Spring, the season when nature wakes up from its sleep, is the time often seen as a metaphor for personal growth and new beginnings. Longer days, warmer temperatures, blooming trees and flowers and other changes in the natural world, bring people a sense of optimism, hope, and fresh start.
Growth in all its forms – emotional, intellectual, professional and spiritual – is essential to us living fulfilling and meaningful lives. Carl Gustav Jung, the renowned Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology, thought that neurosis, the term used for a condition marked by mental distress and emotional suffering, is a manifestation of suppressed growth within an individual’s psyche. This suppressed growth is often the result of how we learned to adapt in early life, when factors outside of our control, like family and environment, were dictating how we needed to behave. Whilst helping us to fit in, cope with challenges and meet expectations placed on us when we were young, these learned, often unconscious behaviour patterns, may later in life become our growth barriers. Â
Our understanding of the mental health has advanced significantly since Jung’s times. Decades of empirical studies, clinical observations and technological developments taught us that adverse and traumatic experiences, especially during formative years, can have a significant negative impact on various aspects of people’s lives.
It is important to understand that trauma is not exclusively an event. Of course, there are some events like terrorist attacks, combat, serious accidents, unexpected losses, natural disasters, or violence – referred to as Trauma (with capital ‘T’) – which will leave anyone deeply affected. However, in a broader sense, trauma can refer to any experience or a series of experiences, when an individual feels overwhelmed, extremely frightened and powerless.  This can include being raised by abusive or neglectful parents, bullied at school, harassed or discriminated at work, put down by a partner, or any other experiences involving humiliation, abandonment, rejection or failures. Trauma may be experienced after a relationship break-up, divorce, illness or a job loss. Pain and loss come with being human, so most, if not all, people have had some traumatic experiences during their lives.
Whilst some people are able to navigate through adversity due to their natural resilience, social support and ability to find meaning in their experiences, many others continue to live with symptoms of trauma without recognising them to be linked to their difficult past.
Below are a few examples of the negative consequences of unresolved trauma:
Emotional Dysregulation: this may manifest as intense and unpredictable mood swings, low stress tolerance and/or feeling overwhelmed.
Interpersonal Difficulties: difficulties in forming and maintaining healthy connections with others, resulting in social isolation, trust issues, and/or conflicts.
Low self-esteem: holding negative self-beliefs, such as feelings of unworthiness, shame and/or guilt.
Unhelpful Coping Mechanisms: resorting to substance abuse in all its forms, self-harm, and/or avoidance behaviours; while providing temporary relief, ultimately these strategies prevent individuals from constructively addressing the underlying issues.
Physical Health Problems: experiencing issues such as fatigue, sleep disturbances, chronic pain and even serious illnesses.
PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) Symptoms: in severe cases experiencing symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, and hypervigilance.
Whilst the list above is not exhaustive, hopefully, this gives a feel for how extensive and damaging the consequences of unresolved trauma can be. Although healing may happen naturally, psychotherapy can be very beneficial in helping individuals process their traumatic experiences and be able to move forward with their lives.
One psychotherapy approach that can help with trauma-related conditions is called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing).Developed in the late 1980’s, EMDR was a chance discovery by a US psychologist Francine Shapiro, who on her walk noticed that moving her eyes rapidly from side to side appeared to her own distressing thoughts and feelings, this discovery becoming the basis for a method to treat symptoms of PTSD and other trauma-related conditions. Best known as trauma therapy, EMDR can also effectively help with other mental health conditions, like anxiety, panic attacks, depression, grief and loss, amongst others.
Whilst the underlying mechanism of how EMDR works is still not fully understood, it is thought to involve the brain’s natural capacity for Adaptive Information Processing (AIP). According to AIP theory, when a person experiences a traumatic event, the information related to that event does not get adequately processed and is stored in the brain in a raw and fragmented form. This is why some trauma survivors continue to relive their traumas through flashbacks and nightmares, and are easily triggered into fight, flight or freeze type responses in situations which even remotely resemble the original traumatic event(s).
The theory goes that our brain has a natural capacity to process and integrate such experiences, so EMDR therapy steps in to facilitate this. The process of bilateral stimulation (usually following therapist hand with eye movements) and simultaneously focusing on a distressing memory is  thought to mimic what occurs during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, facilitating the integration of the traumatic memory into a broader memory network. Doing this repeatedly, gradually reduces client’s distress associated with the past event(s) and brings new insights and association. Over time, the memories of traumatic events are integrated into the individual’s life story in a more adaptive way, and the troubling symptoms subside or disappear.
Since its inception, EMDR has been extensively studied and is now endorsed as an evidence-based trauma treatment by numerous professional organisations, including the World Health Organization, Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and NHS.
Today, EMDR is widely used by therapists around the world and continues to evolve as a leading approach in trauma therapy, helping people heal from trauma and other mental health conditions, build resilience, and start living balanced and fulfilling lives. Whist people may never be okay with what happened to them, with courage, commitment and the right support, one can move from hurt to healing, adapt, even thrive, and continue growing as a person.
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