Is it bad to talk about your trauma?

Talking about personal trauma can force you to revisit painful memories. Forming coherent thoughts about traumatic experiences can trigger flashbacks, nightmares, and panic. But, forced exposure to these thoughts might cause more harm than good. Don’t be afraid to seek help from a mental health professional.

Can talking about trauma be counterproductive?

But research has found that telling the trauma story is ineffective in bringing relief from symptom of trauma and sometimes can be harmful (retraumatizing). Careful preliminary work with other strategies needs to take place before working with the trauma story itself.

Do we all have childhood trauma?

Unless we’ve suffered sexual or physical abuse, or even if we have, we may tell ourselves that there was no “trauma” in our early life. By this definition, we have all experienced some degree of trauma in the process of growing up.

At what age can trauma impact human beings?

The mean age at first exposure to any trauma was 11.4 (SD=8.8), but ranged between before one years of age through age 62. Overall, middle childhood (ages 6–10) was the most often reported time period for first exposure to child maltreatment (Table 2).

Does talking about trauma help trauma?

Getting people to talk about trauma while they are traumatized may not only not help, but could actually make things worse. (1) Getting people to ‘relive’ their trauma is not therapy. But it can be torture.

Do trauma trauma triggers need to be ‘uncovered’?

That therapist also believed that many traumas are hidden, blocked out by the conscious mind, and need to be ‘uncovered’ and then re-lived through the imagination, so that the client can ‘get in touch with’ all the raw pain and emotions of that original time in order to ‘let it go’. This therapeutic myth has been around for over one hundred years.

Why is a heavy focus on telling the traumatic story?

A heavy focus on telling the traumatic story reflects outdated notions of what trauma does to people and how to treat it. Traumatic memories are not stored in a way that they can be deeply accessed by verbal interactions based on cognitive or logical processes.

Can you heal trauma by reliving it?

Before he came to see me, Colin had been to a therapist whose treatment approach was based on the maxim that in order to help heal trauma you have to relive it, and re-experience all the original feelings again as they happened.