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Did you know that the effects of a traumatic experience place a heavy burden on individuals, families, and communities?
As a social responsibility because we care about “ALL victims and survivors” of catastrophic and traumatic experiences, we are on a mission to reduce the deadly impacts of violence and trauma by continuing to integrate trauma informed approaches and interventions throughout our coaching and training services.
Trauma has become a global epidemic, one that could be identified as a “World-Class Crisis”. Anyone can be traumatized. No one is immune from its deadly reach. Below is a list of how widespread trauma is throughout the world, affecting every part of the population:
Institutions and Organizations – can be negatively impacted when going through times of significant change or outside scrutiny (i.e. – downsizing, restructuring, inquiries) Individual staff members may become inadvertently traumatized as a result of this process and/or have their own trauma histories be triggered by the events if the process is not sensitively and compassionately handled.
Service Providers – can be traumatized after hearing the stories and witnessing the suffering of trauma survivors. This is called “vicarious trauma” or “trauma exposure response” and happens when the provider is regularly confronted with traumatic content.
Cultures – can be traumatized when repeated denigration, attempts at assimilation, and genocide occur. In North America the First Nations culture has experienced significant trauma as a result of colonization. Following 9/11 the North American culture became organized around fear and terror as a direct result of the trauma experienced from this event. In addition, many other countries have also experienced trauma that has impacted their culture.
Communities – communities can be traumatized when events affect any of its members.
Families – families can be traumatized by an event happening to one or more of its members. Even people who did not directly experience the trauma can be impacted by it, especially if they have a close relationship to the trauma survivor.
Individuals – of all ages, socio-economic status, cultures, religions and sexual orientations (including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) can be profoundly affected.
The fight or flight response (in its original form) is about survival. It’s about hope. We activate it when we believe there’s a chance we can outrun or outfight our attackers. The freeze response however, gets activated when’s there’s no hope.
In order to understand the fight or flight or freeze response you have to understand how the two branches of the autonomic nervous system (or ANS) work in harmony with each other to deal with the threats we face and then recover. Our ANS is a network of nerve fibers that extends throughout the body connecting the brain with various organs and muscle groups in order to coordinate the two branches of this response.
The sympathetic branch activates the fight or flight response. It tells the heart to beat faster, the muscles to tense, the eyes to dilate and the mucous membranes to dry up. All so you can fight harder, run faster, see better and breathe easier than you would without this response. And remember, this response kicks in for real threats and imagined ones in as little as 1/20th of a second: Less than the amount of time between two beats of the heart.
The parasympathetic branch activates the relaxation response. It tells the body, OK, you can relax now. The danger has passed. No need to be on alert anymore.
Below is a partial list of the most common types of fight, flight and freeze responses to help you gain a better understanding of the roles that each play in the lives of victims and survivors.
DISCLAIMER: THIS WEBSITE is not therapy or intended to be a replacement for therapy, medical advice or diagnosis, and you should never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this website. Our purpose of this website is to promote broad consumer understanding and knowledge to the various coaching, consulting, education and training services that we provide.