If you've lived through a trauma, why wouldn't you want to avoid any reminder of it or any
thought about it?
Of course you would.
Of course you'd want to go to any step you could to avoid reliving that trauma.
So how could I possibly suggest that avoidance might make things worse?
Stay tuned and I think you'll understand My name is Barbara Heffernan and I am an anxiety
and trauma specialist, a psychotherapist, and I created this channel to give people
more hope about recovering from anxiety and trauma.
If you support the work that I'm doing here, the best thing you can do for me is to subscribe
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In this video I'm going to focus on the PTSD symptoms that fall into the category of avoidance.
By the end of this video, you'll understand how avoidance impacts you so you can make
a more informed choice about what you'd like to do.
And I also think you might be surprised by one or two of the ways that avoidance shows
up.
So, stay tuned.
So post-traumatic stress disorder is a grouping of symptoms that may occur after somebody
has experienced a trauma.
And these symptoms fall into four categories and the categories are intrusive symptoms.
So thinking about it when you don't want to, nightmares, distressing thoughts, avoidance
symptoms - which we're going to focus on today.
Negative changes in how you think about yourself or the world and negative changes in mood.
And then also hyperarousal symptoms.
So feeling hyper vigilant, always on edge, not being able to sleep.
All of that falls into hyperarousal.
And sometimes I think it's also very helpful for people to know that their grouping of
symptoms does not mean that they are nuts, but that they have a treatable condition.
And with trauma, it's very important to know that you are not crazy and that your symptoms
are not crazy.
Your symptoms are a fairly normal response to a traumatic event.
So what was crazy is what happened to you, not the symptoms you're having.
And the avoidance symptoms include persistently avoiding anything that's related to the event,
avoiding memories of the event, avoiding - trying to avoid thoughts of the event, trying to
avoid feelings.
So if a person or place or object creates feelings that are related to the trauma or
any kind of reminder of it, you will avoid those things.
And as I said at the beginning, it makes perfect sense to want to avoid.
We all want to avoid pain.
We all go to pretty extraordinary lengths sometimes to avoid pain if the pain is severe.
So people can avoid feeling the feelings that go with the trauma in fairly self-destructive
ways.
They can abuse alcohol, abuse drugs, become hyper-sexual in a self-destructive way.
They can develop eating disorders, gambling addictions.
There are many manifestations that occur from trying to avoid the feelings that go - the
feelings or memories that go with the trauma.
And so it's pretty easy to understand how those kind of very self-destructive avoided
behaviors can create problems of their own and really long term impact somebody in a
negative way.
And then there's some much more subtle forms of avoidance.
Sometimes people become very numb.
They just become, they numb themselves out to all feelings.
Because if you numb yourself out to pain, you're also numbing yourself out to joy.
So long term it's not a good solution.
And then a very common impact of avoidance is that somebody will avoid getting treatment
for a trauma.
And trauma recovery can be facilitated by going for treatment shortly after the trauma,
which obviously does not apply to childhood trauma if you're an adult because you did
not have the ability to take, bring yourself to treatment.
But if you're an adult and you experience a trauma, the sooner you get treatment, the
better the outcome and the shorter amount of time you need to suffer.
So the best analogy I know of to think about when you think about avoidance is the analogy
of a magnet.
And if you have a really large magnet and you have a smaller magnet, well the smaller
magnet go like -oof- , right?
If we flip that smaller magnet, it will be pushed away from the larger magnet.
However, that larger magnet is still controlling the activity of the smaller magnet.
So that's the way to think about your trauma.
Whether you have a trauma and you are completely engulfed by it or you run away, you block
it, you dissociated.
You might even forget the memory.
You compartmentalize it into a little tiny part of your brain.
Your activities are still being controlled by that trauma.
Another example to use would be if somebody was in a supermarket and there was a bombing,
they might begin to avoid going to any supermarket whatsoever and you could probably get around
going to a supermarket, have a friend shop for you, have your spouse shop for you.
But pretty much if you're avoiding all supermarkets, you are letting that trauma control you.
Even though what you feel like you're doing is avoiding feeling the feelings of having
had that trauma.
Does that make sense?
Could you comment below and let me know if this makes sense to you?
That avoiding is still allowing the traumatic experience to control your behavior.
So how do you not avoid?
Well, that depends a little bit on long you've been avoiding because if you had childhood
trauma and you've been avoiding for a very long time, not avoiding would begin probably
by beginning therapy.
Beginning to talk about it, beginning to go into the feelings around it, which is very,
very hard work but worth it.
And then if you've been avoiding all the difficult memories and feelings by abusing drugs, substances,
or behaviors, the first step will be to recover and no longer utilize those behaviors to avoid
feelings because when we avoid the really difficult feelings, as I said, we are also
limiting ourselves from truly being able to feel joy, happiness, peace, contentment.
So one of my earlier videos I call How to Dive Into It to Get Over It, which is a video
on traumatic memory processing, which I will put the link here, but unfortunately to recover
from trauma there is a need to dive into it, to get over it.
But some of the steps that you can take now to help yourself begin to do these would be
to develop some kind of mindfulness practice, to practice grounding techniques, to engage
in activities where you feel physiologically safe to be present in the moment because that
helps you really develop the feeling that I'm safe now.
Things are okay now.
This trauma is not happening to me now.
And the more you can develop those abilities, the sooner you'll be able to recover from
trauma.
And the more stabilized you'll be to go through the process of the trauma therapy.
And one of the key components of trauma recovery is desensitization.
It is a process in which you become desensitized to the memory, which does not mean you'll
forget it.
It does not mean it will ever be a pleasant memory.
Nope.
But it will be more like a memory of, while that was lousy, that was really horrible,
but I'm not re-experiencing it now.
So that's the goal of trauma treatment is to get you to the place where you truly can
think about it.
You can remember it, you can remember it was bad, but you don't have to re-experience it.
And now, so let me know in the comments below if it makes sense, why avoidance can prolong
the recovery period.
So with this video, I'd like to truly empower you to know that you can recover from the
trauma you went through.
You can recover from it, which does not mean you'll forget it.
It does not mean that we'll ever feel like, Oh, it's okay that that happened to me.
That's not at all what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that you will no longer be reeks variances and you'll no longer be
re-experiencing the symptoms that happened to you during the trauma.
If you liked this video, please give me a thumbs up.
Leave me a note below and I look forward to the next time.