Trauma Counselling

Trauma Counseling is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary guide to the theory and treatment of survivors of a broad spectrum of traumatic events, including interpersonal violence, hate crimes, school violence, community violence, natural disasters, and war and terrorism.(Lisa Lopez Levers,2012) According to Edwards (2005a), in psychiatric and clinical settings, the term trauma refers to extreme and often catastrophic events that pose a sudden threat to a person’s life or physical integrity and produce a specific pattern of distress.

Psychological Trauma Defined 

To understand what trauma does we have to understand what it is. Lenore Terr, a child psychiatrist who did the first longitudinal study of traumatized children writes, “psychic trauma occurs when a sudden, unexpected, overwhelming intense emotional blow or a series of blows assaults the person from outside. Traumatic events are external, but they quickly become incorporated into the mind” (Terr, 1990, p.8). Van der Kolk makes a similar point about the complicated nature of trauma when he says, “Traumatization occurs when both internal and external resources are inadequate to cope with external threat” (Van der Kolk, 1989, p.393). Both clinicians make the point that it is not the trauma itself that does the damage. It is how the individual’s mind and body react in its own unique way to the traumatic experience in combination with the unique response of the individual’s social group.