Trauma therapy

The term trauma goes back to the Greek language and means "wound". The Trauma therapy treats a mental or emotional trauma or psychotrauma.

What is trauma therapy?

In psychology, trauma is referred to as a mental wound. Trauma occurs as a somatic response to overwhelming events.

In psychology, trauma is referred to as a mental wound. Trauma occurs as a somatic response to overwhelming events. People who experience extraordinary situations such as abuse, violence, accidents, life-threatening illnesses, operations, and states of war can develop trauma symptoms or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Trauma therapy tries to get the affected people out of the spell of their traumatic experiences and to treat the typical stress symptoms associated with them effectively in order to enable them to live a free and largely unencumbered life again.

Function, effect & goals

The World Health Organization describes trauma as a mentally distressing event that stems from a catastrophic, extraordinary situation or threat that can be both long-lasting and temporary. These experiences almost always cause lasting disturbances in those affected. However, not all stressful situations lead to trauma. Whether or not this condition arises depends in many cases on the personal nature of the person concerned and their social environment, how they experience the traumatic event and whether they are able to process it or not.

People perceive a traumatic experience as a situation close to physical or emotional death, to which they are either apparently or actually at the mercy. This situation arises from external circumstances and / or fellow human beings over which the affected person has no influence. An example is the rampage of a youth in the Albertville secondary school in Winnenden in 2009. He killed several students, teachers and passers-by before he judged himself. The survivors are still in trauma-therapeutic treatment today because they are not able to come to terms with this incredible event, which they only accidentally escaped alive.

Almost all trauma victims instinctively protect themselves through a mechanism of internal separation, dissociation, which enables them to separate different areas of the traumatic experience. Some people are open about it and feel the need to talk about it. They are overwhelmed with a flood of thoughts, images and dreams in which they relive the event over and over again. These flashbacks can be caused by sounds, smells, colors, places, images, films, people or certain situations.

These triggers are called triggers in technical terms. Even decades later, they can trigger a chain reaction of somatic reactions completely suddenly, without those affected ascribing them to the trauma. The traumatizing event is indelibly stored in the brain. This protective mechanism is intended to enable the person concerned to react immediately to the same or similar events in the future in order to avert the danger. Other sufferers separate what they have experienced completely from their lives and ignore everything that is related to it. They rely on the strategy of denial, ignoring and emotional withdrawal in order to suggest normality in this way, because they see their trauma as a disruption in the regular process.

This behavior is a protective mechanism that those affected have built up over the years to avoid repeated trauma.At some point they perceive this behavior as normal and self-evident, and this is how they are also perceived by their social environment, which, without knowing it, reinforces their understanding of their roles. Even people who suddenly witnessed extreme situations without being victims themselves can develop traumatic stress symptoms.

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Risks, side effects & dangers

Traumatic experiences always put one's own identity to the test, because the people affected have no influence on these external events that affect their lives. Unprocessed trauma can have serious consequences, as the protective mechanisms increasingly become independent.

The consequences can be depression (dysthymia), inability to work, addictions, dissociative disorders, emotional coldness, behavioral problems, attachment disorders, extremely controlled and controlling behavior, avoidance (avoidance), aggressiveness (hyperarousal) and post-traumatic stress disorder. This is where trauma therapy comes in. It starts with general counseling, which can be short or long term. With the short-term counseling, the victim only deals with a few aspects of the experience. The long-term counseling works through what has been experienced step by step and also gives the victims assistance in order to be able to cope with everyday life again.

Trauma-therapeutic consultations start at different points. In the case of acute symptoms, in addition to trauma therapy, drug therapy using psychotropic drugs, tranquilizers and antidepressants is indicated, even if the allocation of these drugs is not undisputed. These drugs reliably reduce anxiety, impart a state of calm and block the reuptake of serotonin by means of "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors". Although these substances are often the first treatment of choice, they only combat the side effects of post-traumatic complaints, but they do not eliminate the cause.

The use of psychotropic drugs only makes sense in combination with trauma therapy. This pursues different approaches. The psychotherapeutic procedure helps to process the traumatic experiences in an orderly manner, to limit them or to resolve them. The psychoanalytic process works with transferring and fixing the traumatic experiences from patient to therapist. The imaginative process uses the deeper levels of consciousness and works with dream-like processing images. The narrative approach takes into account the patient's need to compose a story in conversations.

Other important approaches are behavioral therapies that confront victims with what they have experienced (exposure therapy), as well as the exposure and restructuring approach. This dream-focused therapy aims to make stressful memories manageable and to weaken them. Gestalt therapy relies on an isolated approach to mind, soul and body. Creative approaches (art therapy) can also be useful. Victims of trauma who show a certain psychological resistance to what they have experienced show a resilience.