If you have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) you probably struggle with relationships and feel very alone. You wonder if you’ll ever feel safe and secure in a relationship. You’ll damage a relationship when you’re in the midst of a crisis because you’re very likely to “flip” (there’s a scientific basis for this that I’ll explain) and say or do things you’ll later regret.
When this happens, and especially if it happens multiple times, you end up compromising your relationships by behaving in ways that are symptomatic of your condition but not indicative of who you really are.
It’s not what’s wrong with you
Therefore, the unfortunate reality is that the people you care about will be hurt by these behaviors, and they will seek distance from you. Instead of getting the understanding you need, you’ll get negative judgment.
When this happens, you end up feeling defective. You ask yourself, “What’s wrong with me?” But the question isn’t what’s wrong with you, it’s what happened to you.
If you haven’t been in a war or a car crash (what we call “Big T” trauma), you – and your loved ones – may not accept the diagnosis of PTSD. You and they may think that what was experienced “wasn’t that bad.”
4 Different Types of Trauma = PTSD
What we understand now is that there are actually four different types of trauma: “Big T” (overwhelming, life-threatening events); “little t” (less obvious and still overwhelming events like abuse or neglect); ongoing, repeated negative experiences (bullying, being a witness to persistent violence or trauma, or adverse childhood experiences—also known as ACEs), and oppression (related to race, culture, gender, etc.).
For example, in my counseling practice the majority of my clients have experienced a high number of adverse childhood experiences – which contributes to an experience of complex trauma that can haunt a person as much as having fought in a war zone.
What is trauma?
So what is trauma really? Here’s my working definition: Trauma is an experience in which an event (involving powerful and dangerous stimuli) overwhelm the person’s capacity (resources) for coping.
This means whether a person actually experiences trauma or not is based completely on their perception of the event (or series of events). And guess what? Whether or not they were overwhelmed wasn’t a voluntary thing. It wasn’t a conscious decision.
As it happens, trauma is largely related to the involuntary decisions the brain makes to stay alive – usually these decisions fall into one of the following: fight, flight, freeze, or appease (or submit). So this isn’t a question of someone “bucking up” and “getting over it,” it’s a question of how a person’s nervous system responded (and continues to respond) in the face of perceived danger.
We can never know or truly understand how an experience affected someone – we can only ask the person how they experienced it. And then believe them. And then understand the ways that trauma may have shaped them.
Explain your PTSD
Because PTSD is best understood as an adaptive process—meaning that persistent adverse events end up re-wiring the brain so it can respond quickly to threatening circumstances when they recur.
Above all, the take-home message is this: when you or someone you love has problems being in a relationship, or behaves in ways that distance them from the people in their lives, it may be because they have been trained by trauma to perceive threats.
So what do these behaviors look like? How do they happen? And how can you deal with them? That’s something we’ll get into in my next post. Until then, the bottom line is that people who have experienced trauma will always need less judgment and more understanding.
If you’d like to find out more, click the button below and schedule a free, 15-minute call. We’ll discuss how we may be able to help you heal your trauma and enjoy more connection in your life.