Trauma/PTSD: Is it really about being 'traumatized for life'?

Hello, Beautiful World!

This post will be a little different (divided into 'weekend' and 'week') as an exciting event occurred over the weekend related to my past two posts (Week 3 & 4). Without further ado, lettuce begin (idk why I just wrote that, but just go with the flow here):

Weekend (particularly Sunday):
On Sunday, as some of you may have seen on my snapchat, I went to the NEDA (National Eating Disorder Association) Walk with A New Beginning from 6AM to 9AM. Before I get into that though, let's have a little storytime session: I had to get up at 4AM!!!!! That was wayyyy too early since I haven't had to get up before 8AM since school ended. What was worse was that I couldn't fall asleep until 11:30PM the night before; so, I basically had to live off of ~4 hours of sleep.

Anyways, I woke up to an absolutely silent house (no normal human gets up that early), and realized that I make so much more noise when I'm trying to be quiet.

It took about half an hour to drive to the zoo. It was super dark outside (I don't like driving in the dark, so this was my first long drive in the dark). There were practically no cars anywhere (very eerie). I made it to the zoo, and it was soooo cold and dark (sorry, I've said dark like a million times).

But what surprised me was how many people had showed up for this walk! Everyone was so lovely and sweet and supportive despite the ungodly time we were up at, the cold, and the darkness. We set up our booth, and bam!

    

We saw an amazing sunrise. The sky literally looked like cotton-candy (seeing that made getting up worth it) :D There were awesome guest speakers, a relaxing yoga session, and the mile-long walk in the zoo was also super fun! Who knew the zoo animals are most active and awake that early?!

 At this event, A New Beginning also won first place for raising the most amount of money for the NEDA fundraiser (YAY TEAM!)😁

Side Note: While the zoo was super fun, it triggered my allergies and I woke up Monday feeling terrible (are anyone else's allergies kicking up?)

Week On-Site:

Getting to the disorder of the week, trauma/PTSD, we're going to start off with some general statistics:

• Trauma:*
• Every year, trauma "accounts for 41 million emergency department visits and 2.3 million hospital admissions" in the US
• The amount of lives lost to trauma (30% of all life years lost in the US) is equal to the combined rate of lives lost from cancer, heart disease, and HIV
• In the US, 70% (~223.4 million people) of adults have experienced some type of traumatic event**
• PTSD:**
• It is estimated that 1 out of 9 women develops PTSD (women are twice as likely to have PTSD as men)
• In the US, it is estimated that 8% of the population (~24.4 million people) have PTSD at any given time
• Of the 70% that have experienced some type of traumatic event, up to 20% develop PTSD (~44.7 million people who were or are struggling with PTSD)

What I found most interesting about these statistics was that of the millions of people that experience trauma at some point in their life, only about 20% develop PTSD. In other words, I was surprised that trauma didn't always lead to PTSD. 

Before meeting with Grace Brooks, a clinical therapist at A New Beginning who specializes in abuse/trauma/neglect, I conducted a survey and looked through everyday media relevant to trauma/PTSD. Starting off the meeting by asking her what misconceptions clients generally came in with to her in terms of trauma/PTSD, I learned that people come in feeling like they are permanently damaged. If a client has trauma and has no resources at the time of the trauma to process those feelings, that trauma is hard wired in the limbic system (the emotional part of the brain). As an adult, experiences in their life can trigger the original trauma and they experience feelings as if they are emotionally younger (they also may be experiencing emotions from their past). Their reaction seems like an overreaction. Some clients believe the symptoms of PTSD that are occurring in their adult life (depression, anxiety, self-defeating coping skills like an eating disorder) have nothing to do with the way they were raised. Many have no memories of any trauma in their past, and have difficulty assessing memories. 

Grace Brooks, MA, LISAC, LPC

From here, Grace and I discussed more about trauma/PTSD using the survey questions as a basis:

Misconceptions:

• Myth: Trauma only occurs after a life-threatening event. Everyone who faces such an experience will also get PTSD. 
• Truth: No! The life-threatening event is the trauma, and without support from family or professionals when it occurs, symptoms from PTSD can appear.  
• Myth: One can get through trauma alone if he/she is strong. 
• Truth: Trauma recovery cannot be done on your own. Clients need a professional to help them resolve the trauma. It has nothing to do with strength, except courage to get help.  
• Myth: If the trauma occurred a long time ago, you cannot change anything about it.
• Truth: By accessing the limbic system, the client can resolve their trauma no matter when it occurred. Treatment involves assisting the client to their memories of trauma. For instance, writing a timeline of behaviors from your past.  Mental health therapists use various skills to resolve the trauma (to name a few: EMDR therapy, Gestalt therapy, or Somatic Experiencing). Gestalt is using empty chair to reenact the feelings from the trauma by visualizing your abuser in the chair. Somatic Experiencing works with physical sensation, and helps the client access those sensations and release feelings from the trauma that have not yet been processed. Complex PTSD are many traumas that were experienced, and you can use the same techniques mentioned above. With treatment, negative cognitions, such as "I am bad," that are hard wired in your limbic system when you were a child can be replaced to "I am good" by creating new neural pathways from your limbic system to your prefrontal cortex. 
• Myth: For PTSD, one only needs to process the trauma to become fine. 
• Truth: Only talking about it will not help. Treatment has to be experiential by accessing the wounded ego state where the trauma is hard wired. An ego-state is an entire system of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors from which we interact with one another. 
• Myth: PTSD only affects war veterans.
• Truth: Anyone who experiences trauma or any life threatening experiences can experience PTSD symptoms. 
• Myth: People suffer from PTSD right after they experience a traumatic event.
• Truth: No, it takes time for the trauma to manifest into PTSD. If you have a therapist working with you in the immediate present when the trauma occurred, you won't have the symptoms of PTSD because you will have created a place where you can feel safe again and have processed the trauma. Also, when it manifests is different for everyone (anywhere from six months to twenty years).

Some things that can be myths or truths, depending upon the case:

• To say that trauma affects everyone the same is a very broad statement that is both true and false. It can be true because of the similar symptoms present in patients (for example, most everyone has startled experiences). However, it can also be false because just because some people don't have a startled response does not mean that they don't have PTSD. So, while there is a certain set of criteria (aka core symptoms) patients have to meet, they may not have all of the same symptoms besides those ones. 
• Trauma both can and cannot affect one for the rest of his/her life. If you do put in work and effort during recovery and therapy, you can certainly get much better in terms of your reactions to situations. However, if you don't work on it, your reactions get much worse and you can start to close-in on yourself. Basically, do the trauma work and you can get better. Recovery is possible. 
• Trauma most definitely can negatively impact one's personality/character. But get through treatment, and you can become a survivor instead of a victim. Also, getting through trauma work allows one to be there for others, building compassion by knowing at a deep level what others are going through. 

Since the media plays a huge role in how we perceive things, I also asked Grace how she felt regarding the portrayal of trauma/PTSD in If I Stay, Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Iron Man 3, and Sling Blade.

• If I Stay
• It's definitely a good portrayal of trauma (it's traumatizing to witness one's whole family dying and being the only one to survive). 

• Forrest Gump
• During the scenes in the movie in Vietnam, if it was a real person, it would absolutely cause trauma (even if they didn't necessarily portray it as so in the movie). 

• Saving Private Ryan
• Anyone in a war, unless they found some resource to process the trauma on the spot, would have trauma. The characters were in the midst of war, which is a life threatening event, so PTSD is possible.

• Iron Man 3
• Tony Stark does faces trauma and PTSD after his involvement in the alien war invasion in The Avengers (this can be seen by his symptoms: reclusiveness, outbursts of anger, etc.).

• Sling Blade
• This movie is actually what is shown to students studying trauma in graduate school (it shows how trauma develops into PTSD). 

Something interesting that I have slowly been realizing is that emotional trauma (repeated invalidating messages, etc.) is the basis for a lot of disorders. People end up believing and internalizing these messages, creating a negative core belief in themselves that gets in the way of them being able to reach their goals and living a successful life. It's actually deemed to be 'the silent killer' of the mental health world.

So where do all of the misconceptions surrounding trauma/PTSD come from? One source is social media. People who think they're knowledgable about these disorders go ahead and spread the wrong information throughout the internet. It can also be due to to research that had been later proved invalid (the former information just stuck around even after being proved wrong). Lastly, sadly to say, sometimes even professionals give incomplete information because they may not be fully-versed in mental health issues. 

 I hope you guys like my Week 5 post! Thank you all for following me on this enlightening journey, and showing me so much support!

Lots of love 💗,
--Saleena



Sources:

*Trauma Statistics (2014, February). Retrieved March 6, 2017, from http://www.nationaltraumainstitute.org/home/trauma_statistics.html

**PTSD Statistics (n.d.). Retrieved March 6, 2017, from http://www.ptsdunited.org/ptsd-statistics-2/