Two Types of Trauma

Earlier, I talked about a couple things related to trauma and one of the things I mentioned was a car accident. The other thing I mentioned were things like abuse and when it comes to trauma, there are two types of trauma. There’s single event and then there’s complex trauma.

Single event is a lot easier to identify somebody slips and falls at work. They end up in the hospital. They have a broken back who knows whatever. It’s a bad day and they have a lot of stress maybe they see a mop bucket at work. They have stress anxiety because they’re reliving that trauma. It’s a lot easier to pinpoint as to what that trauma is and, in this case, let’s say the person doesn’t have any underlying major traumas or childhood trauma. This is easier to prove in a workers comp claim when it comes to stress claims and different things as opposed to complex trauma.

Complex trauma is harder to treat because this is involving the whole person this can involve things from childhood years and years and years ago that get masked and covered up. They talk about unpeeling the onion all the way down to its core. This is what we’re talking about when it comes to complex trauma. It takes time to heal and people need time to process and to reprocess within the brain with a psychologist, a counselor, somebody who’s a professional and to rebuild a healthy image of self to manage your trauma history with different tools that are out there. So, complex trauma can take a lot of work and complex trauma can also occur with a single incident trauma like an accident that can just be the thing on top of the thing. On top of the thing that sets somebody off to the point where they need time off to heal and they need to go through different programs therapy.

So, understanding both is very important but also when we look at workers compensation. When people are you know first responders for example too often in the first responder community with workers compensation, they try to pinpoint it to one specific call. Well, you tell me the calls that first responders. Let’s say you go on 911 calls a day which one call made that person have post-traumatic stress. This is a big issue so have a holistic caring perspective and the longer you fight from a management standpoint of getting people the care that they need, the longer it takes for that person to come back to work so understanding that. If we actually help people and we figure out better ways than the workers compensation process to get people the care that they need especially with complex traumas, we can get people back into the workforce and none of these things are like death sentences for people right.