7 Thoughts That Prevent You From Seeking Help After a Traumatic Event (And Why You May Want to Rethink Them)
Brian (not his real name) closed the door of the aircraft and guided the passenger boarding bridge back toward the airport. Although he had been working at the airport for five years, he had no warning of what was to follow. With temperatures below freezing, the plane had to be de-iced before leaving the bay. The airplane waited a long time to take off. When the tower finally gave the signal to take off, the plane’s engines revved, systems froze and the plane crashed. Forty of its sixty passengers died.
Brian was one of the first responders at the scene of the crash. Later, he told me he had offered his coat to passengers whose clothes had been blown off, took families to the morgue to identify bodies and helped a passenger get new glasses after his were destroyed in the crash.
The award the airline presented Brian did not assuage the trauma symptoms, nor did the short-term therapy offered by the airline company begin to address his reactions to all the horror he had witnessed. It took five years to not get teary each time he thought of the accident. Even a shift to doing office work for the company did not help ease his anxiety and nightmares. At the time of the crash thirty years ago, Brian had to “deal with it” on his own.
Why Traumatic Events Can be a BIG Deal
Traumatic events overwhelm the nervous system and cause body functions that are beyond our control to go on the blink or to develop posttraumatic stress (PTSD) symptoms. This is a big deal!
PTSD can result in not being able to move easily between what your body does to help you rest and what it does to get you ready for action. For example, if your nervous system clamps down on your ability to rest, your body does a nosedive. You become exhausted or numb; your blood pressure and heart rate drop; digestion problems develop; and your ability to fight off disease weakens. Mentally, you can become depressed or lose interest in relationships and when you dissociate the environment appears not quite real.
On the other hand, the parts of us that get you ready for action can get revved and get stuck there. When this happens, heart rate increases, breathing becomes difficult, muscles tighten and the skin tingles. Sleeping or relaxing becomes difficult. Emotionally, you anger easily or become on-guard with the smallest provocation, and you panic or worry easily.
At times, the nervous system becomes so stressed that you bounce between feeling collapsed and revved. For example, depression may hang out under anxiety and you alternate between constipation and diarrhea. Easily transitioning between feeling charged and then relaxed is out of the question.
Traumatic events can affect the nervous system profoundly, yet you may not be able to reach out for help. This happens to all of us; even those who offer treatment for traumatic stress. Being able to recognize that an event was traumatic and that it indeed has affected your body and then to recognize your limitations in being able to address the posttraumatic symptoms can be very challenging. Understanding why you are reluctant to seek professional counseling can help you discover what might be keeping you from recovering from a traumatic event.
7 Reasons Why We May Not Seek Help After a Traumatic Event
1. You may not think that what happened to you was traumatic. This is a very common response. After something serious happens, you may dissociate, i.e. feel little physical pain, think it didn’t really happen, or be cut off emotionally from our terror.
Dissociation is natural and in many ways a good thing. It can keep you from freaking out when you need to give a report to the police, make family meals or go to work. The protection the dissociated state offers you, however, can lead you to think, “I’m just fine,” and keep you from appreciating just how much you have been seriously affected by the event.
2. You may choose to do something that you believe will benefit you, such as a needed medical procedure, and not know that it could also be traumatic. While you may be pleased that your bones were reset or that the C-section helped your baby to be born alive, your nervous systems can be negatively impacted by the anesthesia or the less-than-supportive professionals or family whom you encountered along the way. You may not stop to consider that your nervous system could get overwhelmed even as you benefit from a procedure.
3. When you compare our traumatic stress with those of others, your stress seems minor and not deserving of much attention. You may minimize the effect of the fender bender or the fall off the curb. You tell ourselves that what happened is nothing compared to someone who was almost killed or became paralyzed after an accident. In reality, each of us has a different point of overwhelm; what may be not traumatic to one may indeed be traumatic to another.
4. As an adult, you regard the abuse or neglect you experienced as a child as having happened “so long ago” that you believe it could not have an effect on you now. You also tell ourselves that childhood events, including birth difficulties, which you may not recall, are things of the past. “Children forget these things,” you tell yourself.
We now know that the body does indeed have the capacity to remember, even if you don’t have the words to describe what happened. Symptoms associated with childhood stress can lie dormant for a long time then suddenly appear. When they appear out of the blue, you may not take them seriously or connect them to anything in our childhood.
5. Telling others your story can overwhelm your listeners.. You may decide to not talk to others if your story leaves them also feeling depressed or anxious. As a result, you may decide not to discuss anything about the traumatic event to avoid hurting others and having to deal with their uncomfortable reaction. You want to protect others and ourselves from further harm. Frequently, you think that if our friends could not tolerate knowing what happened, then no one would be able to be there for you.
6. Somewhere along the way, you lost trust that others could offer competent help. Responses to trauma often get linked to one another. If you did not have adequate protection or support during earlier traumatic events, it is easy to generalize that you will not be helped again. This is a common reaction.
One of the main effects of traumatic stress is to inhibit your ability to see our current situation clearly; instead, you tend to live as though the past is still occurring. You are not able to see that there really is competent help available so you prefer to manage things on your own.
7. Your culture, including military life, expects you to go on, no matter what. You live in a culture that expects you to be tough, to produce and to override physical and emotional pain. Reaching out for help can bring shaming remarks, a sense of feeling like a failure or being broken. Admitting to being overwhelmed and compromised in your ability to perform can scare you and your loved ones. You would rather keep pushing on.
What Can Be Gained by Working With a Professional Trained in Trauma?
A trained therapist can normalize trauma symptoms. She can help you to understand why you are acting and feeling the way you do. Understanding that your reactions are typical responses of the nervous system, which you cannot control, can take away judgment that you are doing something wrong or that you are weak in some way. In addition, the therapist’s support can provide validation and acknowledgement you may have wanted and deserved for a long time.
The therapist won’t freak out when you tell her your story about the traumatic event. A trained professional knows how to take good care of herself. Her belief and experience that your body knows how to heal from post traumatic stress enable her to hang in there with you. To fully recover from trauma, and this IS possible, your brain needs to connect with others. The therapist can provide a compassionate escort along the way.
Sometimes the memories of the traumatic event are just too horrifying to face them on your own. A trauma specialist can help you to work through the memories (even if you don’t remember much of the story) in such a way that all the energy that arose at the time of the traumatic event and which is still trapped in the body gets to move out of your system. It’s done without you feeling frightened or overwhelmed. The unpleasant symptoms then go away or significantly diminish.
When you are dealing with the traumatic stress on your own, there can be a temptation to tell the story over and over. Unfortunately, this makes the grooves in the neural pathways associated with the PTSD symptoms go deeper, and you can stay in the trauma symptoms longer. During therapy, a trained professional can support and encourage you to pay attention to what calms, eases tension, and reminds you of the times when you felt most like yourself. Paying attention to your experience in this way actually helps to create new neural pathways that help with healing. Feeling relaxed, able to rest, and no longer depressed become real possibilities.
Summary
- PTSD affects the nervous system by causing us to lose the ability to move easily between rest and activity and/or between feeling calm and emotionally charged.
- We are reluctant to get professional support because we:
- Downplay a traumatic event.
- Are not aware that helpful medical interventions can contribute to PTSD.
- Judge our experience as being less traumatic then others
- Believe “time heals all wounds.”
- Think that talking about our experience causes more pain in others.
- Live in the past, unable to trust that help really is there now.
- Override our pain to conform to society’s expectations to perform.
- Benefits of working with a trained trauma therapist include:
- Normalization of trauma symptoms
- Ability to be a compassionate companion when we get scared
- Emphasis on what returns the nervous system to health
- Management of the healing process in ways that do not retruamatize
If You Are Wondering…..
If a past traumatic event is still negatively impacting your life or that of a loved one, it may help to check it out with a trained trauma specialist.
I offer a free 30-minute consultation, in person or by phone, during which we can discuss your situation.
For more information about how trauma may affect you or someone you love, subscribe to my free newsletter Healing Trauma
~Maggie
