Ana Große Halbuer

Is everything trauma, really?

Certainly, not every strain or challenging phase in a person’s life is traumatic.The same experience can lead to very different responses in different people which is why this question deserves to be answered individually, and with proper diagnostic support. Trauma, however, is more common than we tend to assume, and spoken about far less openly than we might think.

People who have experienced psychological trauma often continue to suffer from its aftereffects long after the event itself. Unprocessed distress and states of tension may show up as inner restlessness, anxiety or hyperarousal, aggression, sleep disturbances, immune dysregulation, a persistent inability to find calm, feelings of overwhelming sadness or grief, panic, helplessness, avoidance, over-adaptation, withdrawal and a pervasive sense of insecurity.

Traumatic experience can be understood as having been exposed – suddenly, all at once, or over too long a period – to something our system could not sufficiently process or integrate. This includes experiences that are not always consciously remembered, yet which may express themselves somatically, emotionally, or in our behaviour and relationships – both with ourselves and with others.

If you recognise patterns of relational difficulty, compulsive behaviour, rumination or impulsive anger – or if you often feel overwhelmed by intense emotions and find it hard to regulate what arises – this may point to an underlying need that trauma therapy can address well.

Persistent sadness, shame, guilt, sudden disgust, freezing responses or flashbacks can also be signs of traumatic experience. Many people describe feeling emotionally flooded, depressed or chronically irritable. These states frequently come alongside physical symptoms and can feel profoundly destabilising. Somatic complaints or pain without a clear medical cause can also emerge in this context, leading to significant distress and confusion. For many people, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel safe in their own body and in the world which affects their connection to their own inner experience and their capacity for closeness with others.

When overwhelming or threatening experiences cannot be sufficiently processed and integrated, and when terror becomes embodied, this has concrete effects on the body, the brain and nervous system, on perception, sensation and thought and on life and the sense of aliveness itself.

What begins as an acute stress response can, over time, become post-traumatic. At the core of post-traumatic stress is the absence of integration : the event has not yet been processed and placed within the brain and body’s memory system, which organises experience within a framework of time and place. As a result, parts of the trauma can be re-experienced emotionally, sensorially and somatically in the present – drawing our attention, again and again, back into the past.

Trauma is healable.

Even when your own capacity for self-healing feels out of reach or unreliable, it is always there. Traumatic experience once meant a loss of connection to yourself, to your body, to a sense of safety and orientation. Our relationships, our families and our experience of the world are all shaped by what we have lived through. When we keep encountering our embodied terror in the present, what is most often missing is a safe connection to ourselves.

Trauma therapy means rebuilding that lost access to safety within and with yourself, and with your body. From that regained sense of trust and orientation, memories can be felt anew, re-evaluated and integrated into life as it is now. Gently rediscovering these connections to yourself is a deeply healing and very personal process – one that can lead you back to your own aliveness and to a renewed sense of trust in yourself.

How does this work?

In trauma therapy, you reconnect with your innate capacities for self-healing and self-regulation and strengthen trust in your own agency, your boundaries and your choices. The trust you rebuild often becomes the foundation for safety and freedom in the most personal sense and in a life that feels truly yours.

Structure and process:

The goal of individual trauma therapy is always personal, shaped by what you bring and what we agree on together. An important foundation of trauma-centred work is first to support your connection to yourself and to a felt sense of safety, orientation and possibility within your current life circumstances. When these first steps take hold, this quality of safety tends to develop further in the body as well. Processing what has been overwhelming makes it possible to be more safely and stably present in the here and now  and to integrate what has been experienced, so that the memories of traumatic emotional states and old feelings of helplessness can be held and accompanied by you yourself.

Trauma is not one thing. A fundamental distinction is made between shock trauma and developmental trauma.

Alongside thorough trauma-informed assessment, we work together to identify your existing resources so that you can gain a felt sense of the safety and sources of strength that are already present in you.

The foundation of my trauma therapeutic work is grounded in a deep understanding of serial traumatisation, and particularly of attachment and developmental trauma. Depending on your individual needs, different trauma-specific approaches have proven effective – including the NARM® approach alongside more classical trauma therapeutic methods, neurovisual techniques such as EMDR® and Brainspotting®, and methodological approaches such as PITT® and TRIMB®. Body-oriented approaches, including sensorimotor and somatic psychotherapy and Polyvagal therapy, complement what I can offer you in your process.

This is intended as a general overview of the possibilities. Which of these approaches feels right for you will emerge from the therapeutic process itself. One principle guides all of my work: the foundation of any good therapeutic relationship is the quality of contact between therapist and client. For this reason, we get to know each other before beginning therapy and together decide whether and how we might work well together.

You can find further information on this topic under KNOWLEDGE including my BLOG.