Trauma doesn’t always refer to a single event. Relational trauma is characterized by ongoing mistreatment, abuse, or abandonment within a relationship. In other words, it’s trauma that occurs in relation to someone whom you relied on.
You do not necessarily need to be a victim of a traumatic event in order to feel traumatized. If you witness a traumatic event, or you are in a line of work that involves responding to emergencies, you can also struggle with trauma symptoms or even post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Countless people have suffered as a result of war. Around the world, many regions have dealt with violent conflicts that have spanned generations. Even for those who have been able to escape and settle down in safer places, the effects of surviving a war don’t just fade away.
Maybe you’ve recently experienced a traumatic event, and you feel like you haven’t been quite the same since. You might be haunted by flashbacks of the event, and it can seem like you’re constantly waiting for another threat to crop up.
Maybe you’ve been spending lots of time keeping up with the news. Every headline seems to bring worse updates. Each day, you see reports, images, and videos from different war zones.
If your child has lived through a traumatic event, you might be wondering how you can move forward as a family. Helping your child process and heal from what happened is a major undertaking.
For many people, trauma and chronic illnesses seem to go hand in hand. Fighting for a diagnosis and undergoing painful surgeries or treatments for a chronic illness can be traumatic.
Perhaps you’ve been struggling with your mental health. You’ve noticed that your symptoms seem eerily familiar. Maybe your mother, father, or other relatives dealt with similar symptoms when you were growing up. But you didn’t realize that these behaviors were indicative of a mental health condition.
Maybe you’ve been suffering from a chronic illness for some time now. You can’t help but notice that your symptoms began shortly after you survived a traumatic event.
Trauma does not just have an impact on your mental health. The emotional effects of surviving trauma are well-known, but many people do not realize just how deeply trauma can affect your physical well-being.