Library · Shirley J. Davis
Understanding Trauma
Acute, chronic, and complex trauma, and how they connect to DID.
We’ve all heard the words trauma and traumatized used in pop culture, newspapers, and journals, but what is trauma? What makes it the heart of so many mental health diagnoses, and how can we combat it?
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a trauma-related disorder, and to understand the condition, we must first understand trauma. This article will do just that: explore trauma and how it affects those with DID.
What Is Trauma?
The word trauma is used in two different ways: physical, meaning a physical injury, and psychological, meaning an emotional response to a profoundly distressing event. The latter is our focus today, and it can follow the sudden loss of a loved one, an accident, a natural disaster, or an assault, to mention only a few causes.
People exposed to trauma might respond in several ways, such as being in a state of shock, feeling extreme grief, or being in denial of what just happened to them. Trauma may also cause long-term reactions such as emotional instability, emotional flashbacks, impulsiveness, and strained relationships.
The Three Major Types of Trauma
Trauma is often life-altering and is divided into three major types: acute, chronic, and complex. It is vital to note that one may begin with acute trauma and advance to chronic or complex trauma.
Acute trauma
Acute trauma results from a single distressing event, such as an accident, an assault, or living through a natural disaster. The event is frightening enough to shake the person’s sense of physical and emotional security. It leaves a lasting impression on the person’s mind and, if not addressed, can affect the way they behave or think.
The signs of acute trauma are:
- Unusual anxiety or panic
- Irritability
- Confusion
- Inability to sleep
- Feeling disconnected from the surroundings
- Lack of trust in self or others
- Inability to focus
- Lack of self-care and grooming
- Aggressive behavior that is out of the usual for the person
While time can heal people living with acute trauma, a mental health professional can help ease the anxiety and hopelessness they often experience.
Chronic trauma
Chronic trauma occurs when a person is exposed to prolonged distressing events over a long time. Chronic trauma may result from:
- A serious long-term illness
- Sexual abuse
- Domestic violence
- Bullying
- Exposure to extreme traumatic situations such as war
The symptoms of chronic trauma may appear days or even years after the traumatic events. They are profoundly distressing and can present as:
- Emotional instability
- Emotional outbursts
- Anxiety
- Extreme anger
- Flashbacks
- Fatigue
- Body aches
- Headaches
- Nausea
People experiencing chronic trauma may develop trust issues and struggle to keep stable jobs or relationships. Help from a qualified mental health professional can help a person experiencing chronic trauma heal.
Complex trauma
Complex trauma results from exposure to many different traumatic events or experiences, such as repeated childhood abuse. These traumatic events usually happen within relationships and leave the person feeling trapped.
Complex trauma has a severe impact on a person’s psyche and is found in people who experienced childhood abuse, neglect, domestic violence, family fighting, and other repeated experiences.
Complex trauma affects a person’s overall health, performance at work or school, and relationships. The symptoms of complex trauma are:
- Anger
- Sadness
- Despair
- Change in self-concept
- Distrust of others
- Suicidal thoughts or actions
- Feeling detached from one’s body or surroundings (depersonalization/derealization)
- Episodes of feeling detached from one’s mental processes
- Isolation
- Guilt
- Shame
- Feeling different from other people
- Helplessness and hopelessness
- Self-harm
- The abuse of alcohol and other substances
To heal from complex trauma, one must restore self-awareness and learn to understand what is happening in one’s brain. By understanding better what is happening inside ourselves, we can learn to control our actions through hard work, dedication, and time.
No matter what type of trauma you are experiencing, if you find it challenging to recover, please seek the help of a mental health professional. A qualified therapist can help you heal from the traumatic experiences you have survived.
Trauma and Dissociative Identity Disorder
There is a strong link between complex trauma and dissociative identity disorder. During a traumatic event, children use whatever coping mechanisms they can find to distract and distance themselves from what is happening to them. Some will be very still, others will fight back, and still others will escape their abuser by pretending the assault is not happening to them. In time, these children begin escaping into their minds through dissociation.
Dissociation is a normal mechanism that humans use when they are bored or overwhelmed. Over time and with chronic use, dissociation becomes the go-to mechanism a child uses whenever they perceive they are in danger. In the setting of chronic or complex trauma, dissociation is a coping strategy, thought to be a self-protective survival technique to escape the unbearable.
Supporting the link between trauma and DID, researchers have noted that people with dissociative identity disorder and other dissociative disorders report the highest rates of childhood abuse and neglect of any psychiatric group.
Ending Our Time Together
Nearly everyone will experience a traumatic event at some point in their life. No one is exempt.
Trauma is disruptive and can be destructive to a person’s life if it is left untreated. Treatment often involves working with a mental health specialist to face what happened and put it into the past.
There are three categories of trauma, sometimes overlapping and progressive if not treated. People living with dissociative identity disorder have experienced both chronic and complex trauma, and they need to understand what is happening to them, and what happened to them, to heal.
I hope you get some information from my writing. I thoroughly enjoy sharing what I know and understand about DID through my lived experience and what I have gleaned in the thirty years since I was diagnosed.
“Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.” — Peter A. Levine
Reference
Sar, V. (2014). The many faces of dissociation: Opportunities for innovative research in psychiatry. Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience, 12(3), 171–179. doi:10.9758/cpn.2014.12.3.171
© Shirley J. Davis. Shared on Ivory Garden with the author’s permission.
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