Trauma is a huge problem for individuals as well as for society as a whole. In addition to the classical approaches such as psychotherapy and medication we would like to introduce you to two techniques, one verbal and one non-verbal, for providing acute trauma care:
- Critical incident Stress Management CISM, especially for helping professions and derivatively traumatized persons and
- Trauma Tapping Technique TTT, for all.
Trauma means that a person feels that his or her integrity as a person or life is threatened, e.g. people fleeing from violence, war, etc. or that a person is witnessing such a situation in his or her immediate proximity (journalists, reporters, interpreters, physicians/health care workers, and helping professions). The perception of a threatening situation can have a traumatising effect for an individual even without being directly affected. That means that both primary affected and secondary affected, like for example volunteers, can suffer from traumatisation. The trauma or the critical situation can create such an amount of emotional stress that a person is not able to deal with it in a normal way. Trauma refers to situations where our archaic reflexes, that is escape or combat, are not an option. Being helplessly exposed to something evokes feelings of being stuck, of not being able to move forwards or backward. People respond to that with fear and/or a strong reaction of the autonomic nervous system, emotionally, behaviour-related, physically, as well as cognitively.