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What the words you will hear actually mean
Short answer
Most technical terms in trauma therapy describe something quite ordinary, in Latin. Here each one is explained the way I would explain it in the room: the experience first, the name after. If you have heard a term that is missing, ask me and I will add it.
Glossary
Fifteen terms
Ordered the way they usually come up, not alphabetically.
- Trauma
- Not the event itself, but what is left of it in you. Two people carry the same event differently, and that is not a measure of who is stronger.
- Trigger
- Anything that resembles "then" to your body — a sound, a smell, a tone of voice, a time of day. The reaction arrives before you can think that you are safe.
- You go blank and everything recedes (dissociation)
- The sense of having left your own body, or of the room being behind glass. You are not losing your mind — it is how the system shuts down when there is too much.
- Being permanently on (hyperarousal)
- A body that never comes off standby. Startling at sounds, being unable to settle, sleeping with one eye open.
- Being switched off (hypoarousal)
- The other end: numbness, heaviness, nothing felt at all. People describe it as laziness more often than as a symptom.
- An image that imposes itself (flashback)
- A memory that arrives not as recollection but as the present. Which is why knowing it is over does not help.
- Avoidance
- Everything you do to stop it happening again — going round a street, not driving, not sleeping. It helps in the short term and shrinks your world in the long term.
- Window of tolerance
- The range in which you can feel something without being flooded. All of preparation exists to widen that range before processing.
- Stabilisation
- Learning concrete ways back to steady. The first phase of any trauma therapy, and the only part that is learned well in a group.
- Grounding
- A way back into the present room through the senses. Not relaxation — the aim is orientation, not calm.
- Bilateral stimulation
- Rhythmic alternation left and right: eyes following a hand, pulses in the palms, tones in headphones. A tool inside EMDR, not the whole method.
- Dual attention
- Part of you is in the memory, part of you is in the room with me. That second part is what separates processing from reliving.
- Processing (reprocessing)
- The part where the memory stops pulling like the present. It begins at phase four of eight, desensitisation; the first three exist so that it is safe.
- Negative cognition
- The conclusion about yourself drawn at the time and stuck to the memory: "I am not safe", "it was my fault". It does not change by being argued with.
- Closing a session
- The last ten minutes or so, in which everything goes back in place. You do not leave the room in the middle of something — that is my job, not yours.
A word missing?
Write it to me and I will add it. If you heard it from another therapist, that is still fine.