How You Can Help Someone Suffering With Trauma

When we encounter someone who is suffering from trauma, our inclination can often times be to meet with with encouragement or positive thinking. The problem is, this often times makes things worse for the person on the receiving end.

This might look like a statement such as “it’s going to be all right” or “well, that’s just the way it is” or “you just need to move on” but this actually is many times just dismissive to the person on the receiving end. Whether that is rooted in a place of love (reassurance) or out of a place of being uncomfortable (dismissive) either one can feel like they are missing the mark to the person with trauma. We might not feel like a trauma therapy expert and are therefore unqualified to do anything about it. While a professional trauma therapist may be needed to fully resolve trauma, we as friends or family can actually do a lot to help alleviate the sufferings of our loved ones.

Trauma happens and gets stuck for the same reason it doesn’t heal, we lack connection. When something happens to us that is at or beyond our ability to process on our own, trauma happens and the experience gets stuck inside of us. To resolve these stuck points takes connection. Connection is the antidote to addiction and it is the antidote to helping those with trauma who feel anxious, depressed, and alone to feel understood, acknowledged, validated, and comforted. Here’s a helpful two step process that can help in aiding you to connect with someone experiencing trauma.

Step One: Understand

If connection is the solution to helping those with trauma, we need to really understand what it means to connect. Connection happens through two prongs, curiosity and compassion. These to aspects make for authentic, balanced connection.

If we are curious without compassion it can feel cold and clinical like Sherlock Holmes looking for clues while ignoring the feelings of others around him. If we are compassionate without being curious, it can feel inauthentic and ungrounded like someone giving us a standard “that stinks”. Something about it just feels like the person isn’t going deep enough or doesn’t care to understand.

Connection happens with we slow down and balance being curious about someone’s experience combined with empathy. It’s essentially like balancing the logical and emotional. When someone states they’re hurt, we have to understand why before we can fully empathize. That involved asking questions, digging in, spending time, and really getting some visibility on what the person is going through. Then we must imagine what the other person is going through. That’s what true empathy is. It’s not experiencing the other persons emotions, but understanding so deeply what the other person is going through that you can imagine what that would feel like.

Step Two: Acknowledge and Validate

This step is key to connecting with the person’s felt experience. So what does true empathy look like? If we can imagine what a person who witnessed something traumatic was feeling, we can imagine what we would want someone to say to us. Maybe that looks like “I imagine you felt so dismissed” or “I imagine that would feel a lot like being abandoned”. Phrases like this offer empathy but also give the person an opportunity to reflect on what the experience was like.

When we acknowledge that someone went through something difficult, we show them that someone sees them. That they are loved and cared for and worthy of being acknowledged. When we validate someone, we tell them that their experience was real and they did not imagine the way they felt. This is what distressed individuals or people with trauma are often looking for. This is why encouragement often times falls flat when engaging someone with trauma. It just doesn’t seek to understand or engage deeper, it just feels like being dismissed and that just makes things worse.

If you feel like you’re lacking people who you can really connect with or if you don’t feel understood, cared for, acknowledged, or validated, reach out to Alpine Family Counseling today for a free consultation for Trauma Therapy in Colorado Springs with a trauma therapist. We want to help you feel seen and obtain the healing you deserve so you can leave suffering being and feel like you were meant to feel, happy and whole.