(Faure - "Pavane")
Keeping Secrets
Most people have to face a barrage of questions during the time immediately after their trauma. These questions can come from relatives and friends as well as from emergency and rescue workers, such as police, firemen, ambulance personnel, nurses or doctors at the hospital, your own medical practitioner and even sometimes the press. At the same time, most people feel very shocked and stunned in this initial period after their trauma and find it difficult to cope with questions.
Such questions may be experienced as very intrusive and inappropriate, and it is only natural for trauma sufferers to want to keep their responses brief.
There might also have been some other reasons that prevented you from sharing your true feelings with others:
* A feeling that although people asked you questions, they didn't really want to know the full details, perhaps because they felt uncomfortable being confronted by the horror of your experiences.
* Some people said very tactless and completely inappropriate things, which upset you. You didn't feel strong enough to let them know that the things they were saying hurt you or may even have made the trauma worse, and instead you just close down and refused to share things with them at all.
* Some only talked about the physical aspects, about your injuries or wounds, but completely discounted how this trauma affected you emotionally.
* Other people may have asked you about your feelings but you felt uncomfortable opening up to them. You may have felt you should be brave or that it was a sign of weakness if you allowed yourself to share with them what you really felt. Another possibility is that you felt you shouldn't upset or burden them with some of the distressing experiences you had.
* It could also be that people really cared and asked you lots of helpful questions about your feelings, but that at the time you just felt completely numb, and couldn't respond. You may have still been too shocked to feel anything or to verbalize your feelings.
* People were too preoccupied caring for others, who were also involved in the trauma, or suffered as a result of it, and completely ignored you because they thought you were all right. Maybe your injuries weren't as serious as other people's; maybe others died and you didn't.
* Either you or other people felt you were to blame or were responsible for the trauma because of some action you took. As a result nobody showed any sympathy for the physical or emotional effects on you.
Opening Up
In order to work through, come to terms with and resolve a trauma, it is really important that all aspects of it are processed. This means that you need to make sense of..
* What exactly happened
* How you reacted
* What it meant to you.
The above example illustrates how people can be affected by a trauma in very different ways. There is no prescribed way of reacting to a trauma and, while for some people their physical injuries are the most painful, for others their emotional wounds are far greater. Your experience of the trauma is unique to you and recognition of this helps you to re-establish control and positively change the deeply unsettling and disruptive effect the trauma may have had on you.
There are many ways in which you can make sense of your trauma and often it can be enough to talk about it in detail to a person or friend whom you can trust. When you do this it is normal that you should experience quite strong emotions and even some of the physical reactions that you felt during the time of the trauma. If this happens, allow these feelings their space - they are an important part of the normal healing process. To keep feelings from becoming too overwhelming, ensure that you keep yourself safe while going through your experiences.
Even if you do not feel able to share your experiences with others, you need to find other ways of processing your experience. Some alternatives are suggested below.
1. Write an account of your own personal trauma
You could think of this account like a personal 'testimony' the world, so that others could witness it and understand the terrible experience you have gone through. It might help to think of it as being similar to the way in which the people in this book have shared their experiences in order to help you understand and recover from your trauma better.
How to prepare your account:
a. only work on your trauma if it is actually over, so, for example, a road traffic accident that took place three weeks ago or a bank robbery four months ago. If your trauma is still with you, for example, if a person who has hurt you is still around and continues to hurt you or could hurt you, then do not attempt to work through your experience at the moment, as it will not be beneficial.
b. Set aside a limited amount of time each day, at a specific time, and arrange to do a pleasurable activity afterwards. This should be a time when you are not disrupted by others and when you can feel safe expressing some of the emotions that come up. Set yourself a time limit of about 45 minutes to one hour. If you haven't finished writing your account at the end of the time for that day, jot down a few notes and resume the next day. It is important that you stop after the time limit that you have set for yourself. Afterwards you should have arranged to do a personally pleasurable activity, such as meeting with a friend, taking the dog for a walk, listening to some music, going to church, taking a relaxing bath, arranging for an aromatherapy massage or whatever else that is likely to be helpful to you.
c. Allow yourself as much time for recounting the whole of your trauma, as you need. You may need several days or possibly several weeks until you have completely accounted for all aspects of your experience. It is important that you don't rush things and that you always stop after the time limit you have set yourself for the day. Don't be impatient with yourself there is no standard guideline about how long it should take you to work through your trauma. It is a good idea, though, to work on this for a set period of time each day. If you need longer than a week you might like to give yourself a day off from it at the weekend, before starting on it again the following week. If you have to miss a day because of other commitments, just carry on the following day.
d. Include as much information and detail about the trauma as possible. It is important that you think about everything that you saw, smelled, heard, touched and sensed around you at the time. Remember that this experience was unique to you, no other person would have experienced the trauma in exactly the way in which you did. Even if at first you think that you don't recall very much, when you allow yourself to revisit the experience, it is often surprising how many things your mind and body have registered, often over a very short period of time.
e. Write in the present tense, using the first person. Start your account at a time shortly before the trauma happened and continue to work through all aspects, including the aftermath, such as rescue attempts, your experiences at hospital, how others reacted, etc. Write your account in the first person as if you were really revisiting your trauma, for example: 'As I see ... I go to ... and I feel ... 'This will help to make your account more vivid. In your account work through:
* What exactly happened, i.e. start with the facts: what w, you doing and thinking just before the event? Go through the entire sequence of events until the aftermath.
* How you reacted, i.e. what were your feelings? What did you do? What physical sensations did you notice?
* What it meant to you, what was the worst part for you? How have you changed? What is your life like now?, What can't or won't you do now that you used to do before? What things or people aren't there anymore because of the trauma? What is the hardest part for you to get used to? Where are you stuck at the moment? What needs to happen for this stuckness to be resolved?
f. Allow yourself to experience the feelings and sensations that may arise. Traumatic experiences wouldn't affect us if we didn't have feelings. It is very important that you acknowledge the presence of these feelings and bodily sensations, for example, feeling hot or cold, etc. To do so is an essential part of the processing of the experience.
It is important not to be frightened, even if these feelings surprise you by their strength. Remind yourself that this is how you felt at the time of the trauma but that is past. These reactions are simply part of your own coping responses and are designed to help you survive the trauma as best you can.
It is quite normal that you should have had very strong and often confusing reactions both during and after your trauma. it is also entirely normal that you may have felt, said or done things during the trauma that you would never have done under ordinary circumstances. Some people feel that the trauma has brought out characteristics in them that they didn't know they had. If you feel ashamed, angry or guilty about having reacted in a particular way during the trauma, remember 1 that you reacted in the only way you could at the time. With hindsight what you did may not seem right to you, you feel you should have acted differently or done more. This is a very common reaction. It is important to remind yourself that during the trauma you reacted under the conditions of a life threatening experience and that at the time and under those conditions, for you, those were the only things that you could do. This doesn't necessarily make those decisions that you took morally or legally right, but it puts them into a realistic perspective.
2. Other ways of processing your experience
There are other ways of processing your experiences if you find writing difficult. Follow the same guidelines as above (a-f) and choose one of the alternative methods, outlined below:
* Use a tape recorder to dictate your experiences on tape. Then listen to it being played back to you.
* Paint or draw. You don't have to be very artistic, but sometimes it can help to express all your experiences in the form of a drawing or painting. It doesn't have to be an accurate representation of what went on, but it should capture the personal meaning for you and reflect all the feelings and sensations that you experienced. Allow yourself to express the imagery that comes up for you when you revisit your trauma.
* Make a collage. Use anything you can find, such as old magazines, old clothing material, wood, threads, colours, etc. build up a representation of what happened to you. Again the aim is not to create a fantastic piece of art, but rather capture the meaning of the trauma for you in the collage.
* Write a poem or a song. If you have a bit of literary talent, if you are musical you might find it healing to express and process your experience in this way. Try to come up with series of verses in your poem or your song as you process your experience over several days.
* Make a sculpture, using modelling clay or other bits of material.
The important thing is to allow yourself to be as creative as ye can. The aim is to process exactly what has happened to you, how you reacted and what it meant to you. Choose whichever method feels most helpful to you. You can even use more than one method. You may have hobbies that you haven't used for a while, such as wood carving or working with stained glass, that can help you represent your feelings now.
Follow the principles outlined above and make sure you have clear beginning and an end to this process. When you have completed this first step toward recovery and healing, reward yourself for your achievement!
(Faure - "Pavane")