What does trauma look like?

As a hairdresser, you may find that your clients share a lot of intimate information with you, and expect you to be their counsellor as well. 

And yet your training is in making someone look beautiful on the outside, not helping them process what’s going on inside. 

At Panorama Wellness Group, it is important to us that we are able to help you, as a business owner in Langley, BC, help your clients in the best way possible.  We believe that starts with caring for you and providing you with support in any way we can.  This blog is one of those ways we want to help you.

When your client starts to share something with you that’s happened in their life that was overwhelming and they’re having difficulty figuring out how to process it, there’s a good chance that it would be categorized as a traumatic event.

But as you listen, how do you know what might be a trauma that can be helped just talking about it, and when someone might need to have some professional counselling?

It starts with understanding what trauma is and how it shows up.

What is Trauma?

The word trauma is one that has become part of a lot of people’s vocabularies in recent years.  It’s associated with Covid-19, with some of our world’s events, and when someone experiences a difficult situation (or even just watches The Bachelor). 

But what does it actually mean?  And are you blowing an experience out of proportion or are you minimizing it when you use the word? 

According to Peter Levine, a leading trauma expert, the word is a challenging one to accurately define.  In his book, Healing Trauma, he explains

“what I do know is that we become traumatized when our ability to respond to a perceived threat is in some way overwhelmed.  This inability to adequately respond can impact us in obvious ways, as well as ways that are subtle.”

The way that I typically explain trauma is that it is something that is unexpected and you can’t be prepared for it, your emotions are overwhelming at the time, and it changes the way that you understand or move about in your life.

There are a couple of points to understand about trauma.

Trauma is personal

When something unexpected happens that you are not prepared for, you experience a traumatic event.  If you can start to absorb that definition of trauma, then you realize that what may seem like nothing to me, can be traumatic to you.  According to Levine, understanding trauma means to

“hone in on the fact that people can be traumatized by any event they perceive (consciously or unconsciously) to be life-threatening”.   

For example, a tree falling in a storm may feel threatening to a child and how safe they feel in their own house, and you as an adult just see it as a result of a storm.  However, if they perceive that they aren’t able to deal with the possibility that it could have fallen on their house, and they could have died, then it’s a traumatic event for them. 

Trauma comes in many forms

If you take the example of the tree falling above, you can start to see how the causes of trauma can be put into different categories. 

Obvious causeswould be something like war, rape, or experiencing or being a witness of violence.   

Less obvious causes, like a bad storm, are ones that highlight the idea that trauma is something that is perceived by the one that is experiencing the event.  So, a car accident or divorce may not seem like a traumatic event to you, but to someone who did not feel prepared or equipped to deal with the event or the results of those events, it is traumatic. 

Trauma shows up in your body

A common misconception is that trauma is something that is in your head, and so you should just be able to use self-talk or rationalization to get over it. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Levine states that

“trauma is something that happens initially to our bodies and our instincts.  Only then do its effects spread to our minds, emotions, and spirits”.

Quite often, you respond to trauma by feeling anxious or nervous.  You may not notice it at first, but almost any response you experience as you think about your traumatic event is related to the burst of energy that you experienced during the original event.  Your body was prepared to respond to the perceived danger that you experienced, and quite often that energy can be locked into your body as you try to recover from the event. 

It is quite common to have people come to counselling to deal with anxiety or a sense of being frozen in life and then realize that it stems from something that happened earlier in their lives that they felt they were not prepared for or posed a threat to their physical or emotional wellbeing.   

The same thing happens when they’re sitting and talking to you.  They might think it’s just anxiety or feeling stuck, but as you’re listening to them with a trauma-informed lens, you can encourage them to be more curious about what’s underneath the anxiety and get some professional help.

If you’re interested in learning more about how trauma shows up, you might be interested in reading the book referenced here, “Healing Trauma”, written by Peter Levine.  It provides more information about what trauma is, and some practical tools that you can use as a hairdresser who has the opportunity to hear people’s traumatic events and emotions that come up as a result.

The therapists at Panorama Wellness Group are also open to meeting with you to help you understand what trauma is and how to help someone get the help they need in order to get through it and be the healthier version of themselves that they’re striving for.  Contact us at info@panoramawellnessgroup.ca to learn more.