Times of Trauma - What To Do When Things Feel Overwhelming

Whether it’s a pandemic, the inability to pay bills, a parking ticket, or a potty-training crisis, all of us experience stress in our lives.

Today’s topic is all about types of stress and where we can turn for help when things feel overwhelming.

All of us experience stress, but not all stress is necessarily bad. Some stress is healthy and positive because it prepares us to respond to temporary challenges in our lives, such as running a race, public speaking, or starting a new job.

When these things happen, the stress response in our body and brain turns on while we need it and then quickly returns back to our normal baseline. But sometimes we experience some intense or longer lasting stressors, and even these can be bearable IF we have support systems in our lives to help us cope. I call this “tolerable stress.” This could include losing your job, or even a death of a family member. Both can be awful situations, but if there are supportive buffers, such as family members, friends, or a faith community, it helps to ease the stress.

So we can experience positive stress and tolerable stress. And there’s a third type of stress called toxic stress.

If we don’t have helpful support systems, and we experience severe or frequent exposure to certain types of stress, it can have a ‘toxic’ effect on the body and brain. These adverse experiences include things like witnessing domestic violence in the home, chronic neglect, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, divorce, an incarcerated parent or close relative, substance abuse and mental health struggles.

Experiencing or witnessing these types of traumatic and toxic situations can have harmful effects on our brains, bodies, and even our genes that we pass on to our children –meaning the way our bodies respond to stress can actually be passed from one generation to the next through our genes.

Whew! So is there anything we can do?

Thank goodness the answer is YES!

Resilience is possible! Resilience is basically the ability to thrive, adapt, and cope despite tough and stressful times –it’s the good news we need to counterbalance all the adverse experiences in our past or present.

Our brains are pretty amazing. While it’s true that negativity and trauma can affect our brains, our brains can actually be rewired and repaired inside.

So what CAN we do to respond to and prevent toxic stress?

Well I’m glad you asked! Let’s compare our lives or our children’s lives to a seed (hold up seed).

Now, I can hope and wish that this seed, which may have been neglected, will flourish and grow. But all the hoping and wishing won’t do much at all for the seed.

But what I can do is provide a positive, nurturing, safe, and stable environment for the seed. I can water it, I can plant it in the best soil I can find, I can make sure it gets sunshine, I can even give it a bit of fertilizer to help it grow.

So while I can’t change the seed, or even change what happened to the seed in the past, I can provide a healthy environment for it to thrive. I can even pull the weeds out that surround it that try to steal it’s nutrients. I can do what I can to prevent birds or other animals from destroying it.

The same thing holds true with our own lives and the lives of our children. We can provide nurturing environments. We can help children learn to cope with adversity and stress. We can do what we can to reduce a child’s exposure to toxic adverse experiences. We can discover, use, and focus on our personal strengths. We can fill our lives with positive emotions, gratitude, kindness, optimism, hope, mindfulness, and forgiveness.

We can also reach out to others who specialize in gardening and growing seeds –these include therapists and counselors, coaches, friends, family, our faith communities and numerous agencies in the community all wanting to help provide a happy, healthy environment for us and our children to grow.

Life is full of positive and negative experiences. And remember, we experience positive stress, tolerable stress, and some experience toxic stress. But the good news is there is hope and help for each of us as we learn how to provide the best environment we can for our seeds to flourish.(maybe a plant I show at the end).

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