Most people don’t like to think about it, but both everyday life and roles we’d expect to involve extreme situations can sometimes get us caught up in events that can’t easily be put to rest.
If you’ve lived in a violent home or neighborhood, worked in roles that exposed you to extreme suffering or seeing others unexpectedly harmed, or been in other situations where your or someone else’s life was at risk, life may feel very different afterwards. If you never had the chance to experience a safe life at all, the lack of knowledge of what safety is supposed to feel like can also make it hard to move ahead.
It’s unknown exactly what leads histories like this to lead to ongoing symptoms for some people and not others, or in response to one event but not another. If you read the previous description and think something like, “I went through that, but life is pretty good now, and I’m not that bothered by that memory or situations like it,” you may be part of a lucky group of people who have experienced potentially traumatizing circumstances and made it through without much harm.
That’s not everyone, though.
Experiences like this can also change life unexpectedly. Even if you sometimes puzzle about what’s wrong, doubt yourself or your worthiness to reach out for help, or despair at ever looking forward to a future not fundamentally shaped by painful events like these, you may be suffering from treatable symptoms of psychological trauma. Ongoing symptoms can feel like being thrown back into the past as if it’s the present, or replaying like a tape or movie. You may feel outside of yourself, numb, blank, nonexistent or underwater. The way these sensations and experiences can come up unpredictably may lead you to feel hyperaware and on a hair trigger, even while also changing your habits and routines to avoid things you used to do. Feelings like this can be ongoing symptoms of treatable psychological trauma, or PTSD.
People have worked with me to climb out of the restricted routines and painful avoidance of PTSD and related disorders using a technique called “prolonged exposure”, or PE. Scientists and mental health clinicians at the Veteran’s Administration (VA) developed PE to help servicemen and women to return to a meaningful life after being shaken by the awful experiences of combat. PE along with the broader foundation of person-centered therapy that I apply to other issues is also validated to work for chronic and complex trauma (CPTSD). It’s in the same family of scientifically backed trauma treatments as other methods you may have heard of like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), cognitive processing therapy (CPT) and trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy (TF-CBT). It can be hard, it can be really unpleasant, but it may also give you your life back.