No room for disorder

No room for disorder.

Being a trauma counsellor means I am regularly uncovering the debilitating symptoms of exposure to traumatic events. I work alongside adults with developmental trauma, I help doctors, nurses, police and other frontline workers to understand and heal vicarious trauma and I am consistently enabling victims of myriad forms of devastating abuse to restore exhausted and battered bodies and minds.

Most of my clients are suffering from a trauma reaction to a horrific event but, sadly, I often find their response is exacerbated by the societal reaction to how we label this process. I am particularly alarmed by the continued use of the word “disorder” in psychological circles. Labelling someone who is experiencing a natural stress response to a devastating event as having a disorder, immediately suggests they are unhealthy in some way. There is a stigma attached to the word disorder that creates pity, it envelopes symptoms in a toxic cloud of shame. To put it bluntly, people believe there is something wrong with them - that they are to blame in some way for their bodies’ natural responses to an intense threat to their life. Indeed many of those suffering from trauma have been harbouring physical symptoms and shameful thoughts about their origin for decades. 

In the past, using the word disorder was deemed a positive in that it allowed those with diagnosis access to greater provision more quickly. But society is ever-changing and, as we continue to grow and learn about the impact of labelling victims, it is imperative we don’t ignore the detrimental impact of the use of this word.

So, how can we help each other?

 “Trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. ” Gabor Mate.

Mate consistently talks about trauma as the human response to an extremely distressing situation or event. I fundamentally agree with this. Trauma lives in all of us in some form – it is not a disorder, it’s a response. In my practice, I replace the word disorder with response. Post traumatic stress response. And I do this in the first session. As psychological practitioners, the importance of normalising is embedded in our psyche from the offset. Normalising our bodies’ physical responses is just as important as validating and understanding invasive thoughts and feelings. I consistently ask my clients what it means to them to be labelled as having a disorder and the responses are always the same – having a “disorder” undermines self-confidence and suggests a deep inability to cope.

Giving people suffering from trauma a new, positive, label and the understanding that their bodies are bearing witness to what they have experienced, allows them the opportunity to unwrap a variety of symptoms gently and safely. It somehow strengthens the belief that it is their right to get better, just as they might expect a doctor to heal a broken bone or stem the bleeding from an internal organ, so too are they entitled to assess and heal their trauma wound.

I continue to be so grateful to psychologists such as Gabor Mate and Dr Jessica Taylor whose work inspires me to unpick the negative associations tangled up with this word. I hope in turn to bring awareness to those around me in my client work and with my work alongside the Met police. Removing stigma from any form of emotional distress and associated physical symptoms remains crucial to my work as a trauma counsellor.

For further reading on this topic I recommend The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate and Sexy But Psycho by Dr Jessica Taylor.