Beyond surviving a trauma

Life is not always fair and sometimes bad things happen without any warning. After the traumatic event has struck, people can struggle for a long time to come to terms with it.

Talking about the traumatic events can be a very useful first step for clients. Telling their story to a compassionate counsellor and feeling that this person does not judge them for what has happened to them can be an enormous relief. It can lift feelings of shame and fear. Clients can start to realise it was not their fault and they are not to blame for what has happened to them. They are a victim. However, labelling oneself as a victim is not a stage which is healthy in the long run. When people keep on feeling they are a victim, these feelings can cause depression, anxiety, helplessness and despair.

A healthier way forward is to start seeing oneself as a survivor. Counsellors can help by exploring with the client how he managed to cope with the traumatic event. How did he do it? How did he manage to survive it? What helped him in the darkest hours? These sorts of questions help the client to focus on another dimension of their history - their strengths and resources. It can result in a feeling of pride that one was able to survive an ordeal. It can raise positive emotions regarding a terrible past.

Surely it is not easy to feel anything positive after you have lost something valuable, endured an ordeal or lost someone special. But does it do any good to have positive emotions under these sorts of difficult circumstances? Yes is the answer. Interesting research by Tugade and Fredrickson shows that positive emotions in times of crisis have a profound impact on wellbeing and achieving goals. Tugade and Fredrickson looked, for example, into the effect of positive emotions on survivors of the 9/11 bombings. They found that survivors who reported feelings of gratefulness and joy to have survived were much better off in the long run. It turns out that when people give positive meaning to negative events beyond their control, this has a very strong positive effect on how they cope. It leads to a healthier body and a healthier mind. People who stayed focused on positive and realistic goals turned out to cope much better with the 9/11 disaster than people who felt to be a victim of the bombings. Positive emotions in times of crisis help to keep a broader perspective on your situation, to look beyond the direct negative stressors and to take a more varied array of actions to achieve positive goals. Positive emotions, therefore, do more than just making you feel better in the moment. They have a long term effect.

Yvonne Dolan, a solution focused therapist who has written a lot about the topic of trauma, speaks of a life beyond the survivor stage. Beyond surviving you’re thriving. The trauma doesn’t define you any longer. It has become just one part of who you are. To help someone to go beyond being a survivor, Dolan’s “therapeutic resolving letters” can be useful. These are four letters which the client can do as homework and can bring into the next session. Letter one includes all the unresolved feelings which the client has toward someone or something that has happened to him. Letter two is the response that the client fears, this either being a response from the attacker or someone who has no good intentions toward the client. Letter three is the letter which the client would hope he would get. It includes all the acknowledgement the client seeks and in case of an attacker it also includes an apology. Letter three has to be written straight after letter two, in order not to deepen the trauma but to ease it. Letter four can be written at such a time as the client feels like it and it represents the hope the client has for a better future. A future in which the trauma is genuinely in the past and the client has gone beyond surviving it.

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