Supporting The Trauma Survivors In Your Life

When we learn that a loved has endured trauma or is navigating a traumatic experience, it is hard to know what to do. Language is never enough, if at all available, for the trauma survivor to capture their experience. Language also fails their loved ones when trying to put in words their care and their sorrow.

Supporting the trauma survivors in our life is not always easy. It involves understanding the deep, often unconscious emotional and psychological impact of trauma on one’s internal world, relationships, and sense of self. It also requires patience, consistency, empathy, and a recognition of our own limitations.

Understanding Trauma and Its Effects

Trauma refers to the emotional and psychological response to an intensely distressing event, one that overwhelms the individual’s capacity to cope or make sense of it. Trauma is less defined by the event itself, but by how that experience impacted and stayed in the survivor’s mind and body. The effects can vary widely and may manifest as anxiety, depression, emotional numbness, or physical symptoms like headaches or fatigue.

Some behavioral or relational patterns can also be expressions of the impact of trauma in the survivor’s life. Trauma often leaves people feeling unsafe, unworthy, or unable to trust others. These feelings can deeply influence their relationships and emotional well-being. Because the original traumatic experience was overwhelming, trauma survivors may find different ways to defend themselves against these feelings, whether through minimization, rationalization, denial, emotional withdrawal, or avoidance.

Listening Without Judgment

The feelings that trauma survivors carry within themselves, such as fear, pain, anger, and dread, can be very hard to recognize, admit, and accept. When someone who experienced trauma begins to open up about their experiences and the emotions surrounding them, it is important to listen with an open mind and an open heart, trying to stay as focused as we can on their experience.

Making judgments or rushing to “fix” the situation is often the result of our own difficulties hearing a loved one in pain or an expression of our own anxiety about not knowing what to do. However, offering solutions can be a way to move away from the emotions that have been shared with us, potentially deepening the survivor’s sense of inadequacy and helplessness.

Attempting to listen empathically to the trauma survivor’s experience, trying to put ourselves in their shoes, can help us hold and validate their emotions. This kind of listening, in which we are hearing not only the words but also the feelings behind them, is not always easy for either party. However, offering empathy and understanding can be crucial and make a significant difference.

Providing Emotional Support In The Aftermath Of Trauma

Listening with openness, understanding, and empathy is itself a way to provide emotional support. It can help the trauma survivor develop a sense of safety, convey the message that their experiences and feelings are worth being heard, and provide a kind of witnessing that they may have sorely needed but never received.

Trauma survivors often struggle with feelings of isolation, shame, or guilt. Being emotionally supportive, including providing compassion, patience, and encouragement, can help them regain a sense of connection and belonging. By providing a nonjudgmental and nurturing environment, you help create a space where the survivor feels seen, heard, and valued.

Emotional support also involves understanding that healing from trauma is not a linear process. It is not something people can “get over” by choice or by merely having a different attitude. The ebb and flow of trauma recovery is a natural part of the experience. Trauma knows no timelines. As much as you wish you could, you will not “heal” your loved one or make their trauma go away. What we can do is try our best to be a consistent, reliable, and supportive companion through their journey.

Fostering A Sense of Safety After Trauma

A central feature of trauma is the way in which it can shatter our sense of safety and control. The trauma survivor might remain in high alert, highly sensitive to situations that might feel threatening. The dangers the trauma survivor fears are highly idiosyncratic, sometimes even unconscious. They can range from fears about their physical integrity to anxieties about being rejected and emotionally hurt.

Fostering an environment where they can feel physically, emotionally, and psychologically safe is very important. This might involve creating a calm, predictable atmosphere at home or in shared spaces. It might also involve attempting to be vulnerable and open about our own feelings, intentions, and challenges.

It is helpful to understand the experiences, people, places, and things that are distressing an evoke past trauma. While we cannot ensure that we will anticipate all potential triggers, we can try to recognize and be mindful about the challenges experienced by the trauma survivor in their relationship with others and the world in general. Allowing the survivor to set the pace of a conversation or decide when and how they engage with certain activities can help them regain a sense of control, which is often lost due to trauma.

Respecting Boundaries, Including Your Own

Trauma can leave individuals feeling powerless, so having control over their personal space, emotions, and interactions is critical to rebuilding a sense of agency and autonomy. Trauma survivors may have emotional or physical boundaries that protect them from further harm or emotional and psychological overwhelm. It is important to respect these limits and attempt to understand them by listening with empathy.

Supporting a trauma survivor can be a challenging labor of love. It can be very difficult to see someone we care about suffer, we might feel angry at what they endured, and have a hard time resisting “rescuing” them from their past. Admittedly, it can also be emotionally difficult to be accommodating to the trauma survivor’s needs or remain understanding of their relational patterns. It is important that we do not lose sight of ourselves as we support others. Being empathic, understanding, and supportive with someone who is struggling does not mean we will not have feelings about it that also need to be acknowledged and recognized.

Encouraging Therapy For Trauma

It is widely recognized that trauma, particularly traumatic experiences that took place with people we trusted or depended on, can only heal in relationships. While emotional support from our friends, our loved ones, and our communities is invaluable, sometimes it may not be enough. The impact of trauma is very complex and can run very deeply, requiring a particular way of therapeutic listening and work through that goes beyond what peers can provide.

Trauma survivors may feel ambivalent or resistant toward therapy due to fear, stigma, or previous negative experiences. They might also fear, consciously or not, the possibility of uncovering and working through parts of their life that they have been trying very hard to forget or disavow. Sometimes, survivors may carry a deep fear of the unknown: it can be hard and scary to imagine what life could look like if we were to find new ways of being.

It is important to approach the possibility of seeking therapy for trauma delicately, with respectful and caring concern. Therapy is not a way to “fix” something or to “get over” trauma. Therapy for trauma involves understanding the ways in which past experiences have shaped who we became, mourning the losses we endured, and recognizing the way trauma infiltrated our relationships with others and with ourselves. Our Chicago therapists work with trauma and complex trauma and are available to help both trauma survivors and those who want to support them. In either case, seeking professional help is not a sign of weakness, but of courage.

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Photo credit: Harli Marten