Living with PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, can be tough. People who have gone through a lot of difficult situations in their lives have to deal with more than just troubling memories. The lasting effects can negatively impact every part of a person’s life, from the moment they wake up in the morning to the moment they put their head down on their pillow.
PTSD sufferers need healthcare that doesn’t just address clinical symptoms, but also keeps underlying trauma in mind. This is what trauma informed care is all about. It’s an approach that’s much more sensitive because it considers a person’s troubled past and keeps the whole person in mind during a healing process.
What is it?
People living with PTSD need help that’s more gentle and healthcare professionals who understand the value of whole-person healing. Instead of asking “what’s wrong with you?”, care that keeps trauma in mind asks “what happened to you?”. This approach is sensitive to the fact that bad experiences can stay with a person physically and emotionally for a long time. It focuses on creating a supportive and safe space where patients can feel comfortable talking about the trauma they’ve been through.
When a patient feels safe and heard, they can begin to shift their perspective away from the bad things that happened to them and give all of their attention to healing instead.
Making whole-person healing work
For whole-person healing to be successful, healthcare professionals need to learn how to be more understanding of every individual patient’s past circumstances. With workshops and specialized training, medical doctors, nurses and aides can become better at treating patients in a more gentle and sensitive way.
Right now, medical environments aren’t properly structured to provide this kind of trauma-informed care. This means that a lot needs to be done in hospitals and other healthcare settings. It also means that many PTSD sufferers aren’t currently getting the level of help or understanding they probably need.
Organizational changes will undoubtedly take a long time to put into practice as policies and practices are updated. The progress being made is valuable though. Encouraging a medical culture of empathy and non-judgment will help individuals with PTSD and many other patients currently dealing with anxiety and other kinds of psychological distress.
Benefits of trauma-informed care
By taking the harsh reality of many people’s lives into account, trauma-informed care aims to provide vulnerable individuals with the help they need in a way that doesn’t end up triggering or traumatizing a person further. In practice, this would make medical environments more compassionate and better suited for recovery.
For people with PTSD and many others, this kind of care goes beyond just managing symptoms. It helps people understand how their past experiences might be getting in the way of their healing process and gives them the tools they need to take control of their lives and get better.
Overall
At the end of the day, trauma-informed care, with its focus on whole-person healing, can give people the hope they need to take an active role in their recovery. It’s a much more sensitive way of thinking that brings a person’s past experiences into the conversation and empowers sufferers to take control of their trauma.
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