Trauma seems to be the flavour of explaining why people are acting oddly, struggling and diagnosed with any kind of mental disorder. It is mostly fiction. While PTSD is real, many people who think they have PTSD and or having a Trauma Response, they aren’t. Here are 5 Trauma Myths and a brief explanation for why it is either FALSE or MOSTLY FALSE.
- Learn more about PTSD and Anxiety [Link]
1 – “We’re not designed to know how to process or cope w/traumatic stress. The fact that trauma often makes us do ‘crazy’ sh*t is a reflection of that fact.” Dr Glenn Patrick Doyle
FALSE
Most of human evolution has been brutal, full of loss and our lives have been painfully short.
What we didn’t evolve for was modern ‘productivity’ and long term physical ailments.
2 – “Most mental illness is maladapted behaviours from a trauma – that is, a trauma response” – pop psych
FALSE
Most trauma is short term. Most people recovery from trauma and consider the event to be just an unpleasant part of their life.
Some people do not recover well.
This should prompt us to ask why.
3 – “To fix your mental illness, we need to do trauma therapy” – too many therapists…
MOSTLY FALSE
Actual PTSD can benefit from medication and CBT based Trauma Therapy. PTSD does have secondary mental illness: resolve the PTSD to resolve that.
PTSD is actually rare.
Trauma therapy only helps trauma and any secondary mental illness from that.
4 – “We just need to find your trauma… it is probably in your childhood”
– bad therapists
FALSE
Patients properly diagnosed with PTSD who then experienced amnesia that also erased the ‘trauma event’ ceased having PTSD.
Our behaviours and reactions are either genetic or learned.
PTSD affects learned responses because the event is not properly understood.
5 – “Trauma is individual and you can’t predict what will traumatize someone” – pop psych
MOSTLY FALSE
It takes a significant amount of distress to create a PTSD response in healthy, balanced, resilient people.
While people can cope with different amounts of certain things, events that most people are not significantly affected by shouldn’t be a cause for PTSD.
Coping poorly after a bad event is often a sign of something else going on.
If you’d like to learn more, are find out what is really going on, feel free to make an appointment with us. Click on the Contacts Page [Link] and book an appointment.