By Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologist

If you react to the heading with discomfort, you are part of the majority of people who believe that trauma is all bad: assault, sexual abuse, robbery, failure, marital breakdown or the death of a child cannot possibly be good for you. End of story.

In fact, for a severe trauma like a rape, some well-meaning but misinformed people will coach the victim to believe she will be "scarred for life." 

I challenge the notion that there cannot be complete recovery from severe trauma.

To understand how trauma could be good for you, we need to look at what trauma is. At its most basic level, trauma is an experience that is so intense you can’t handle it. Let’s look at an example.

If you were being assaulted, your survival instincts would take over. All you would want is to escape. Later, you might experience symptoms like insomnia, nightmares, flashbacks, sadness, fatigue and loss of appetite. You would have thoughts and images you couldn’t put out of mind. You probably would not trust anyone. The fact is, you couldn’t stop during the assault to contemplate the nature of what was happening to you : it was just too intense.

The key to understanding trauma is this: The physical event, no matter how painful, is not the trauma. 

The trauma is the meaning you give to the event in your mind.

If someone intentionally tripped you, making you fall down the stairs and sustain injuries, you would probably be traumatized. But if you tripped over your shoelace and fell down the same stairs, you would likely not be traumatized. In this example the physical injuries are identical between the traumatic event and non-traumatic event. The difference is in how your mind interprets what happened.

If we can create a meaning in our minds, we can use our minds to transform that meaning into something more resourceful. This is the essence of many healing practices.

If you don’t confront and deal with the trauma, it carries two big negatives that make life harder:

But something wonderful evolves if you can somehow face what happened, confront it, process it, and get comfortable with it. You change it from a scary, horrible memory to ordinary memory. The symptoms disappear and your energy level increases to higher than it was before. Your love of life and personal strength become greater than they were before you were ever traumatized. That’s the silver lining! That’s how trauma can be good for you.

The essence of what you accomplished is this: you have conquered something difficult. And whenever any of us conquers something difficult, we get stronger. Our school systems are built around helping students to overcome increasingly difficult tasks. That is how learning takes place. Trauma occurs only when whatever is happening is too intense to face at the time.

It is no co-incidence that when you look into the lives of most great healers and spiritual leaders, you will find that they have endured, survived and grown stronger through some awful traumas.

So how does one get through trauma and ultimately grow from it?  The simple answer is that you have to go back and confront it. Join a group and tell your story. Go on a vision quest. Do whatever you have to, but never bury it.

If you can’t seem to deal with the trauma on your own, find an appropriate counselor or psychologist, and expect results.  More is understood about trauma and its treatment than ever before.

Copyright © Neill Neill. All rights reserved. Dr. Neill publishes other original articles in his popular newsletter, Dr. Neill Neill’s Practical Psychology. Subscribe free at http://www.neillneill.com/psychology_newsletter.php

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