Psychological trauma can result from a single event or prolonged exposure to stress, leading to symptoms such as flashbacks, emotional detachment, and panic attacks. Coping methods include proactive, reactive, and passive responses, with proactive being the most effective. Treatment involves psychotherapy and medication.
Psychological trauma causes emotional damage to the mind resulting from a traumatic event, which can occur in a single moment or over a long period of time. It can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which impairs your ability to cope with stress. Psychological trauma is treated through psychotherapy or talk therapy and sometimes with medication.
A psychologically traumatic event is an event that overwhelms a person’s ability to handle them emotionally, often leaving the person feeling extremely insecure, betrayed, or disillusioned. Common examples are abuse of any kind, domestic violence or substance abuse by a loved one, combat experiences, natural disasters, accidents or medical emergencies, the death of a loved one, and long-term poverty. Whether an event causes psychological trauma depends in part on the person experiencing it. What one person experiences as traumatic may not be so for another person.
Symptoms of psychological trauma also vary among sufferers. Some possible symptoms are reliving the event in mind and body, sometimes through flashbacks or nightmares, repressive memories of the event, intense anger or sadness, emotional detachment or flattened affect, low self-esteem, insomnia, and panic attacks. Symptoms can be caused by triggers that remind the sufferer of the traumatic event, even if not consciously. Symptoms indicate the patient’s ongoing difficulty coping with the trauma. Sufferers may resort to drugs or alcohol to suppress the emotions associated with the traumatic event and often find it difficult to manage or control their day-to-day emotions.
Psychotherapists identify three methods of coping with psychological trauma: passive, reactive and proactive. A proactive response is an attempt to address and correct the source of the trauma in order to minimize the psychological damage. A reactive response occurs after the traumatic event has occurred and consists of an attempt to minimize or correct the resulting damage. A passive response represents an attempt to ignore the source of the trauma or to minimize one’s emotional response to it. A reactive response than a proactive one is more likely to experience psychological trauma, and a passive response is more likely to cause lasting traumatic effects.
While the three different ways of coping with psychological trauma are all natural responses, a patient who tends to respond reactively or passively may work to address potential stressors more proactively. Patients may also work to heal the psychological trauma in themselves by intentionally revisiting the traumatic event in a safe environment, such as with a therapist. This can take the form of simply talking about the event, role-playing, or mind-body therapies such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), somatic experiencing, or sensorimotor psychotherapy.
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