Here’s some interesting new insight into the human mind: first perceptions are even harder to overcome than most people had realized. According to research conducted on an international scale, our first impression of a person, place or idea becomes our brain’s default perception. If we later learn information that contradicts that perception, our brain categorizes it as an exception, rather than using the information to alter the rule. Specifically, we associate the exception with the context of that new information; all other contexts get the ‘default’ association. Say, for example, your first impression of a new coworker is negative, but you end up having a pleasant conversation when you run into him or her at the gym and change your mind. In the context of the gym, you’ll see the person more positively, but anywhere else (be it work, or even a new environment such as a restaurant), you’ll still be guided by your first impression.

This insight is especially interesting for therapists and counselors who help clients overcome phobias, said lead author Bertram Gawronski. “If someone with phobic reactions to spiders is seeking help from a psychologist, the therapy will be much more successful if it occurs in multiple different contexts rather than just in the psychologist’s office.” A similar pattern may be relevant for people struggling with profound anxiety and even PTSD. Learning healthy coping strategies in the therapist’s office can be helpful, but the idea of concept-based perception may explain why people sometimes feel less confident in their ability to apply those strategies in their daily life. (more…)

When a loved one hurts you through excessive criticism, put downs or abuse of any kind, you experience emotional and often simultaneous physical pain. But can emotional abuse be considered traumatic? Dr. Francine Shapiro defines two types of trauma—“big T” trauma and “little t” trauma. “Big T” trauma refers to what we commonly think of as trauma like war or natural disaster, “little t” trauma refers to incidents such as getting teased as a child or getting rejected by your first love. Most people experience “little t” trauma some time in their lives. People who live with and love someone emotionally abusive experience “little t trauma” on a daily basis. The experience of put downs, criticisms or whatever form emotional abuse takes, not only wears down self-esteem but also impacts the nervous system. Memories of the abuse can elicit negative feelings, tense physical sensations along with negative thoughts about yourself long after the abuse has occurred.

Human beings are born with a fight, flight, or freeze response. This is nature’s way of protecting us from danger. However, our minds can’t differentiate between the danger of let’s say the sound of a grizzly bear from the sound of the voice of someone who yells at you on a regular basis. In essence, prolonged exposure to emotional abuse can create similar symptoms to posttraumatic stress disorder experienced by a combat veteran. These symptoms include anxiety, depression, social withdrawal, and avoidance of situations or people that are reminiscent of the abuser, difficulty sleeping, flashbacks of abusive memories, difficulty focusing on the present or trouble concentrating. There can also be stress-related physical symptoms like migraines, digestive problems, fibromyalgia, or fatigue.

My work as a therapist is devoted to help heal those who have suffered from abuse. I believe the only way to facilitate deep and lasting healing is to treat the trauma associated with the abusive incidents. I do so with a technique called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR has been well researched as an effective treatment approach to eradicate symptoms related to trauma. This technique can alleviate anxiety, depression, and other related disturbances resulting from emotionally abusive experiences. EMDR helps the individual eradicate any disturbance related to an abusive incident; the memory of the incident remains but the disturbing emotions and sensations associated with the memory are eliminated. Then, the person can move on in their life free from the “ghosts” of the past. EMDR can relieve symptoms fairly quickly.

Here’s a case example. “Jane” came to therapy lacking self-confidence in meeting men. When I took a look at her thorough history, it turned out she was mercilessly bullied by peers when she was a child. Jane agreed to EMDR treatment and after a few sessions, reported no leftover negative emotions or disturbances when she thought about the bullying. She reported feeling more confident and outgoing in the company of men. Even the way she carried herself changed; she held her head high with much better posture having an air of confidence.

You don’t have to suffer from trauma related to emotional abuse. You can free yourself of painful memories and move on with your life in a positive direction with the help of an EMDR trained therapist.

One way to understand the healing journey is to think of growing from a place of victimization to survival, and ultimately, to thriving. While a person has had no choice about being victimized, he or she does have a choice about growing through these stages.

Regardless of what the traumatic event was, where or when it occurred, there was a period of time when victimization occurred. This victimization is not something one should feel guilt or shame about, rather it is a factual reality to understand, accept, and grow through. When an individual cannot or does not grow through the period of victimization, one can think of this person as being stuck within the victim stage.

An individual in the victim stage feels as though he or she is still in the trauma—no matter how long ago the actual traumatic incident(s) occurred. The sense of being in that moment of time permeates the person’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and even his or her sense of self. It is common for an individual in this stage to avoid many emotions while experiencing in abundance feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, fragility, self-pity, numbness, defeat, shame, self-hatred, and discouragement. The person might feel out of control or angry, want to hide and hope to be rescued. The individual often believes he or she lacks choices and has few possibilities and a shortened future. This combination of thoughts leads to little planning for the future and a preoccupation with the past.

In addition, the individual may feel plagued by memories of the event, particularly if he or she is struggling with flashbacks. Common behaviors that arise out of these thoughts and feelings are self-destructive ones such as addictions or a pervasive passivity. While most individuals, even those who have been stuck within this stage for quite some time, do not desire to be within the victimization stage, some individuals do experience secondary gains (such as love, support, attention, assistance) from being within this victim stage.

[fat_widget_trauma_ptsd_left]These benefits can also become intertwined with the individual’s way of life and identity, making it all the more difficult to grow through this phase. Just as some individuals struggle with leaving this stage, some individuals struggle with being in this stage and try to avoid acknowledging the truth of the victimization. Neither approach is healthy, because true recovery can only occur when ones has dwelt within and then healed out of this stage.

Once a person has grown through the victim stage, he or she enters into the survivor stage, which is the time when one begins to feel strong and confident and to truly believe that there are resources and choices. A key realization of this stage is that an individual has gotten through the trauma intact, or mostly intact, and is indeed outside of it. This understanding allows the person to begin integrating the trauma into his or her life story, to take control of life, and to recognize potential for change and growth.

For many, a sense of satisfaction accompanies this realization as does a shift into an emotional state that has less suffering, less pain, less guilt, and definitely less depression. Many of the difficult emotions decrease, and though this is not necessarily a happy phase of life, moments of happiness will start to occur more often. As one progresses through this stage, living one day at a time increasingly becomes a primary focus. Coping from day to day and acting upon a commitment to healing, trusting, and restoring relationships becomes the essence of healing.

The thriver stage crystallizes the growth of the survivor stage and takes one’s healing to the point where he or she has general satisfaction with life as well as a sense that ordinary life is both interesting and enjoyable. Commitment to moving forward, to taking care of one’s physical health, to investing in one’s career, relationships, and love and life allow these gains to occur. On an emotional level, feelings of strength, empowerment, compassion, resilience, and self-determination eclipse the emotions experienced within the victim stage. In addition a renewed sense of joy, peace, and happiness arises because one has grown, despite the traumatic experience, and is living well.

It is within this thriver stage that a person’s thinking becomes less pessimistic; he or she begins to think and believe that that there are long-term options, that there is a point to planning for the future, and he or she begins to recognize and embrace new possibilities. This living well is also exemplified in an ability to connect with others who are suffering, to accept imperfections in loved ones, and to reach out to others. Life is once again rich in meaningful relationships which help the person find a sense of meaning and purpose. If any symptoms of posttraumatic stress or other issues remain, the individual has learned how to effectively cope with these symptoms. Ultimately, he or she perceives him- or herself as more than a victim. One recognizes him- or herself as a valuable individual who, though tempered by tragedy, has risen and moved beyond the trauma.

This article is part II of a three-part series. Part I introduced the first phase of healing, the safety phase.

As you pass out of the first phase of healing, you may feel as though you have a new lease on life and want to step out of your healing journey.

While you have more than every right to do this, the first phase is ultimately not sufficient to bring whole and complete healing. The real and perceived safety that you established within the first phase of healing—within yourself, with the people in your life, and in your physical environment—becomes the foundation that allows you to grow into the second phase of healing. In this second phase of healing, the actual traumatic experience is grappled with through remembering and mourning.

Integrating Traumatic Events into Your Personal History

Remembering allows you to address your trauma story by placing the event, or events, into your life history. This is giving your memories temporal dimensions. Due to the physiological processes that are “online” during a traumatic experience, the subsequent memories can seem to float outside of time and space rather than being rooted in the timeline of your life. To truly heal and integrate the reality of your traumatic event, the experience needs to settle into your life history.

To achieve this, a therapist can work with you to review your life before the traumatic event, the circumstances that led up to the trauma, and life after the trauma. Such a life review includes looking at others’ reactions, as well as acknowledging and healing from secondary wounding experiences.

By engaging in this emotional work, you transform the traumatic event from something that was done to you into something that is a part of your life experience. Rooting the traumatic event into your collective life history enables you to reclaim yourself—not the trauma—as the main character in your life, and allows your personal meaning of the trauma to come to the surface.

Reconstructing Trauma Memories

Once the experience of trauma is rooted as a part of your life experience—as an event that has a sense of time and space—the next step is to reconstruct the traumatic event. This is not memory recovery work: no memory is created where there is none. Instead, your therapist will work with whatever memory you have, regardless of length or detail. The purpose is to transform the trauma memory from a frozen moment of terror into a memory that reveals your feelings about and interpretation of the event.

This work is done one small piece at a time, with the guidance, support, and assistance of a competent professional. Despite the therapist being “the expert,” you, the survivor, have the final say about the pace of this work. The end result for most survivors is that their trauma story is no longer one of humiliation and shame, but rather one of virtue and dignity.

Remembering the traumatic event or events and connecting them to words and emotions enables you to mourn what you have lost. While trauma may or may not result in physical loss, it always results in psychological losses. Emotionally connecting with your losses is a courageous act. It can feel scary or even terrifying, because this acknowledgment can confirm the finality of the losses.

Moving Beyond the Second Phase

For many, the work of remembering, mourning, and grieving feels endless, regardless of the actual amount of time this phase encompasses.  Keep in mind that there is no set time limit to this phase. Every survivor spends a different amount of time in this second phase of healing, but it cannot be skipped nor rushed.

Survivors will know that they are nearing the end of the second phase of healing when, as Dr. Judith Herman states, “It occurs to the survivor that perhaps the trauma is not the most important, or even the most interesting, part of her life story…when the patient reclaims her own history and feels renewed hope and energy for engagement with life. Time starts to move again…the traumatic experience truly belongs to the past. At this point, the survivor faces the tasks of rebuilding her life in the present and pursuing her aspirations for the future.”

Starting the day with fibromyalgia pain made Vera angry

Fibromyalgia made it hard for 46 year old Vera to get her legs out of bed in the morning. As she moved toward the bathroom and began her toilette, the pangs of pain moved to her hands, head and neck. It brought tears to her eyes. It made her angry to think that Kurt hadn’t even thought of organizing things around the house to make life a little easier for her. Vera remembered the arguments about accompanying her on doctor appointments and got even angrier. But she never said anything to him. She turned her mind to the support group she would attend later that day, although it wasn’t successful in easing her physical discomfort.

Vera found it easier to focus on the fibromyalgia pain than her scary emotions

As she ate breakfast, flashbacks of her early family file flooded Vera’s vision. She relived the tension she used to feel coming home from school wondering if her parents would fight out loud or give each other the cold shoulder. Her mother would take out her frustration on Vera the oldest and quietest of her kids. Her muscles tightened up as she recalled the fear of uncertainty and not knowing how to speak about her worries. It was the same thing now. She didn’t know how to talk about the anxiety of not being able to take care of herself. Vera had no words for the anger at her father for not making her mother happy, and at Kurt for being equally insensitive and uncaring. What she did have was body pain that ranged from dull aches to excruciating pain for which no specific organic cause had been found. Fibromyalgia was the diagnosis. It came with fatigue, slowing down of actions and restricting her life. It was making Vera dependent on pain medication and on a husband who let her down, repeating the cycle of her childhood. (more…)

Experiencing a traumatic life event is horrific and terrifying, but this experience does not have to become your defining moment.

It is possible to grow through a traumatic event, or series of events, and there are loosely-structured phases of healing for that growth to follow. For a moment, stop and reflect on what it means for experts to have identified these patterns of healing: it means that you are not alone in having experienced trauma, and you are not alone on the healing journey.

The healing journey follows three loosely linear stages or phases. The rate of growth through each of the phases, as well as the details of what that growth looks like, will be unique to you. You will develop your own unique pattern of healing, which means that you will enter, exit, and revisit phases at various times in your life.

Always keep in mind that revisiting is not backwards movement. It is like the outer layers of a spiral: you pass by the same issues, but are in a different, deeper state of healing. As you near the end of your healing journey, you will be able to look back and notice an overarching progressive nature to your growth and healing.

[fat_widget_trauma_ptsd_left]This article will look at the first phase of healing, while future articles will address the second and third phases.

Understanding the Safety Phase

As you begin the first phase of healing, safety is both your main concern and the hardest task to achieve. Establishing safety—both within yourself and within your environment—can take days, weeks, or even years. The length of time required to develop genuine safety depends on your unique attributes, such as past life experiences, personality, and pretrauma baseline. The length of this phase also depends on how chronic the trauma. In general, the longer you were exposed to the trauma, the longer it will take to develop a sense of safety.

This is not an easy stage. Establishing safety requires a lot of hard work and may require that you, the survivor, dramatically change your life or lifestyle. While this is a difficult part of the healing journey, absolutely no survivor can skip this stage.

Safety Within

In order to truly have safety, you must establish safety within yourself. Focusing on your physical health lays the foundation for internal safety. Establishing internal safety requires you to tend to any ailments, as well as to eat healthy foods, exercise regularly, and sleep sufficiently. Self-harming behaviors preclude genuine safety, so cutting, burning, or addictions to drugs, alcohol, food, or sex, must be grown through and terminated.

Many self-harming behaviors are efforts at managing emotions or thoughts. Learning how to manage your thoughts and emotional world, including your trauma reactions (especially hyperarousal and intrusive reactions), is fundamental to being safe within yourself. Many people find it difficult to engage in this healing without the assistance, support, and guidance of a trained professional. Do not feel ashamed or hesitant to reach out for help.

Safety in the World

Safety within oneself is only half of the equation. No one can be fully safe unless the environment they live and interact in is also safe. Creating safety within your environment requires safety within your physical and relational spheres.

• Attaining a safe physical space includes your ability to move physically in society with a sense of safety and security. It may help to work on your ability to identify dangerous situations or individuals and, to the best of your ability, to get out of a dangerous situation if at all possible. Consider developing safety plans or learning self defense.

• Assess the physical and emotional safety of your social support network. It may be necessary to remove people from your life who are a potential source of physical or emotional danger, or to increase the number of people who can and do provide emotional support, protection, or practical help.

• For those who experienced trauma at the hands of other people, assess the degree of continuing threat and the potential for re-victimization or revenge, and develop appropriate precautions. Ensuring your safety is not 100% within your authority, since to live means to be vulnerable. But that does not mean it is 0% within your authority either.

Moving Through the First Phase

This phase of growth is gradual. It can have a sometimes halting stop-and-go pattern, and it can take a long time. However, if you continue to work on developing safety, and allow trustworthy others to help you, you will be able to grow through this phase.

Some indicators that you have grown through this phase include no longer feeling utterly vulnerable; having a degree of confidence in your ability to protect yourself physically and emotionally; knowing who to count on for safety and support, and being able to effectively manage most of your trauma reactions, including emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.

If learning about the tasks involved in this first phase of healing feels daunting, don’t give up. Reach out to a trained therapist and harness their skills and abilities in order to engage in this healing work. You have a right to reclaim the quality of life you deserve.

If this first phase of healing sounds like a review of work you have already completed, take a deep breath of congratulations and gratitude. You are on your way to continued and ever-deeper healing and growth.

Communication and trust are key ingredients in any relationship, yet are often negatively impacted by the effects of a traumatic experience.

Trust
The very nature of trauma can shatter an individual’s trust in the world and fellow human beings. A survivor’s reduced level of trust can also make communicating difficult and even damage the foundational fabric of a relationship. Many a survivor believes, “I once trusted and I got hurt, therefore I will protect myself by never trusting again.” After trauma, the world and people in general can seem to be completely unpredictable. Danger seems to be everywhere and so a survivor of trauma may feel that they can never put their guard down in order to relax, feel safe, or trust.

These false beliefs about the world—that no one, including oneself, is worthy of trust and that one can never be safe—can be clung to and reinforce each other. Unfortunately, these beliefs are often expressed via impulsive, mean, or aggressive behaviors towards the people closest to the survivor. While the individual may often feel self-hatred or shame for acting in harsh and distrusting manners, to discuss the reality of these behaviors and the impulsiveness and fear behind them would require open communication that may be difficult or impossible at the time.

Listening and Communication
Survivors of traumatic events often struggle with both expressing themselves and listening actively. Active listening requires a certain amount of concentration and can be made more difficult by the presence of  hypervigilance. After experiencing trauma, most people’s concentration levels are lower and their levels of hypervigilance higher than their pre-trauma baseline. It can be difficult, if not impossible, for survivors of trauma to process significant chunks of information, making complex or lengthy conversations a significant challenge.

In addition to a potential decline in listening abilities, people who have experienced a traumatic event often shy away from openly communicating. Open and forthcoming communication may be avoided for two types of reasons:

• The individual may want to avoid certain internal experiences. It is common for an individual to not want to experience the emotions, thoughts, or memories that go along with talking about the trauma or to share their internal distress with others because of shame about this this distress.

• The individual may want to avoid certain reactions from their listener. The survivor may choose not to share the horror of the traumatic event out of fear that the listener will become traumatized or not believe them. This fear of being toxic often silences a survivor. A survivor may worry about burdening loved ones with information about the trauma or how the survivor has been impacted. Many individuals also do not communicate about the traumatic life event for fear of judgment and rejection: the worry that by sharing information others will think that the survivor is “going crazy,” overreacting, weak, or should be “over it by now.”

Emotional Bonding
These deficits in trust also negatively impact the opportunities for appropriate emotional and physical closeness, which, like open communication, are an imperative component of any relationship. A survivor of trauma often feels emotionally dead inside. This internal deadness can prevent the individual from experiencing emotions for friends and loved ones and can make it incredibly difficult to receive care, support, and nurturing from these loved ones. Feeling and being emotionally bonded or close is not really feasible.

The absence of a strong emotional bond and the survivor’s heightened state of physiological alertness can negatively impact the physical closeness in a relationship. In a state of hypervigilance and presumption of danger, being touched can set off the person’s safety—fight, flight, or freeze—reactions. The friend or lover who inadvertently triggers the safety response by physically touching the survivor quickly learns to avoid physical contact at all cost. Unfortunately, loved ones often stop trying to connect with the traumatized individual, emotionally or physically, since it can feel like the survivor is actively rejecting the loved one.

Authors Herbert & Wetmore phrase it well when they state that, “It is usually not the case that trauma survivors cease to love the people who were close to them before the trauma, but rather that, for the present, they can’t respond to those people normally, because they have lost access to their capacity to love.” Yet an important distinction to make is that even though a survivor may not be able to feel love, they can still act in a loving manner.

The good news is that these difficulties do not need to be permanent. It is possible, through the slow work of healing,  for the survivor to relearn how to trust and feel safe, and for these disturbances or difficulties in emotional and physical closeness to recede. This slow but entirely do-able process is best engaged in with a trained professional. May those of you who are the friends and family of a trauma survivor find an extra ounce of patience and fortitude, and may those of you who are healing from a traumatic life event find validation and the courage to keep growing.

In my practice, people trace depression back to trauma most of the time. Emotional trauma is an overwhelming shock to a person’s equilibrium. Trauma might be linked to an emotional, physical, or sexual attack or witnessing such an attack. War, rape, murder, accidents, and even well-intentioned medical procedures might all lead to trauma. So can single or repeated incidents of shaming and other emotional and verbal attacks. Trauma can also happen when heartbreaking losses of any kind occur.

When people are traumatized, it often shapes their beliefs about themselves or life. These trauma-induced beliefs—such as “I’m never safe,” “I’m unlovable,” “I’m a monster,” “love is dangerous,” “I’m a failure,” “I’m helpless”—affect how people feel and often contribute to depression. Sometimes an individual’s belief is based on something that was true at the moment of the trauma: “I’m helpless” is true when a person is in surgery under anesthesia (where unconsciously-remembered thoughts can still affect us).

But beliefs that formed during a traumatic event are stored without information about what that means over time. So “I’m helpless at this moment” can become “I’m always helpless.” This underlying belief may contribute to depression and helpless behavior indefinitely. If this person doesn’t get a chance to talk about their helpless feelings and express their emotions, they could carry that belief into the rest of their life. It is trauma that turns time-limited events into a part of people’s belief system and identity. It makes sense that people would be depressed when they believe they have no personal power to create the life they want.

“I’m a Coward”

Trauma-related beliefs can be a formative part of a person’s personality, particularly if trauma occurs in childhood. The trauma-related beliefs can be so painful that the traumatized person has to develop ways to coping with the belief—and then the methods for coping become a new part of who the person is.

For example, say a child watches his mother get mugged and freezes in fear until it’s over. Perhaps in his child mind, he concludes, “I’m a coward.” Living with the belief that he is a coward is so painful that he deals with it by trying to prove he’s brave: picking fights and engaging in high-risk behavior. These behaviors give him a euphoric feeling of self-confidence and he gets some relief from the pain of the “I’m a coward” belief. The combination of euphoria and the desire to avoid the shame of believing he’s a coward keeps him trying risky things.

He is new to taking risks, so he and others begin to think of him with a new identity. Risky behaviors get him in trouble in school, which means other kids in trouble gravitate toward him while cautious kids avoid him. This makes it hard for him to do well in school and he develops an identity as a tough street kid with crime rather than college in his future. This trauma-belief comes to shape every decision he makes and pretty much everything about him: who he dates, what he does for money, where he lives, who his friends are.

In situations where he might feel vulnerable or scared, he doesn’t dare show it for fear of revealing himself as a “coward.” So when he experiences other trauma, he can’t express his vulnerable feelings, which keeps him from processing the trauma, causing each new trauma to incapacitate him further. When he does start to feel vulnerable, afraid, or sad, he uses drugs or alcohol to suppress the feelings and give him the high of confidence again.

At some point, this man may realize he is depressed, perhaps when a friend dies of an overdose, a woman he loves leaves him, or he ends up in jail or a hospital. At this point, unraveling his story to find what is causing the depression will be complicated. The depression he feels is caused by this most recent loss, but it’s also caused by drugs and alcohol, living a life that keeps him from reaching his potential, and the self-hate that has developed over the years through taking risks despite serious consequences. But ultimately, the depression began when he watched his mother get mugged. When that is resolved, and he realizes he never was a coward, that freezing was normal and even wise at that moment, he will feel much better. He will probably begin to feel free to redefine himself and make different choices for his life. But because his whole life has been based on the way he reacted to trauma and the way he continued to react to his reaction, he will also have to unravel and replace all the aspects of his life and self-image that were created by that initial belief and shame that he was a coward.

“I’m Worthless”

Another example: imagine a child who is sexually assaulted by an adult. That child may respond to the trauma by believing “I’m only worth something if I’m being used for someone’s sexual satisfaction.” It’s not hard to imagine that this child might become an adult who deals with this belief by being sexually available to many people, who she may not even find attractive, as a way of getting some temporary relief from feeling worthless.

Being sexual with many people becomes part of her personality and identity, both of which would have been very different if she hadn’t been assaulted as a child. When this method of coping with trauma stops working—maybe because she can’t find lovers anymore, or she gets caught compulsively having sex outside her marriage and loses her husband—she may become depressed. She will be depressed about the recent changes in her life, but again, ultimately, the depression comes from the original trauma, and from the problems caused by trying to cope with the original trauma.

As complicated as these scenarios may seem, the origins of a given person’s depression can be even more complicated. Sometimes trauma isn’t involved in the origins of depression, but most of the time, with enough exploration, I find the roots of depression in trauma.

As discussed in Part I of this series, surviving a traumatic event often results in negative and harsh altered beliefs about yourself. A traumatic event can also impact your sense of worth, meaning, and trust.

After a traumatic experience, you may believe that you are no longer worth anything: that you do not deserve things, do not have a right to have your needs met, or deserve to be happy or content. This erosion of your sense of worth and conviction that you deserve and have a right to things like safety and kindness  impacts real-life decisions you make. For example, if you no longer believe that you have a right to stand up for yourself, then you might not say anything when a boss inappropriately berates you. Learning how to reclaim your rights and increasing your conviction in your inherent worth are truly difficult steps in the healing process.  Reading the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights might help you begin this recalibration process.

Traumatic experiences also damage your sense of self by shattering the beliefs, morals, philosophies, and ethics that gave your life meaning. The beliefs that once made sense, like good things happening to good people and bad things happening to bad people, no longer fit with the real-world experiences you went through. Due to this disconnect between beliefs and experiences, you may feel that life is now bereft of any moral or ethical bearings, as if you have awoken in a counterfeit world.

This disconnect can also manifest itself as questioning your spiritual or religious beliefs. This can result in decisions that your beliefs are no longer accurate, or in a new or deeper sense of spirituality or religious devotion. While any of these reactions are painful to go through and difficult for friends and loved ones to understand, each of these reactions is an understandable and normal way to make sense of the trauma.

Intertwined with spiritual beliefs are the beliefs that each of us carry about the orderly nature of the world. Whether or not we acknowledge it, most of us function in the world presuming that there are cause-and-effect relationships at work, like “I am nice to the cashier at the grocery store and she bags my produce in a gentle manner.” Posttrauma, the orderliness of the world is called into question, because trauma is not part of any casual relationship that you, the victim, initiated or willingly participated in. The tarnishing or breaking of this belief can lead you to think that there is no order whatsoever in the world and that none of your actions make any sense. However, as your healing progresses, you will grow to a place where you can balance the truth in both of these tenants: sometimes the world is an orderly place, and sometimes there is no rhyme or reason.

A final aspect of self that is altered through a traumatic event is your sense of community. All of us are social creatures—even those of us who are on the shyer end—and some of our sense of self comes from the social relationships we have. Because a traumatic event distorts our belief that, on the whole, people are trustworthy, and because you may have experienced secondary wounding experiences (painful, possibly even traumatizing experiences following the trauma inflicted by people who are trying to help or who are in an official helping role—for example, a police officer blaming a woman for the sexual assault she experienced) you may find yourself questioning the trustworthiness of people in general, which in turn negatively impacts your ability to be in healthy and nourishing relationships.

A deeper discussion of how trauma interferes with healthy relationships will be the focus of the next few articles, but in the meantime know that you are not damaged, toxic, or beyond all hope. If you engage in the healing process and find your way to grow through the traumatic events of your past, you can and will reclaim the healthy and whole relationship with yourself that you have an inherent right to. Know that there are trained professionals who are ready and willing to help guide you through this process.

Trauma unequivocally impacts your relationship with yourself and challenges and changes how you think about yourself.

Before a traumatic life experience, it is common to believe in your ability to make good decisions, control your environment, and keep yourself safe. Trauma smashes these beliefs and leads to new ones, namely being unable to count on your judgment: if you once judged a situation, person, or behavior to be safe, and it proved to be traumatic, it is easy to believe that your actions cannot change or influence things, that you cannot control your fate, and that forces beyond your power dictate your safety.

These new beliefs can feel more accurate and convincing than the ones you held pretrauma, and thereby lead to a reduced sense of agency and safety—and a natural consequence of that is more frequent and intense feelings of vulnerability and fearfulness.

A common way to try and reduce or manage this increased sense of vulnerability and fearfulness is to increase your sense of responsibility and control. You might find yourself claiming responsibility for the traumatic occurrence, ignoring the fact that no traumatic event is caused by the person who experiences it. Or you may try and control all facets of your life: scheduling every minute of the day, micromanaging the lives of those around you, or establishing impossible standards of perfection.

Even though these efforts at increasing your sense of control are entirely understandable, they do not lead to the desired outcome and often cause you to try and control more elements of your life. Not only does a control agenda not deliver the safety and security you are trying to achieve, but such an approach exacts a high psychological cost. Excessive activities exhaust the human body, mind, and spirit and excessive expectations lead to harsh criticisms and even self-hatred.

The damage that trauma exacts upon your self-esteem also feeds into the harshness and self-hatred that frequently arises following a traumatic life event. It is common to believe that if you had been smarter, faster, fought harder, yelled louder, or simply been a better person, then the trauma would not have occurred. These inaccurate beliefs, though understandable, cause damage by creating a falsely logical conclusion that since the trauma did happen, you must have deserved or caused it—and if you did, then all the shame and self-hatred you feel is warranted.

These beliefs grate away your self-esteem and stoke harsh opinions of yourself to the point where the ensuing self-loathing can become unbearable and paralyzing, leading you to want to hide, disappear, perpetually apologize for your existence, or desperately prove that you are worthy.

You deserve and need to work on challenging these beliefs in order to reclaim the fact that you can make good decisions, that you do have some control over the vagaries of life, and that you are able to impact your safety in the world. Stay connected with the friends and loved ones in your life who are emotionally healthy so that you can hear and give credence to their thoughts regarding your abilities and capabilities. Finally, don’t forget to reach out to a professional and harness her or his training, compassion, and expertise to help you heal and grow through these trauma-induced beliefs.