Psychotherapy Blogbriefs is about my experiences, learnings, discoveries, thoughts and suggestions as a therapist in Santa Fe over the past 18 years, and as a human during the course of my life.
Let's clear up some of the wide spread misunderstanding about what constitutes trauma. For most people, it seems, trauma means war, or personal violence, or a car wreck, or rape, or other heinous treatment of one kind or another. Of course, these are indeed traumatic circumstances. Similar effects derive however from other, more common, more insidious forms of experience as well. Growing up with controlling caregivers, or with addicted caregivers; being neglected in essential ways as a child; being made to feel consistently wrong or bad; being consistently and offensively criticized; being shamed; being ignored or "tolerated". These and other everyday forms of traumatic experience can result in a personality that exhibits many characteristics of the trauma survivor, including chronic feelings of shame or abandonment, anxiety, depression, anger problems, compulsivity or obsessive thinking, low self esteem, confusion, sexual dysfunction, and fears of intimacy.
The traumatic profile can be subtle or it can be dramatically obvious. The effects of trauma can be sudden and acute, or they can be chronic and long established. Identifying trauma is not a matter of making comparisons (oh, that person has gone through so much more than I have), but of being able to recognize the effects in your life of previous experiences, and being able to name what is actually taking place. This then opens the door to a realistic assessment of causal links, and to a more realistic, common sense approach to treatment and to recovery.
