Traumatic experiences threaten people’s lives and sense of safety, and the emotional and behavioural consequences can be ongoing for the individual, their loved ones and the community. Despite widespread discussion of the topic — from TikTok “trauma dump” trends to tongue-in-cheek descriptions of your footy team losing — it can be difficult to understand trauma, recognise the impact it has on your life and get help to recover.
What is trauma?
Trauma is the experience of situations that are emotionally painful and distressing, and that overwhelm a person’s ability to cope. There are no rules around what makes something traumatic. Different events will impact people in different ways and what’s traumatic for one person might not be for another.
Trauma can be a one-off event like a life-threatening car accident, sexual assault, witnessing a death or a natural disaster. It can also be an ongoing experience like living in a war zone, growing up with an abusive parent, being neglected as a kid or working in emergency services.
Trauma can be something you experience personally, witness someone else experience or something your family or community experienced, even before you were born.
What is intergenerational trauma?
A person with unresolved trauma can behave in ways that traumatise others, especially children in their care, creating a cycle of trauma that repeats with the next generation. For First Nations people, the historical and ongoing effects of colonisation can be profoundly traumatic and significantly impact their wellbeing. This is particularly the case for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people affected by the Stolen Generations, who were children forcibly removed from their families and communities by the Australian Government from the 1910s to the 1970s. Stolen Generations survivors and their descendants are more likely to experience negative social and emotional wellbeing and health outcomes than other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Experiencing trauma can contribute to the development of many different forms of mental illness including depressive and anxiety disorders, alcohol and substance use disorders, self-harm and suicide-related behaviours and post-traumatic stress disorder.
One-off traumatic events
Most Australians have experienced a traumatic event, with the most common being the unexpected death of a close loved one, witnessing a person critically injured or killed, finding a body or being in a life-threatening car accident.
Common reactions to trauma include numbness, exhaustion, anxiety, distress, confusion, guilt, sadness, agitation, dissociation and hyper-vigilance. You might experience intrusive thoughts about the event, reduced concentration and repeatedly playing parts of the event over in your mind. You can also experience physical responses to trauma like fatigue, disturbed sleep, nausea, headaches, sweating and increased heart rate.
Generally, these feelings will resolve on their own but recovery from trauma doesn’t mean forgetting your experience or feeling no emotional pain about it. Recovery from trauma means becoming less distressed and more confident in your ability to cope as time goes on.
Most people recover from trauma but if you’re still struggling around a month after a traumatic event, chat with your doctor.
What is post-traumatic stress disorder?
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a set of reactions that occur in some people after they experience a traumatic event. Around 8% of Australian men experience PTSD in their lifetime. There are four kinds of PTSD symptoms:
What is post-traumatic stress injury (PTSI)?
Reducing the stigma around trauma and its effects can help people seek help. Some experts and advocates call for the name ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ to be changed to ‘post-traumatic stress injury’, to describe the experience more accurately and view it as something that you can recover from, much like a physical injury. A survey of 3000 people – including 1500 clinic patients and visitors – found two-thirds of respondents thought using the term PTSI would reduce stigma and over half believed it would increase hope around treatment and likelihood of seeking help.
“For some people, it’s a combination of sleep or alcohol misuse or anger, it might present as isolation, or having trouble with concentration, or workplace conflict or an inability to perform their role as they used to,” says Tim Peck. As Deputy Director of Responder Assist – created by posttraumatic mental health leaders Phoenix Australia – the former police officer uses his own lived experience to help other emergency workers recover from trauma.
“For men, there’s a tendency to push things off and say, ‘She’ll be right, I’ll get through it.’ The risk is that maybe you won’t get through, maybe the symptoms will intensify so much that you can’t function as you were.”
What is complex trauma?
Complex post-traumatic stress disorder can occur after you’re exposed to prolonged, repeated or multiple forms of trauma, particularly in childhood. Experiencing complex trauma such as sexual or physical abuse, sexual exploitation or trafficking, neglect or abandonment, war, torture or slavery, can have a profound impact on a person’s development and wellbeing.
Adverse childhood experiences
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) is the term used to describe all types of abuse, neglect and other potentially traumatic experiences that occur to people under the age of 18 years. They can change your brain structure and function, and the more adverse child experiences you’re exposed to, the greater the impact.
“Complex trauma, as opposed to single incident trauma, affects the very core of a person’s sense of self, their self-confidence, their relationship with themselves, with others and with the world,” says Dr Cathy Kezelman AM, President and Executive Director of the Blue Knot Foundation, which provides information and support for anyone affected by complex trauma.
“People who have experienced this sort of trauma, can really struggle to feel safe, to trust, because often they’ve been profoundly betrayed and can be very readily triggered by all sorts of different cues in the environment, that to others may seem insignificant.”
The effects of complex trauma can manifest at any point in your life.
Recognising and recovering from trauma
For Peck, ignoring his symptoms led to crashing his police car while drunk in a “half-baked suicide attempt”.
“Internally, I was combusting and hiding some really significant symptoms from everyone, including myself. I was suicidal, I was an alcoholic, I was anxious, but I was getting up and getting through a day at work every day without people recognising,” he says. “I didn’t understand why I was having nightmares, or why I’d have flashbacks, or why I was avoiding certain situations and people, I just ignored the symptoms and pushed on.”
The crash ended his career in policing but started Peck on a completely different journey. “It wasn’t until I’d actually hit a crisis point and was really in trouble that I actually opened up to anybody about my condition,” he says.
The effects of trauma are not always identified, acknowledged or appropriately addressed by individuals and communities
Many trauma survivors do not seek help, with the biggest barriers being stigma, shame and rejection; low mental health literacy, lack of knowledge and treatment-related doubts, fear of negative social consequences, limited resources, time and expenses. They may also worry about re-experiencing the traumatic events.
“Because of how society expects men to behave, to not be vulnerable, to not express your emotions, show that you’ve got it all together, it can be harder for men to come forward,” says Dr Kezelman AM.
“For many people who experienced complex trauma, they’ve learned that they can only rely on themselves, and so therefore they’ll withdraw and often be very reluctant to seek help.”
Effective treatments for PTSD are available and include counselling, medication or a combination of both. These treatments can work even if your traumatic experience was long ago. At the core of recovering from trauma is confronting the traumatic memories and reframing your thoughts and beliefs around the experience. For many survivors finding a service or practitioner to trust, feel safe with and be supported by over time is more critical for recovery.
While Peck had seen a psychologist before, he hadn’t engaged in the treatment. “I just lied my arse off,” he says. “You can have a plan to go to see someone, but it isn’t going to change much unless you buy in and do the work as well.”
That’s what Peck eventually did, and he’s been sober since 2014. “Because I’ve done so much work with my clinician, I’m much more aware of how I’m travelling, it’s okay to have a shit day, it’s okay to be anxious, it’s a matter of managing and acknowledging it, having a really strong plan about what to do when you’re not feeling great.”
Dr Kezelman says “there’s no one-size-fits-all” when it comes to treatment.
“Experiences of trauma are individual so experiences of healing are individual.” But hope is critical. “Even when it feels like there isn’t [any hope]. [Trauma] is a very, very common experience and there is help. The pathway to healing and recovery can be long and challenging, but with the right support, people can and do go on to live full, rich, engaged lives.”
Being trauma-informed
Trauma-informed care is an approach to services (like healthcare, policing and housing) that keeps a person’s potential trauma in mind. This can help a survivor’s recovery and reduce the potential for re-traumatisation. But anyone can be trauma-informed. It just means being aware and empathetic to the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of possible trauma survivors. Rather than wondering “what’s wrong with you?” it’s about considering “what happened to you?” “People use all sorts of coping mechanisms [for trauma] and that can include ones that aren’t constructive such as alcohol or drugs, overwork or exercising to excess, self-harm, being suicidal. These are ways people are trying to cope with profoundly abnormal experiences and the angst that creates,” Dr Kezelman says. “People don’t understand why an adult may still be struggling and they may be homeless, or they may be welfare dependent and think, “Why can’t they get their act together?” It’s about understanding why trauma has impacted them so profoundly.”
For more information, resources and support for trauma visit Blue Knot and Phoenix Australia.
