the traumatic event. In addition, individuals may feel numb or
shut off their emotions, believe that they are observing from outside their
body, that time has slowed down, or that this is a bad dream from which they
will wake.
Moreover, trauma affects our women (and
most individuals) in a number of ways. Trauma ultimately destroys one’s
relationships with oneself and others in the world. Individuals feel they
cannot trust themselves because they were not able to keep themselves out of
harm’s way. They may not trust other people in the world because those people
have betrayed their trust and hurt them in some way. Often times, individuals have tried to figure
out ways to cope with the trauma they have experienced. Some of the common,
unhealthy ways individuals have dealt with their trauma is by using alcohol or
drugs to numb themselves. It is very confusing and painful to have traumatic
memories pop into one’s head unexpectedly, or to always be afraid of what will
happen next. Another way they may have
learned how to cope is by limiting what they do day to day- they may not go certain
places, and even start to isolate from family and friends. Commonly they may
attempt to control their fear of getting hurt again by creating a sense of
safety in their actions. This is done by controlling other aspects of their
lives: their job, their home, and their relationships with other people in
their life.
So, when a woman comes to Breakthru House
we want her to start to trust herself, trust the other women in the community,
and the treatment team. This all occurs very slowly as trust is built over
time. One of the ways we try to heal the trauma the women have experienced is
by having them feel the feelings surrounding the traumatic event. Often times,
this may include: anger, shame, embarrassment, guilt, etc. They may not be able to even identify these
feelings, so we may use different techniques to help them. One technique is to
look at different pictures I have of people experiencing different emotions and
then the woman will have to guess what emotion that individual is feeling. Or,
I may include media to have them identify with a topic. These 2 songs relate to the cycle of domestic
violence.
