Understanding trauma: How it shapes us and paths to healing

There is no doubt about it, humans are resilient. As an individual, it doesn’t always feel this way, but we certainly wouldn’t be here – and in the position we are if our species were fragile. I often hear people say they’ve been told by others that they are strong, but they don’t feel strong or don’t want to be strong, they just don’t have a choice. And this is the truth. Things happen, we’re knocked back, get knocked down, but we pick ourselves up and take another step forward.

However, many of those knocks stay there. Physical changes that no one can see, but you can feel. Sometimes the feelings are extreme enough that they affect your behaviour, and other people notice. These invisible changes to your body and brain are psychological trauma.

What is trauma?

In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk defines trauma as:

“Not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present.”

Similarly, Gabor Maté describes trauma as:

“Not what happens to you; it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. It is not the blow on the head, but the concussion I get.”

Trauma occurs when a brain perceives an experience as terrifying. Some things are a threat to your life. Others less so. Regardless of the actual threat – if your brain perceives it as a threat, and terror, you may experience trauma symptoms in the future. Some people find it so difficult to hold the memories in their mind, they attempt to push it away. This is draining and takes so much energy, it makes it much harder to function.

Trauma changes your brain’s alarm system, increases the stress hormones in your body, and changes how your brain filters relevant and irrelevant information. Trauma affects the part of the brain that communicates the feeling of being alive.

What does trauma feel like?

The experience of trauma is subjective. It does not discredit your trauma if your experience is different to the following. This is just a snippet of what trauma may feel like for some people.

Anything that reminds your brain of the trauma may send you into the stress response. Your brain will prime your body to act – whether fight, flee or freeze. You’ll feel adrenaline and other stress hormones racing through your body as your heart rate speeds up, your breath quickens, and your pupils dilate. You may struggle to function normally because your human thinking brain steps into the background, giving your primitive brain the lead role. Speaking is difficult, and you cannot think straight. This may happen more regularly than you’d expect.

When you sleep, your body shuts off the production of noradrenaline (the brain equivalent of adrenaline). We dream (in part) to process difficult memories in a safe brain environment. This reduces the painful emotions attached to the experiences. Dream sleep allows us to separate the difficult emotions from important information to learn and usefully recall life events without feeling overwhelmed by the emotions that the experiences originally held. A symptom of trauma is recurrent waking flashbacks to the trauma and nightmares involving the trauma. To some extent, this is a good thing.

Research shows that to recover from painful emotional experiences, we need to dream about the emotional themes and sentiments of the waking traumas. However, research also shows that the noradrenaline in the brains of people with PTSD is so high, it may not reduce enough during sleep to remove the emotion from the memory. The brain is doing exactly the right thing to process the experience and heal the body. However, due to the excess noradrenaline, it doesn’t work, so it tries again the next night, and so on.

Toxic shame is a big feeling for trauma survivors. Some people say all trauma is somehow related to shame. Due to the shame, trauma survivors may not fully express their emotions. Trauma can cause you to lose yourself. The shame is agonising and based on self-blame, how you feel about yourself, what you did or did not do, how terrified you felt, excited, angry or dependent.

The stages of healing trauma

The traumatic experience/s is part of your story. Your therapist is unable to take it away from you. They also cannot remove the memory or memories. To some extent, trying to remove the memory is part of what causes the symptoms of trauma. Your therapist, however, can help you lean into it. To process it and move through it so it no longer haunts you in the same way. There are many therapeutic modalities that will help you heal from trauma. It may take a while to find the right one for you, or you may need to take a holistic approach and use various things.

Safety is the first and most important stage of trauma recovery. You can create a feeling of internal and external safety by ensuring you are physically and emotionally safe. You must surround yourself with safe people and ensure your environment is safe. From this place of safety, you can begin to bring techniques like grounding exercises and mindfulness into your life. A therapist will help you with this once you feel safe in their presence. You need to trust your therapist. This is a process and may take time.

At some point, you need to confront your traumatic experience. The best way to do this is with a person who has experience in holding space. You need to feel completely safe and know you have a strong foundation of support as you move through the memory and process it. You need to already have ways to cope with overwhelming feelings and sensations – hopefully developed in previous therapy sessions.

Finally, you can integrate and reconnect your experiences into your life. Accepting your trauma as part of your story, without letting it take control of your life. You can learn to trust again, let go of shame, rebuild relationships and find purpose in life.

How hypnotherapy can support trauma recovery

Hypnotherapy is a therapy that uses hypnosis to enhance other therapeutic modalities. In The Body Keeps the Score, Van Der Kolk explains how hypnosis helps people find words for things they were previously too afraid to remember. It also helps people take more control of their emotions. Hypnosis can help people achieve a calm state in which they can observe their traumatic experiences without overwhelm. This unique ability to create a safe space for processing makes hypnotherapy a powerful tool in the journey of healing trauma.

• The Guardian. (2023, April 12). The trauma doctor Gabor Maté on happiness, hope and how to heal our deepest wounds. 
• Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
• Walker, M. P. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.