In my new book Transforming Pain Into Power: The Story of North Wales Recovery Communities (NRWC), I include a variety sections that relate to themes relevant to addiction and addiction recovery. These themes include the impact of trauma, as well as the healing of trauma. Here is one of these sections.
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In trying to understand the nature of trauma, we need to look at three different components. Firstly, the Event (or events) itself. Secondly, the Experience of the event—whether it is physically or emotionally harmful, or life-threatening. Thirdly, the adverse Effects on functioning the event creates, be they mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual. These effects may not appear immediately and may be very long-lasting.
In relation to the event and how it is experienced, it may be a capital ‘T’ trauma, such as major violence, rape, or a natural disaster. It may be a pattern of repeated, unpredictable, and uncontrollable stressors that leave the person fearing what adverse experience is coming next. Alternatively, it may involve neglect—such as fragmented, patternless caregiving of a child—or marginalisation, being excluded, minimised, or shamed. People can also be re-traumatised, even by helping professionals, institutions, or systems, e.g., the mental health or addiction treatment system, criminal justice system, and even the education system.
The long-term effects of trauma can involve a person being unable to: cope with the normal stresses and strains of everyday life; form and maintain relationships; manage cognitive processes, such as memory, attention, and thinking; control the expression of emotions and regulate behaviour. Hypervigilance, numbing, and avoidance are also long-term consequences of trauma.
A person may experience ‘intrusive symptoms’, such as recurring, unwanted images and thoughts of the traumatic event, and have dreams or nightmares about it. They may experience depressive symptoms such as sadness; a loss of pleasure from anything experienced; a sense of guilt and shame; over-focusing on negative things in one’s life, and a feeling of emotional and physical exhaustion.
A person may show a dissociative response in response to inescapable, unavoidable distress and pain. They may disconnect from their thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity. They escape the threat of the outside world by psychologically fleeing into their own inner world. Whereas the physiology of the arousal response is to optimise fight or flight, dissociation helps one rest, replenish, survive injury, and tolerate pain. One’s heart rate drops, and peripheral blood flow constricts. Endogenous opioids released in our brain reduce pain, which can explain why some people who cut themselves in response to stress or past trauma describe feeling no pain during the ‘self-harming’ process.
Leading trauma expert Bruce Perry emphasises that not all forms of dissociation are bad. The ability to control one’s dissociative capabilities is very powerful. It allows people to have an intense focus on a specific task, and to go to places in their head and ‘imagine things in the future in ways that a lot of people have a hard time doing.’