Navigating Trauma: Understanding, Recognizing & Healing
Written by Renae Regehr & Dr. Chuck Geddes
Ever wonder whether an experience, be it yours or a loved one's, qualifies as traumatic? Life is filled with challenges, and hardship is an intrinsic part of the human experience. However, the term "trauma" is often thrown around casually, mislabeling everyday stressors.
This is a disservice to people who truly undergo traumatic situations.
It's important to differentiate between something that is difficult vs. traumatic because it paints a picture of what someone has endured and the far-reaching impact it likely continues to have in their life.
As physician, trauma expert and fellow Canadian, Gabor Mate aptly says, “Every traumatic event is stressful, but not every stressful event is traumatic.” (CBC, 2022)
In this blog, you will learn about:
Distinguishing between what is challenging and what is truly traumatic.
Understanding the body's response to trauma.
Unraveling what is trauma vs. complex trauma
Exploring the path to healing from complex trauma
Recognizing Childhood Trauma Impact: What is the difference between something being hard or traumatic?
Imagine this scenario: You unintentionally are 30 minutes late to pick up your child from school, leaving him the only student waiting. Did you traumatize him?
For something to be considered traumatic (CAMH, n.d.), it has to have a lasting emotional response from experiencing a highly overwhelming or distressing event.
This leaves ambiguity because what might be traumatizing to one person may not be to another person.
Why?
The impact of a difficult experience varies from person to person, and the crucial factor lies in what happens inside them during and after the hard experience.
Consider this. If you have a loving friend or parent who comes alongside you, sees the pain that you have endured, sits with you in it, and helps you make sense of the situation, this will significantly reduce the long term negative effects.
In the example of leaving your child at school, assuming your child was scared and stressed and you apologize for being late, tune in to how they are feeling, help make sense of the situation, and are emotionally available to connect with them, the long term impact is going to be much less.
However, if after a highly stressful experience you feel alone and continue to feel confused and overwhelmed, the negative long-term impact will be greater.
Again, in the example of leaving your child at school, if once you arrive to pick up your child, you don’t acknowledge or minimize how they are feeling, ignore that you were late, tell your child everything is fine and that they survived, there is likely going to be a longer-more severe impact.
Understanding the Body's Response to Trauma
When overwhelmed or terrified, our body automatically activates our nervous and stress response system to protect itself. Cortisol and adrenaline flood our nervous system causing us to go into fight, flight or shut-down mode. Our survival brain is activated to keep us safe, our thinking becomes simpler and our capacity for language becomes limited.
During traumatic events it may feel like time slows down because a person’s senses are heightened taking in every detail, whereas others become immobilized and can freeze or even faint as a response to keeping their body safe (Porges, 2018).
After the overwhelming or stressful event is over, it is crucial to make sense of what happened. The process of making sense is healing and helpful in the context of a caring individual as you tether what happened to you to the present moment and integrate the experience into the story of your life.
You may need to process the situation multiple times and have new healing experiences (e.g. car rides that feel safe after a car accident) to move forward, but healing is possible. These are all important steps in developing resilience in the face of trauma or anything hard that happens to you (Siehl, Robjant & Crombach, 2021).
Grasping Complex Trauma: Distinguishing Trauma from Complex Trauma
The key distinction lies in this:
Trauma refers to a single overwhelming event at any stage of life, while complex trauma involves multiple relational traumatic events during childhood, resulting in profound and long-lasting negative impacts (NCTSN, 2003).
The duration, frequency and intensity of the traumatic experiences leave an imprint on the 7 developmental domains of a developing child.
Complex trauma significantly interferes with brain and nervous system development, affecting almost every developing system in a child's body and brain (Perry, 2002, van der Kolk, 2003).
How do you heal from complex trauma?
We receive referrals of children who are displaying a wide range of extremely difficult behaviours. These children and youth come with an array of assessments, a long list of diagnoses, multiple medications, and an overwhelmed group of caregivers and professionals.
Understanding how complex trauma impacts development is an important paradigm shift. As professionals, parents, educators, caregivers and others who work with children and youth we need to shift our attention to the signs of trauma in children and focus on where their development got stuck.
The first step in healing from complex trauma is creating an environment that is developmentally appropriate to help rewire and re-set a child’s nervous system, brain and sense of self.
We need to move beyond managing the challenging emotions and behaviours we see and respond to the needs of the underlying, over-reactive stress response system.
We’ve seen dramatic successes over and over again with children and youth in our foster care and adoption systems when we apply our understanding of complex trauma to assessment and treatment plans.
The same brain science that highlights the negative effects of trauma also offers hope – new experiences can reshape the trajectory of children's lives.
Feeling stuck? The first step towards hope is gaining a thorough understanding of how trauma impacts development. When you comprehend why a behaviour occurs, you can effectively navigate the path to healing.
Authors
Renae Regehr, MA, RCC
Renae is a Registered Clinical Counsellor and holds a Masters of Arts in Counselling Psychology from the University of British Columbia. She works with children, youth, and families who have been impacted by trauma and attachment disruptions. Renae also is the Founder of Free To Be Talks, a non-profit that promotes positive body image using a research-based curriculum that over 3,000 students have gone through across North America.
As a mother to four children of her own, biological and adoptive, Renae is passionate about child development and supporting parents and caregivers to ensure their children have a bright future.
Dr. Chuck Geddes, PhD, R.Psych
Dr. Chuck Geddes has worked extensively in the fields of Child and Youth Mental Health and Child Welfare over the past 15 years. He developed the Complex Care and Intervention (CCI) program as a way to embed a trauma-focused therapeutic perspective into the care of children in the foster system.
Dr. Geddes provides education and training to social workers, foster parents, and mental health clinicians across the province of British Columbia.
