When You’re Working Through Difficult Life Experiences
What makes a “Difficult Life Experience” traumatic?
In today’s world, we often hear about the idea of trauma. We seem to understand that it is a word reserved for soldiers returning from war, those who have had a close call with a natural disaster or fire, or a car accident, or is even reserved for victims of physical and sexual abuse.
While these are all true, this definition leaves out plenty of other traumatic experiences that do not fit neatly under any one particular category of ‘extremes’ listed above. Truly, despite our discomfort with the word, we register many events that happen to us in our lives as traumatic, which we will call “difficult life experiences” or “traumatic situations” interchangeably.
Abandonment
Being a victim of or witness to violence
Bullying (at any age)
Childbirth
Childhood emotional abuse
Community Violence
Domestic violence
Emotional abuse
Emotional neglect and attachment trauma
Hospitalization
Life threatening illness or diagnosis
Long term misdiagnosis of a health problem
Medical trauma
Military combat
Natural disasters
Overly strict upbringing
Physical neglect
Rejection
Severe illness or injury
Sexual abuse
Sexual assault
Sibling abuse
Significant Break-up
Sudden loss/ Grief
Vehicular accident
Verbal abuse
Victim of a Crime
Witnessing a terrorist attack
Different Types of Difficult Life Experiences.
Single Event.
Single event traumas are severe incidents that occur once and have lasting effects. These are the events that we most commonly associate with a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis, as often the person who experiences the event will suffer flashbacks and nightmares long after the event took place. For many, what is left is a sense of fear about the world and those who inhabit it, or feeling incredibly overwhelmed by intense emotions.
Some examples of incidences leading to a traumatic reaction include being the victim of a crime, being present during a school shooting, or being sexually assaulted.
Complex Trauma.
Opposite single-event trauma is the concept of complex trauma that is ongoing or chronic in nature. Often this occurs in an individual’s formative years and sets the stage for many difficult patterns to resurface in the years to come.
This type of trauma may have more severe and persistent effects as it disrupts the process of trust, self-esteem, and identity building, and leads people to feel shameful and unable to effectively regulate their emotions.
While situations leading to complex trauma are too numerous to list, here are some common factors:
Early Attachment Injuries
Community Violence
Historical or Intergenerational Trauma
Early Attachment Injuries
From the very beginning of our lives, we entrust our care and keeping to the adults in our world. For our most basic needs, we are reliant on them, which is why when we experience emotional neglect from the very people who were meant to be there for us, the wounds are deep and long-lasting. This becomes especially apparent as you attempt to form adult relationships.
Community Violence
This type of insidious trauma is difficult to define, where a particular incident wasn’t necessarily directed at you but it is still all around you. It may be that you grew up in a neighborhood with a very high rates of violence or there may be gang involvement, and so on.
Because you are completely surrounded by threats of violence, it creates a huge toll and many lasting effects.
Historical or Intergenerational Trauma
We see those with this type of trauma develop psychological or emotional difficulties that were passed down generationally, whether through direct communication about what was experienced, or through other indirect means. In this way, survival coping skills that were once adaptive are repeated as patterns in younger generations where that way of relating to the world is no longer helpful.
Not surprisingly, this can affect entire communities, cultural groups and generations.
Unsuspecting Trauma
This category is for those of you who still struggle to label what you’ve experienced as ‘traumatic’. This may include difficult breakups, the sudden death of a loved one, humiliating or shameful experiences, and others that do not neatly fit in any one category.
However, these experiences are not to be ignored, as the cumulative effect of these unprocessed traumas may trail a person relentlessly until they are dealt with.
Vicarious Trauma.
It is important also to note that there exists ‘vicarious’ or secondary trauma as well. This means that you do not have to be directly involved with the incident to be affected.
We think mostly of this exposure via someone else’s retelling, or as the first responder on the scene of an accident. However, we may also think of this in our digital age as a result of social media, news outlets, or word of mouth.
An example of this would be how mass shootings or terrorist attacks seen on the news affect the masses and not just the individuals who endured the event.
"You can’t defeat the darkness by keeping it caged inside of you"
-Seth Adam Smith
Questions You Might Have About Difficult Life Experiences
What does trauma look like physically?
Physically, we experience traumatic events with our whole bodies. In the moment, it may look like racing heartbeat and muscle tension and a sense of being ‘on edge’.
However, the power of trauma is in its ability to keep us stuck, reliving that moment of terror, or lying in wait for the next feared incident.
It also may present much more subtly than that, by recoiling from the touch of a loved one, or fearing a strong emotional reaction.
Other Physical Symptoms:
Insomnia or nightmares
Fatigue
Flashbacks
Hypervigilance
(being startled easily, more reactive)
Difficulty concentrating
Edginess and agitation
Aches and pains
Are you sure it’s okay to call what I’m going through “trauma”? I know other people have it worse.
It is great that you have insight and a good sense of how what you went through compares to others!
However, what this tells me is that, in addition to dealing with the distressing situation that’s on your plate, you are also serving yourself a heaping pile of self-judgment. This ultimately does nothing to help you heal, as it’s necessary to step out of that analytical mindset to be able to comfort the part of you that is holding onto that pain.
What is defined as ‘traumatic’ is really dependent upon each person, as two people may experience the same or a similar situation that one calls traumatic and the other does not. Both are perfectly okay. It is most important that you pay attention to what you need.
How does trauma impact our mental health?
Left unaddressed, trauma has a way of sneaking up on us and creating a whole host of difficulties, for ourselves, our relationships, and our families.
If we do not learn how to cope and how to effectively regulate our emotions, we can expect them to resurface in many different ways throughout our lives.
Other emotional/ psychological symptoms include:
Shock, denial, or disbelief
Confusion, difficulty concentrating
Anger, irritability, mood swings
Anxiety and fear
Guilt, shame, self-judgment
Self-isolation
Feeling depressed or hopeless
Feeling numb or outside of yourself
How can counseling help with difficult life experiences?
The role of a therapist is to help you identify and begin to dissect the patterns that have resurfaced in your life, and to get to the core. On this journey inward, we may learn about the source of these difficulties that may or may not lie in childhood.
Counseling can help you to put words to your experience, and to learn to stop giving what you’ve been through in the past so much power over your present reality.
We’ll talk together about different ways to approach these situations, both in mindset and in actuality. This will be the most important part of our work together: not just looking at the path you’ve traveled thus far, but also giving you a roadmap for the way forward.
If we can learn to stop just surviving, begin to start processing and coping, then we are well on our way on the path of healing.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy
In addition to more traditional approaches, some of our therapists also offer EMDR therapy which can be especially helpful and healing to those with all different types of trauma.
In an EMDR session, through the process of bilateral stimulation (side-to-side eye movements), we will engage both hemispheres of the brain while you focus on and recall particular distressing memories. This process helps to lessen the power and influence of these “stuck” memories and allows you move forward in healthy ways.
Tips For Managing Difficult Life Experiences
Allow yourself to feel.
Nothing seems to be more common in the world of traumatic experiences as the concept of ‘avoidance’, as well as the inextricably-linked presence of anxiety.
What happens is that when we go through something horrible, it in turn inspires a whole host of negative emotions and often an omnipresent sense of anxiety that is “waiting for the other shoe to drop”.
Of course it feels uncomfortable, and unpleasant, and we would do anything to make it stop. At some point, we learn that by avoiding our emotions that we can get a sense of relief, if only for a little while.
Some may find their relief in the number of calories they consume, others by pushing away any hint of emotion at all, and others still look to outside relationships to regulate their internal selves. This becomes our survival strategy. However, when we avoid we typically end up making things worse.
We can only avoid for so long.
We must do the brave thing instead and feel our way through it.
Be kind to yourself.
Nothing can be more detrimental to the process of healing as the voice of your inner critic, letting you know that you haven’t done enough, telling you that you couldn’t possibly still be affected by that thing that happened when you were young, telling you that you’re overreacting.
The voice of shame and self-judgment is a powerful deceiver: you hear it whispering in your ear that you’re a lost cause, that things will never change, that you might as well give up.
We can overcome these lies by promising instead to be kind to ourselves. To judge our past actions by who we were and what we knew at the time, to remember that others in our position would likely have made a similar choice, to recognize that healing takes time.
Through each step of the way, we must be kind.
“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.”
Talk to a counselor.
Traumatic events and difficult life experiences that occur at any part of our lives have the potential to knock us off course, causing us to feel stuck and overwhelmed.
Luckily, you do not have to navigate this situation alone. Sometimes professional help is needed to help learn ways to withstand the severity of our emotions, or to be reminded that we’re only human.
Reach out today and schedule an appointment.
Contact Us Today.
When you’re going through a difficult time, you want to enlist the support of someone who understands, whose been there. Our therapists have walked through many challenges in their lives, some more difficult than others, and have found their way out the other side.
Perhaps more importantly, we’ve helped countless individuals come to terms with the difficulties they’ve experienced in their lives, and we can help you too.