Exploring possibilities for moving forward after a trauma
A useful way of thinking about your self is in terms of a narrative that we have constructed in childhood and developed into adulthood. This narrative is essentially one of our making and consists of those memories that we have selected, for whatever reason, as being significant in our understanding of self. The stories we tell about ourselves contain out most familiar ways of being, our most frequently made choices and our preferences in many areas of our lives. Over time these choices, in multiple areas of our lives, become definable features of our selves and allow us to predict what we will like and enjoy and the things we want to avoid. These familiar choices become significant features in the stories we tell about our lives in the present and allow us to predict what we might do in the future. These stories have developed over our lifetimes and give a reassuring sense of continuity about who we are.
The potential to make an alternative choice is always a possibility and these are observed when people comment that they've done something ‘that's not like them’, that is they have made an unusual choice from their norm. Our stories reflect what is important in our lives, in terms of our values and beliefs, and these constructs help us to make sense of our lives and give meaning to what is happening around us and to us. When we experience a traumatic event we are unsure about the outcome as our beliefs about our self and our life include little, if any, information about the exceptional event and so the predictive power of our beliefs and our stories are thrown into confusion.
The future that was dreamt of is threatened and the beliefs that had been adequately predicting events are no longer relevant. Instead of heading towards the future, that had been planned and longed for, we are facing the unknown. This is what many people fear the most, not knowing. Not only is the future of the story in jeopardy but the new events are frequently unwanted intrusions. Feelings of acute anxiety and fear occur when our minds are trying to make meaning out of events that we have never encountered before. We find ourselves entering a stage of our lives that was neither planned anticipated or desired.
An event can be described as traumatic when it interferes with our usual ability to anticipate and make sense of events. Trauma means that our belief systems are no longer allowing us to predict who we will be, what we will be doing and so disrupts our sense of identity and our plans for the future. Trauma is a sense of loss, of not knowing and consequently of increased fearfulness, who am I in this situation? When our lives are running relatively predictably we can be fairly independent however, when traumatic events are encountered our narratives are disrupted and we require more support in our disoriented state until we can regain our equilibrium. There can be strong negative emotions of threat, anxiety and fear as we are unable, for a while, to predict what our futures might be and find ourselves needing to incorporate an unwanted role into our life stories.
Coaching sessions provide a relationship where you can attempt to make sense out of these new and frequently unwanted events. Likely questions we would explore are; Who am I now? Where am I going? How is this going to work out? The Exploring Possibilities approach is useful in these difficult times as we can explore possible answers and options for the future can be evaluated and a sense of how you can move forward can be restored, albeit your situation and self may be forever changed by the trauma.
Coaching sessions can be used to explore possibilities when we encounter traumatic events, for example;
- incorporating the loss of a loved one into your narrative of self
- family life when your child has an additional support need
- finding a way forward when you have a lifelong illness
- recovering from a relationship breakdown