Common symptoms of trauma

  • Feeling stuck in the past and having trouble moving forward

  • Replaying painful memories or experiencing flashbacks

  • Being easily startled and tense or its opposite - feeling emotionally numb

  • Feeling disconnected from your body, having a hard time staying present

  • Challenges identifying, tolerating, and managing strong emotions

  • Changes in sleep or appetite

  • Avoiding triggers of painful memories or experiences

  • Trouble thinking about the future

  • Physical symptoms like chronic pain without medical explanation

  • Difficulty advocating for personal needs and boundaries

  • Experiencing trouble sleeping, having nightmares

  • Difficulty building trust or fearing abandonment in relationships

  • Burnout, loss of faith or spiritual crisis

  • Unclear, helpless, or incredibly negative sense of self

  • Behavioral difficulties that don’t feel totally voluntary like “self-sabotage”, anger, impulsivity

  • Self medicating through overworking, substance use, social media, sex, food, etc.

  • Feeling deep shame and defined by what you’ve been through

While there are a lot of reasons that you may notice some of the above symptoms in your life - if you have experienced trauma(s), even if it was a long time ago, it can be important to make connections between those experiences and their effect on you. Having insight can bring clarity and help you exercise personal choice in how you want to move forward or change.

Trauma disrupts thriving, connecting, and living in the present

Sometimes our lives are shaped by unimaginable moments outside of our control that overwhelm us. Life after a traumatic event can feel surreal and full of uncertainties as you try to come to grips with what happened and face tomorrow. Sometimes it is years after that you begin to appraise its impact upon your life or relationships.

The word trauma is a big one. A trauma isn’t limited to one kind of experience. What all traumas have in common is that they overpower our previously established ways of coping and significantly diminish our sense of ourselves, relationships, and the world.

Traumas can happen across the lifespan - from a one-time terrible experience to multiple, repeated experiences of fear, violence, instability, abuse, or neglect. You may experience a traumatic event directly or witness it - and in both instances it can have a profound, negative, and lasting effect. Trauma can be defined as the negative psychological, physical, and interpersonal effects after being exposed to or experiencing an adverse event that significantly impairs one’s ability to live and cope. Two people may experience the same event, but depending on many factors, may walk away differently. Often traumatic events include some aspect of seeing or experiencing serious threat, harm, or death - but it can also include extreme deprivation of what we need for basic physical, emotional, and relational health and safety. At its core, trauma significantly disrupts our ability to thrive and fully connect with ourselves and others. A disproportionate amount of conscious and unconscious energy is spent trying to survive or deal with what happened and what we worry it means for the future. Sometimes a traumatic event becomes your primary lens for what to expect in the world.

wilted purple rose in vase
“Therapy for trauma can help you address the effects of a traumatic experience with professional support so you can get unstuck and move forward. ”

Common trauma disorders

It’s helpful to know that not all traumatic events result in a personal trauma response or trauma disorder. In fact, it is considered healthy and expected for someone to experience distress and disruption after a traumatic event - this is simply part of what it means to go through an awful experience. However, when those symptoms or disruptions become prolonged or start to affect other areas of life unrelated to the traumatic event - this may mean you are struggling with a trauma disorder. The good news is that you don’t have to continue struggling on your own - research shows that therapy and professional support is effective in helping people recover from trauma.

Acute stress disorder

Acute stress disorder is characterized by symptoms such as recurring, intrusive distress or memories, avoidance, hyperarousal, changes in mood, and an altered sense of reality or dissociation following exposure to death, injury, or violence within 3 days to 1 month of a traumatic event. Symptoms are not only distressing, but get in the way of social, work, or personal responsibilities and functioning.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

PTSD is characterized by similar but a greater number of symptoms from acute stress disorder occurring for longer than 1 month, although symptoms can present at any time, even years following a traumatic event

Complex PTSD (C-PTSD)

C-PTSD is characterized by core features of PTSD, in addition to difficulty with emotion regulation, a persistently negative sense of self, and chronic difficulty in relationships. C-PTSD often occurs after repeated and prolonged exposure or experience of traumatic events, often starting in childhood where escape from the situation was not possible. C-PTSD is not a universally accepted diagnosis - it was only accepted to the ICD-11 in 2019. It recognizes that someone’s experience of trauma may not have a neat beginning and end, and they must manage the effects of enduring trauma compounded over time

Prolonged grief disorder

Prolonged grief disorder is characterized by a number of symptoms occurring nearly every day for at least one month, 12 months after the death of a loved one, including: persistent longing or preoccupation for the deceased person, disbelief, intense emotional pain, feeling of identity confusion, avoidance of reminders of the loss, numbness, intense loneliness, meaninglessness or difficulty engaging in present life

sign on post with words thank you ICU nurses

A multicultural note: Other types of trauma

The study of trauma is still evolving - more types of trauma are being labeled and recognized as having a profound impact on mental health and wellbeing - especially the ones that affect us across particular communities, social groups, and generations.

  • Collective trauma can be a shared experience of violence, threat, or natural disaster. For example, New Yorkers still remember where they were on 9/11. Undoubtedly it will take years before we can process the long-term traumatic effects of COVID-19 for the country. Collective trauma can be felt when a nation goes to war, survives a natural disaster, or when neighborhoods of color endure oppressive policing methods.

  • Intergenerational trauma occurs when the effects of trauma occurring in one generation (often within a family or social group) is passed down to subsequent generations (e.g., Holocaust survivors, racial trauma, addiction, abuse or neglect). Trauma responses can become part of a family legacy and relationship dynamics.

  • Vicarious trauma can occur when you are exposed to trauma secondhand - which is often the case for first responders, physicians, therapists, and caregivers whose careers put them in close contact to significantly negative events on a regular basis. It is important to validate these types of trauma as real and with damaging effects if not given adequate support and care.

  • Spiritual trauma happens when you experience abuse or maltreatment from a spiritual or religious leader within the context of a faith community. These experiences often represent an extreme power differential and seriously impact someone’s spiritual beliefs, worldview, and engagement in faith practices or organizations.

How can therapy for trauma & PTSD help me?

It’s understandable that you don’t want to revisit or talk about experiences that have caused incredible pain. Yet avoidance means that the pain goes untended to. It doesn’t disappear - it only means it seeps into your life in other ways that get in the way of thriving. Therapy for trauma can help you address the effects of a traumatic experience with professional support so you can get unstuck and move forward. It can also be validating or revelatory to learn more about trauma - what may actually be a very normal survival response to trauma is often misinterpreted as a personal shortcoming or failure. You may recognize that the strategies or defense mechanisms you used before to survive trauma worked for you then - but get in your way now.

Working with a trauma-informed therapist can help you understand, trust, and manage your emotions - something that may seem impossible if your trauma made you feel inner turmoil on a regular basis. On the other hand, if some of the ways that you dealt with trauma was by shutting down - therapy can be a place to safely reactivate or reintegrate parts of yourself or your life that you detached from. Whether it is learning to neutralize unexpected triggers or flashbacks, changing unwanted patterns in relationships, or strengthening your relationship with your body or yourself after trauma - the goal of therapy is to help you experience a sense of personal agency in your life, relationships, and how you tell your story.

Finding a trauma therapist in NYC - we’d love to help

Our team of psychologists at Manhattan Therapy Collective are trained in a range of relational, multicultural, and evidence-based trauma-informed therapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Relational Cultural Therapy, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Keeping trauma to yourself can be incredibly lonely. It can feel like you or your life have been defined by the bad things that have happened to you. But this doesn’t need to be the case.

We encourage you to reach out for support - we’d love to connect and answer your questions. Therapy for trauma can help you experience the care and support it takes to imagine more for your life and move forward. Being able to talk through what happened and actively move forward at your own pace can be an incredibly healing experience. Doing so with a therapist can also give you the opportunity to learn what it means to trust yourself and someone else in the context of an unconditionally supportive relationship.

Common questions about therapy for trauma

 

  • Absolutely. Having flashbacks is often disorienting and terrifying, and even moreso if you don’t understand what is happening or why. Sometimes the things you are trying to manage your flashbacks may be unintentionally making them worse. By demystifying what is happening and learning how to respond in healthy ways, you can regain a sense of control of your body and emotions with professional support.

  • It can make sense to go to therapy now even if your trauma(s) happened years ago and you’re in a very different place in life. Sometimes the effects of trauma are obvious, while sometimes they are not - learning more about the range of ways trauma can affect us depending on the context (e.g., how old you were), can be very validating and connect some dots. It can also be hard to have a full perspective of your own life, which makes having an outside party valuable. If you’ve actively avoided thinking about traumatic events, we do know that avoidance tends to have the opposite effect and usually strengthens the impact or meaning of the thing we’re trying to get away from - even if it’s unconscious. We also know that while the impact of trauma may not be particularly salient now - life experiences, such as new relationships, parenthood, relocation, or losses - may bring up what’s been buried or forgotten in unpleasant ways. Being proactive in addressing trauma in therapy can be a wonderful form of self-care and empowerment.

  • We actually get this a lot. As you can see from above, there is no singular definition of a traumatic event. What we care about the most is understanding and thoughtfully supporting you through whatever were the most painful experiences you’ve been through. It does not matter if someone else considers your experience a trauma or not - we are not interested in comparing one’s experience to another. What we do care about is its impact on your life - whether or not a significant experience is keeping you from the life you want to live or the person you want to be. Our ultimate goal is to help you thrive.

  • Absolutely not. Most mental health professionals would agree that we’ll be processing the effects of covid for quite some time. Especially in the case of first responders, essential workers, parents, teachers, and those who lost loved ones in the pandemic - sometimes there was simply no time to do anything but survive the moment - not process or address your reactions to it. Adrenaline, the burden of responsibilities, our ability to compartmentalize or put others first, burnout, depression, grief - can often mean we aren’t remotely in the same area code as our traumas until much later. Unfortunately this can be the case for many. We very much want to normalize having a trauma response years later after a traumatic event. And we’re ready to connect whenever you are.