Talking On Trauma
The importance of mental health has become a priority to society in recent years. Taking mental health days from work has slowly become more acceptable. Having a therapist or psychiatrist is much more openly discussed. Athletes & celebrities have been highlighted in news stories & social media platforms as they’ve shared their respective battles with mental health. Amidst breaking the stigmas surrounding mental health, discussions on trauma have been numerous. Trauma has become a sort of buzz word, quickly used to define situations in times of trouble.
The growing talk about trauma is a worthy conversation. All humans experience trauma. But trauma is a dense subject. A specific experience may be traumatic to one person & that very same experience may not be traumatic for another. So how can trauma truly be distinguished? Trauma can be defined as an emotional response to a terrible event that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope. This inability to cope is what truly makes the event identifiable as trauma. If coping skills are lost, something fills in the space. This is where the detrimental effects of trauma become concerning. If left unchecked, traumatic events last far beyond the short-term & spread to every corner of a person’s life.
At If Not For Grace, we meet people who have encountered trauma. That’s because we serve people, and all people experience trauma. Our services utilize a trauma-informed care approach, meaning we seek to provide care with the awareness of experienced trauma in mind. Our ministry works to help women, men & families process difficult emotions after an abortion decision. For many of them, the abortion experience was traumatic. For many of them, past traumatic experiences contributed to them making their abortion decision.
No matter the reason, we weren’t made to carry the weight traumatic experiences create and allow these moments to rule over us for the rest of our lives. The good news is, there is a way to process such trauma, and not allow it to define us and be the end of the story.
In the coming weeks, we will bring more conversation on trauma and try to answer some questions. How does trauma affect your brain & your heart? Are the long-term effects of trauma really that severe? Is there hope for someone on the other side of trauma to heal? For now, consider each interaction you have as an opportunity to love and care for a person who has experienced trauma. After all, trauma is not a stranger to any of us.