Trauma and Complex Trauma create difficult challenges for individuals and can have a significant effect on their relationships, affected by conscious - or unconscious - associations linked to past abuse.
They become "triggered" by events that may seem unrelated to their current experiences - or may seem uncomfortably familiar - and interactions between couples or family members quickly become overwhelmed with emotional reactivity.
Trauma: You may have experienced one incident or many, due to an act of nature, a criminal offense or accident, of short duration or prolonged.
The effects of trauma can be long-term, affecting you and your relationships with your partner, children, colleagues or the driver that just cut you off in the parking lot.
At times, people deal with trauma by "numbing out" with alcohol or drugs or emotional withdrawal. Others may "act out" in anger, causing trouble with their family, neighbors or the legal system.
Complex Trauma: This occurs when multiple traumatic events, occurring simultaneously or at different points in life, affect the conscious or unconscious memory.
Subsequent traumas become easier to "lay down" in the brain - a history of early trauma can create vulnerabilities that worsen the effects of later trauma.
Numbness and strong reactivity alternate as protective processes that help you or your partner survive the moment or the day, but negatively affect you and your relationships in the long term.
Often, survivors of past trauma, or their partners, notice:
- Frequent feelings of depression or anxiety
- Felling sudden anger or rage at a person or situation
- Frequent, strong arguments in a close relationship that seem unresolvable
- "Numbing out" emotionally
- "Self medicating" with alcohol or drugs
- Problems with boundaries in relationships (trouble saying "no" or overly focused on others to one's own detriment)
- Unexplainable discomfort or uneasiness with a situation or event
Feeling one or even some of these does not mean you were traumatized. But trauma survivors often report these occurring frequently or even daily.
Sometimes, trauma survivors wonder if they are "crazy" - but as they work in therapy toward insight and self-compassion, they discover that they are actually using "survival skills" that made sense in the context of abuse, but no longer serve them in their lives or relationships.
