The American Psychiatric Association has defined Trauma as follows: 
The person has experienced an event that is outside the range of usual human experience that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone. For example: serious threat or harm to one’s children, spouse or other close relatives and friends; sudden destruction of one’s home or community; or seeing another person who has recently been or is seriously wounded, or killed as a result of accident or physical violence. 

The result of these kinds of experiences results in a condition known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD is a normal response to abnormal circumstances. Failure to recover or adequately deal with traumatic loss and restore one’s life to normal functioning is often referred to as Complicated Grief Response. 

Factors which lead to complicated grief subsequent to trauma: 
1. The suddenness of the trauma overwhelms the person’s coping abilities and leaves him or her in shock. 

2. Our commonly held beliefs about the justice, orderliness, safety, meaningfulness, stability, predictability, and our ability to control our destinies, is violently shattered. 

3. We experience intense reactions of fear, vulnerability, helplessness, and loss of control. 

4. We experience a profound loss of security and confidence in the world, which affects all areas of life. This is likely to increase many kinds of anxiety. 

5. We have relatively more intense emotional reactions, such as greater anger, ambivalence, guilt, helplessness, death anxiety, vulnerability, confusion, disorganization, and obsession with the deceased along with strong needs to affix blame or make the death meaningful. 

6. Leaves us with many secondary losses and problems to deal with as a result. Unfinished business, and not being able to say goodbye make it difficult to complete the mourning. 

7. Leaves the victims with profound feelings of mistrust, shattered beliefs, and inability to reattach to a future with hope and meaning. A sense of foreshortened future and recurrence are common. 

8. Compounds and exaggerates all of the other normal ongoing stressors of life. 

9. Creates many post traumatic reactions of a physical or psychological kind. Shock, numbing, headaches, sleep disorders, digestive disorders, inability to feel loving feelings, depression, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, fatigue, tension, weakness, difficulty in concentration are all common.

10. Attempts to cope and restore order, which may turn out to be ineffective. Quite often failed attempts to cope lead to addiction, avoidance, phobias, chronic depression, compulsive- destructive behaviors, and failed relationships. Failed attempts to cope may lead to the mourner getting stuck, or suffering from a complicated grief reaction. 

---

This site is owned, operated, and maintained by Crystal Hickerson 
Contact Me at realdivas@yahoo.com