Avoidance and Trauma: Why it happens and how therapy can help!

Have you gone through a traumatic event and are trying your best to avoid thoughts, feelings, and memories of the event? You are not alone. Everyone has or will experience trauma at some point in their lifetime. Statistics show that 70% of adults have experienced trauma at least once in their lives. Of these, 30% have had multiple traumatic experiences. You can overcome this ordeal with trauma therapy.

After a tragedy, people tend to try and forget their experience, a phenomenon known as avoidance. The pain, fears, vulnerability, and hurt from the ordeal are better ignored or suppressed into oblivion. However, nobody has ever successfully healed from trauma by forgetting. Trauma counseling is the best way to overcome the psychological impact of adversity.

Avoidance is a destructive coping habit for trauma. It may seem to work temporarily, but eventually, it causes significant damage to your mental health. Avoidance is a symptom of trauma-related mental conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A trauma counselor guides you to identify maladaptive behaviors like avoidance and teaches you beneficial techniques, skills, and behaviors to adopt.

What is Avoidant Coping

Avoidant coping entails active minimization or evading memories, thoughts, feelings, or situations relating to the traumatic event. It offers short-term relief and ultimately increases your stress and distress. Avoidance triggers severe anxiety, depression, and PTSD. You can overcome avoidant coping through trauma therapy. There are different forms of trauma counseling depending on your psychological issues.

PTSD Therapy

Your PTSD therapist administers counseling relating to post-traumatic stress, which develops from untreated trauma. In PTSD treatment, you gain an increased understanding of the trauma and how it affects your life. Your PTSD therapist also teaches you beneficial techniques and skills to help you regulate your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. PTSD counseling is effective long-term and beneficial beyond the confines of treatment.

Childhood Trauma Therapy

Childhood trauma counseling focuses on treating trauma experienced when you were a child. You can negatively adapt to traumatic experiences from childhood into adulthood. In this form of trauma treatment, the trauma therapist helps you identify childhood traumas and how they influence your thought, emotional, and behavioral patterns. They then equip you with techniques and skills to undo your learned habits and form beneficial ones.

Avoidant Coping Behaviors

Situational Avoidance

The anxiety, depressive mood, pain, defeat, or anger after remembering or relieving a traumatic experience can force you to avoid places, people, and traumatic issues. Unfortunately, this leaves things unresolved and only causes your intense negative feelings to fester, looking for an outlet.

It manifests as:

● Canceling plans because of deep-seated insecurities, like a beach party because somebody body-shamed you
● Not showing up for a doctor’s appointment because you worry about the findings.
● Fearing commitments because of a partner’s emotional or physical wounds
● Cutting off loved ones because of unresolved conflicts.

A trauma counselor increases your awareness of these behavioral patterns and their associated thoughts and emotions. They also guide you into forming new ways of approaching situations. For instance, the trauma therapist will probe why you feel insecure enough to cancel or not attend a social event. Through self-reflection, you can identify the anomaly in your thoughts and feelings and use logic to counter their influence on your behavior.

Denial

Instead of facing reality and the burden of learning from a traumatic experience, denial provides an easy way out. Denial is a defensive mechanism to cope with intense thoughts, feelings, and events. Instead, you reassure yourself concerning the negative evidence before you. For example, someone in an abusive relationship can convince themselves they are responsible for the ill-treatment instead of acknowledging their partner’s vice. Another person can use humor to mask their trauma.

Denial can also be a consequence of fear. When you are afraid of change, starting over, finding a new job, friends, or life, you can deny your reality by suppressing past or ongoing trauma. Unfortunately, denial normalizes the problem. PTSD counseling helps you identify these coping behaviors and resolve the trauma before it does more harm to your mental and physical health.

Distraction

Distraction diverts your attention from the trauma to something that provides temporary relief. You may use work, drugs, promiscuity, partying, relationships, or habits as distractions from deep-sitted pain.

Unfortunately, distractions can become destructive habits, making you dependent on them for life. They become the new drug of choice, keeping you high enough to forget your problems.
You can overcome this behavior with trauma therapy. Your trauma counselor lets you question your inclination to certain behaviors and understand why you do some things. Knowledge coupled with therapy techniques improves trauma symptoms and eventually frees you from the trauma burden.

Addiction

Similar to distractions, addictions can provide temporary relief. However, they also increase your dependence and tolerance to your substance or behavior of choice. Addictive substances and behavior bring short-term comfort at a high cost. They rewire the reward pathway responsible for happiness, satisfaction, peace, and pleasure by making it rely on substance or behavior to activate.

Trauma inhibits this pathway. Psychoactive substances and behavior can temporarily activate and sustain it. However, the intensity of their action on the reward pathway is extreme. The brain learns to tolerate these potent stimulation levels. It also triggers severe withdrawals to keep you committed to the addiction. You can be addicted to drugs, medication, alcohol, or tobacco. Behavioral addictions include overindulgence in comfort or sugary foods, gambling, promiscuity, or gaming.

Trauma counseling techniques are equally psychoactive. They forge a new pathway that is not dependent on substance or maladaptive behavior. For instance, in PTSD counseling, you learn to face and disempower the trauma, which in turn, renders useless your dependence on substances or behaviors as a way of escape.

Procrastination

Postponing addressing trauma prevents healing. You end up carrying a burden without any form of relief. Trauma becomes your constant companion. Procrastination also permeates other areas of your life. It can be the reason behind your missed deadlines or lack of commitment to responsibilities.

Trauma wears down your zeal for life. It makes getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, or putting on clothes an unbearable burden. Procrastination feeds on this lethargy. It temporarily provides relief from mundane tasks required for everyday living.

Surrender

Sometimes you may not have the will to fight for your mental sanity. Therefore, you give in to the viciousness of the trauma. Resigned acceptance makes you helpless. It robs you of a peaceful future. It makes you hopeless toward healing or relief. You accept your fate instead of finding a way out. Childhood trauma and PTSD have this effect on people. For instance, you can resolve that you are unworthy of love after a rape incident. A spouse can refuse to leave their abusive partner because they have accepted that they are unlovable. Another form of resigned surrender is accepting systemic injustices and considering accommodating them because the cost of fighting for equality is demanding.

You can find healing through PTSD counseling and childhood trauma therapy. A PTSD counselor raises awareness of the trauma implications exposed through your behavior and its destructive nature. You also learn to identify, manage, avoid, or face triggers.

Therapy: The Effect of Trauma Avoidance on The Brain

Trauma disorganizes three brain parts, the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.

The Amygdala

The amygdala is the stress response center of the brain. It assembles stimuli through the nerves from the body, processes, decodes, and attaches meaning to the information. When the amygdala senses danger, it activates the stress response, better known as the fight or flight response or anxiety. During a traumatic event, the amygdala becomes overstimulated and malfunctions, creating faulty interpretations of the event.

The amygdala will remain hyperactive and hypervigilant after this event unless the trauma gets resolved. It interprets familiar stimuli relating to the trauma, triggered by your thoughts, surroundings, feelings, or phantom stimulation as threats. The amygdala also retrieves the initial faulty information, now contained in your memory, and prematurely launches the stress response.

Unfortunately, you could be sleeping, walking, or working, when the amygdala decides you are in danger. The anxiety is usually intense, interfering with daily living. Triggers occur as:

● Intrusive memories – intense emotions and negativity accompany these sudden and uncontrollable recollections.
● Recurrent thoughts – persistent negative thoughts ruminating through your mind concerning the traumatic event.
● Nightmares – recurrent dreams about the trauma linger despite your best efforts to ignore or avoid triggers.

The Hippocampus

The hippocampus’s role is in learning and memory. It records and stores sequential events as they occur. During a traumatic event, the hippocampus stores the erroneous information packaged by the amygdala, including emotions and moods. The size of the hippocampus reduces after a traumatic event. It retrieves this information every time the amygdala responds to the traumatic event.

The Prefrontal Cortex

Your ability to rationalize thoughts and emotions happens in the prefrontal cortex. When you get discouraged, the prefrontal cortex enables you to find facts to counter your negative perspective. Trauma dulls down activity in this area of the brain. When your amygdala sends out false danger alarms, you cannot use logic or rationalize the reaction because of the underperforming prefrontal cortex.

The Downside of Avoidance in Trauma

Each time you relive the trauma, your brain forges and fortifies a pathway that increases your vulnerability to triggers. Each subsequent experience leaves you worse off. Avoidance makes addressing the initial trauma that led you down this hole impossible. It applies a bandaid to an acute wound. The mental and physiological damage continues despite your best efforts to minimize the trauma impact, downplay its significance in your life, or ignore its effect. The impact of trauma varies from person to person. Trauma therapy is the best place to analyze the implications of trauma in your life. Your trauma counselor provides a personalized approach that is specific to your condition.

Avoidance Keeps You From Seeking Trauma Therapy

Trauma thoughts, emotions, frustrations, and accompanying behaviors persist because they are wired in your brain. The impact is too complex to ignore or wish away. Avoidance shifts your energy and concentration away from the root cause to periodical obsessions that require compulsions to dull down.

For instance, you may resolve to drink alcohol each time you get intrusive thoughts or isolate yourself from the world for fear of subsequent attacks. Instead, you could look for a trauma therapist to piece together your memory, learn and grow from the trauma, face and subdue your fears, manage triggers, and heal.

Avoidance Keeps You in a Vicious Cycle

There is no escaping the cyclic nature of avoidance. Its relief is short-term. You can only sustain this comfort by continuously forming your preferred patterns and habits. The rituals add to your anxiety and trauma burden instead of dispelling them.

Avoidance and the Rebound Effect

Deliberate thought and emotional suppression only augment your desire to think and feel. The phenomenon is known as the rebound effect. The more you avoid thinking or feeling things relating to the traumatic event, the more you are bound to encounter those thoughts and emotions.

Thus, avoidance is itself a trigger of your trauma because it empowers the stimulants. It makes you a slave of your misery. You are better off facing your fears and taking control of your thoughts.

Embrace Trauma Counseling

Get connected to a trauma therapist

Coping mechanisms without the guidance of a trauma therapist can worsen your trauma. For instance, you may vent to friends and loved ones without finding a plausible solution to the trauma. The problem is only half-solved when you talk out your feelings.

A trauma counselor helps you deal with trauma comprehensively. They also provide support, accountability, and a listening ear. They will empower you to face your trauma, deal with the source of your trouble, and undo destructive patterns and habits. Begin your journey to a trauma-free life today.

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