It’s difficult to talk about trauma in a way that’s neither too clinical nor too soft. I try to find a balance between the language of science and the language of metaphor because I think both are important in understanding the process of trauma and recovery. The term trauma itself has gone through an evolution of meaning. Post-traumatic stress used to be considered solely a soldier’s malady and has now been recognized to also affect people who have suffered abuse in relationships, witnessed or experienced violence, and those who have survived natural disasters, catastrophic and sudden life changes, or medical emergencies.

If you have experienced trauma, you may find yourself struggling in the aftermath with feeling like you are unable to get out of that experience. It may be so severe that at times you literally think it’s happening again, or it may manifest as nightmares/intrusive memories or gaps in memory. You might find yourself feeling jumpy and on edge, having mood swings, or just plain feeling numb, lost, and out of it. You might be losing yourself in distractions, avoiding things you previously liked, and shrinking your world to cut out as many reminders of the event/s as possible. Often trauma memories themselves will feel disparate, with sensations separate from images, which may be separate from emotions, all of them like the frayed edge of a torn tapestry.

Trauma, in short, can turn your world upside down, shattering your sense of self, disrupting your relationships, and leaving you locked in a fragmented hell of sensations and memories of the worst moments of your life.

Post-traumatic stress is most easily conceptualized as a fragmented, dysregulated, and stuck adaptive response. Your nervous system is trying to do what it should, which is to learn from, master, and prevent future similar threats; however, it’s not able to do that job properly. Left untreated, you may find yourself stuck on a loop between fight/flight and freeze, one feeding into the other over and over. It can lead to life-long struggles and even be passed down generationally through culture and behavior as well as genomic changes. But it is far from the only or even the final story.