Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Trauma Counselling & Debriefing

Trauma is the result of the occurrence of an overly stressful event in one’s life where one finds it difficult to cope with the emotions involved with that experience. When trauma enters one’s life, it often causes disruptive post-traumatic stress disorder. It disrupts any sense of order one might have previously had in day to day life. Subsequent to a traumatic event the post-traumatic stress disorder one experiences can make it extremely difficult (even impossible at times) to reconnect with life as it existed prior to the damaging event in question. After a traumatic experience one might have difficulty falling asleep, experience disturbed sleep, or sleep too much. Sometimes people avoid the place where the incident occurred. They often re-experience the traumatic event through recurring nightmares and/or recurring distressing thoughts. Sometimes people feel numb or irritable and often experience poor concentration after the incident.

Deon provides comprehensive trauma counselling and debriefing, from his office in Durbanville, for those suffering from post-traumatic stress after a psychologically disruptive event in their lives.

He typically encounters the following types of trauma:

• Crime – armed robberies, burglaries, murder, hijackings, rape, etc.
• More subtle trauma – subtle triggers from one’s past that cause trauma and erode the ability to cope and healthily manage certain situations.
• Workplace trauma – Deon often counsels healthcare personnel of hospitals or firefighters, since their working environment makes exposure to trauma inescapable.
• Critical incident trauma – disruptive events like car accidents, miscarriages, serious illness or the loss of a loved one.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder | Counselling and Debriefing

Serious workplace violence or accidents can have a dramatic effect on employers and employees. In South Africa, workplace violence such as armed robberies have become all too common, and it often happens that employers and employees do not know how to deal with the consequences of a traumatic event that occurred in a work environment. Consequences of workplace trauma very often has significant post-traumatic stress as a side-effect.

The fact that this trauma often affects a whole group of people instead of just one person, makes it a unique situation to deal with. Deon is available for group debriefing, helping all the members of the group work through the trauma they have experienced together.

Trauma Debriefing is a simple, supportive, discussion of a traumatic event. The debriefing process is designed to allow the victims of the trauma to work through the incident step-by-step in order to make sense of it and to eventually become reconciled to the traumatic event.

It is important to remember that trauma debriefing is not a form of psychotherapy and it should not be seen as a substitute for psychotherapy. It differs from trauma counselling and stands alone as an intervention for a single psychological crisis and does not involve ongoing therapy in itself. Trauma debriefing focuses on the reduction of distress and the restoration of a group’s functioning and performance.