Why has trauma become such a buzzword? - Video Transcript

Hey, everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and today I want to talk about Trauma, which is something that falls under the umbrella of anxiety disorders. It's sort of been a buzzword lately you'll see plastered all over social media and there's a lot of talk about childhood trauma and things like that. But I think there's also a lot of misinformation out there and some misconceptions about trauma and sort of how it can affect us. 

So the first thing I want to differentiate is the difference between PTSD and CPTSD. So PTSD is a pretty well known disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and this is going to come from a single event or short-term exposure to extreme stress or trauma. So you can think of it as sort of like a frozen memory. So it could be maybe a soldier returning from an intense battle. It could be a child who witnessed a friend's death in an accident. There was last summer, the Highland Park shooting. I'm about 20 minutes from Highland Park. So this was really salient in our community. But you know somebody who witnessed that and then demonstrated symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder such as nightmares or extreme hypervigilance, things of that nature. 

And then, more recently the term CPTSD has shown up and that refers to Complex Trauma. So complex trauma is going to result from more chronic repetitive stress from which there's little chance of escape. So sometimes this is referred to as childhood trauma. A lot of times it affects our core beliefs. It can cause us to disassociate and kind of like mentally and emotionally separate from ourselves. 

So some examples of this would be, you know at the extreme and like a prisoner of war who was maybe tortured for several years, somebody who was kidnapped, somebody who endured ongoing sexual abuse as a child. But then it can also be more subtle forms, such as exposure to gas lighting. If you were in an unhealthy marriage during the pandemic, I'm sure some people experience some Complex Trauma. You know just from the ongoing stresses of the pandemic. So it's really sort of long term exposure to crisis conditions. 

And I think the word trauma has been thrown around a little bit loosely lately and I don't want to minimize any one's experience. But Trauma is really kind of how an event affects us. So two people could experience the same event and one person could not be quite as affected by it for whatever reason, whether it's the way their nervous system is wired or you know their resiliency or how they cope with it or what not. 

Whereas another person who experienced the same thing might have a lot of symptoms of trauma, anxiety, and things of that nature. And so I think you know we're humans. We've all been through experiences or repeated experiences that some people could look at and say they were traumatic. But if we didn't actually experience those trauma symptoms, from those experiences, then referring to them as trauma can sort of be a slippery slope. So it's just something that I think is important to keep in mind that really it's a personal experience, whether something was was traumatizing or traumatic for someone and I think you know, with social media there it's really easy to pass judgment on other people's experiences because we don't know the idiosyncrasies and the specifics of them. So you know, just be really cognizant. If you're using the word trauma that might mean something to you and it might mean something entirely different to someone else and it's just something to really be sensitive about. 

So I hope this was helpful and informative. Please feel free to ask me any questions or drop a comment. Follow me on social media at Cathartic Space Counseling, or you can subscribe to my Youtube channel, the Anxiety Therapist or if you have an interest in working with me, provide free consultations via my website, that's catharticspacecounseling.com. So I hope you'll have a great week and I will talk to you next time.