After a shocking or disturbing event - a serious accident, an unexpected and tragic loss or a threat to your safety - there’s a need to digest that extreme experience while it’s fresh, so that it doesn’t cause post-trauma stress problems later. Perhaps the best way to do that is to debrief the experience with someone familiar with post-trauma coping strategies.
Informal debriefing is available on an individual basis. Such debriefing assumes that your initial stress reactions are likely to be normal reactions to that very abnormal event. But debriefing helps to keep your healthy recovery on track!
Terrible things happen in life but it doesn’t mean you have to live a terrible life because of it.
Sometimes a traumatic experience is so shocking and overwhelming that we continue to relive it long after the event has passed. We become re-traumatised each time and feel as though we are trapped in a re-occurring nightmare.
Sometimes a traumatic experience is so shocking and overwhelming that our brain refuses to integrate it fully into the psyche. Whilst this blocking may help at first, it soon becomes a blockage to the normal recovery processes of the body and mind.
This is when trauma counselling can really help. Counselling lifts the legacy of pain that the traumatic incident has left imprinted and gently draws out our inner strength and resilience so that we may heal and move on.