Recovering from PTSD and other trauma reactions is possible, and it it takes time, courage, compassion and patience. To understand how to heal trauma, we need to understand how it is stored in our body physiologically and how our brain works.
Many people don’t realize that even though someone may not immediately have symptoms after an upsetting event, these can come out of nowhere several years later and this can make the symptoms even more upsetting and confusing.
“Trauma” has become a word we throw around in our daily life and is generally understood to be a highly stressful event. Psychologically speaking, though, “trauma” is an upsetting event or stressor (often life threatening) that exceeds a person’s ability to cope with and is accompanied with feelings of helplessness or powerlessness. Given each individual’s combination of temperament, genetics and history, what may be traumatic for one individual may be within the ability for another to cope with, therefore trauma is based on the perception of each individual.