Two Challenges Of Trauma
There are two challenges for a person who has experienced a traumatic event. The first thing you have to do, of course, is survive the trauma. Fortunately, your mind and body have built-in systems to help you survive trauma. These are your fight/flight/freeze responses. A traumatic event involves two elements. First, there is the situation that creates a great deal of fear and stress. Second, there is the inability to escape the situation. When this happens, your fight/flight/freeze responses allow you to survive what is happening.
The second challenge for a person who has experienced a traumatic event is to come to terms with what has happened so that your life does not become defined by the event. Unfortunately, this challenge calls for abilities that you may not have learned. In fact, what we have learned may actually get in the way of recovering from trauma. It is not unusual for people to try to not have the thoughts and feelings associated with the trauma. This is called experiential avoidance.
What Is Experiential Avoidance?
Experiential avoidance happens when you are unwilling to have certain experiences; in fact, you do all you can to escape these experiences. So you have the feelings, thoughts, and the physical sensations that are part of the trauma, and you do all you can to make these go away. You can do this in a lot of ways. You may use your own willful intentions to stuff the feelings and physical sensations. You avoid situations that may trigger them; for example, if you were in a serious automobile accident, you may stop driving because being in a car triggers the feelings from the accident.
What makes experiential avoidance so powerful is that, at least temporarily, it seems to work. If you don’t get in a car, the stress and anxiety subside. But here is the problem. You begin to limit your activities; you stop doing things that you find meaningful and can add vitality to you life. So instead of enjoying life, you spend your life avoiding the feelings of the trauma. In other words, you are trying to control your life in a way that keeps you from reliving the trauma.
Control works in many areas of your life
If you are trying to solve a problem at work or doing a project at home, you want to take control and take the steps you need to do the task at hand. What works in the world out there, however, does not work with the world inside. When you try to control all the feelings and sensations that are part of the trauma, you define what is happening inside as a problem. And the only thing you can do with a problem is solve it. But you cannot go back and solve or undo the traumatic event. And when the efforts to solve the trauma are unsuccessful, your mind judges you and tells you that you are flawed in some way.
So trying to control the impact of the trauma leads to you overidentifying with this picture of yourself as flawed, and you end up stuck in the emotional turmoil of what happened in the past. There is an alternative. Instead of controlling your thoughts and feelings, you can develop a willingness to allow them to be present without fighting them and without getting caught up in them. The word for this alternative is mindfulness. Mindfulness is paying attention to what is happening in the present moment; you simply let it be there in a nonjudgmental way.
When you are able to do this consistently, you will notice enough emotional space between you and the thoughts and feelings of the trauma to choose a response that is more in line with the values that give meaning and direction to your life.
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