Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes explains how unresolved trauma becomes PTSD or complex PTSD, covering flashbacks, hypervigilance, avoidance, and emotional dysregulation. The lecture links trauma to addiction and mental health problems, then walks through identifying three healthy coping strategies for these symptoms.
Hey there everybody, and welcome back to the Addiction and Co Occurring Disorders treatment manual, unit one, part seven, an introduction to trauma. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. In this part, we're going to define trauma and explore how it might interact with mood and addiction issues, as well as potentially physical health issues. Trauma is experiencing something that overwhelms your ability to cope. Not all trauma results in PTSD or cptsd. Complex post traumatic stress disorder. Trauma, if you have adequate resources and you were not already struggling with addiction or mental health issues, can often be resolved without injury. However, if it's not resolved, it leads to what I call traumatic injury, which is PTSD or cptsd. People with PTSD or CPTSD often experience re experiencing. They may have flashbacks or nightmares about the event. They often experience hypervigilance. One of the core features of trauma is during that event, you felt unsafe and disempowered. You felt like you didn't have any power and maybe not the ability to escape from it. Therefore, after that point, if you haven't resolved it, if you haven't developed a sense of safety and personal power again, then you may be what we call hyper vigilant. You're constantly on guard. You're constantly scanning because you don't feel safe. People with post traumatic stress often avoid reminders of the event. Well, that makes sense that you wouldn't want to be reminded of that event. But people with post traumatic stress or complex post traumatic stress go to great lengths to avoid those reminders because when they encounter those reminders, it triggers their other symptoms and that is just so painful and overwhelming. People with post traumatic stress often have what we call emotional dysregulation because they don't feel safe. They and they're hypervigilant. That stress response system is frequently or constantly on. And when that happens, the body, in order to protect itself, turns down your stress sense stress response. So you're not going to notice or respond to things that probably would have irritated you before. Your body says, you know what, we ain't got the energy to focus on that right now, so just ignore it, let it go. You just, you don't have the energy. So the person, most of the time, instead of having bouts of feeling happy or irritable or a little bit anxious, they're just kind of flat, kind of like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. But when they do get triggered, their body just sends a tsunami of stress hormones. So they go from feeling flat to frantic or flat to furious like that and that's what we call emotional dysregulation. They don't have any middle zone. They don't have moderately irritated. They are either flat or they're enraged. They're either flat or they're absolutely petrified. And many people with post traumatic stress also struggle with feelings of guilt and shame about what happened, about their memories, about not being able to move on, about a whole bunch of things. Things many people and, and I dare say most people that are struggling with addictions and anxiety and mental health issues have a history of trauma somewhere. That, whether it's attachment trauma from childhood or traumatic events from when they were growing up or from the past, you know, five years, I don't know. But the majority of people that I have worked with have a history of unresolved trauma somewhere. So it is important to think about whether you've experienced traumas, whether some of those traumas are unresolved, and how they may be triggering addictive behavior, depression, anxiety, anger, guilt, grief, and jealousy. And identify three healthy ways of dealing with each symptom. So when you are re experiencing, when you're having a flashback, what are three ways you can cope with that? How can you help yourself get grounded and feel safe until that flashback is over? Hypervigilance. What are three ways that you can help yourself feel safer and actually relax? Now, you may not be able to relax when you're in the middle of a whole crowd of people, like at the mall. You know, that's, that's a huge step. But three healthy ways of dealing with this when you're, for example, at home or in your office, at work, when you're at places where you spend a lot of time with. What are three healthy ways that you can think of that can help you feel safer and less vulnerable, less hypervigilant?
