Trauma VS Traumatisation

Recently, we've started differentiating between trauma and traumatisation in our trainings. 
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This is for a couple of reasons. One is that it's actually more accurate. Trauma is the bad thing that happened. Traumatisation is the result of the bad thing that happened. In other words, how the trauma impacted and continues to impact you.
The more important reason, however, is...

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the effect this change of messaging has on the client.

We used to say EFT works on healing trauma, thinking of the event and the effect as one and the same without realising that to the person suffering from trauma - there was a BIG difference.

When that person would hear a practitioner talk about healing their trauma, they would often feel a bit taken aback. (When I worked in television, we called this "bumping" on something). They'd bump on the suggestion that their trauma could be healed because they knew that there was no way to make the bad thing not have happened!

Some clients even found that they were unconsciously blocking the EFT out of not wanting to erase the bad thing that happened. This could be for a number of reasons. Common ones include not wanting to erase any positive learning or resilience that came from the experience or the feeling that erasing the experience lets the perpetrator off the hook (as though the crime never happened) - or even the fear that erasing the trauma will remove the client's awareness of how bad it was and they need that awareness to keep safe from letting it ever happen again. (To this, I offer the analogy of a burning house. Do you need to be standing IN the burning house to know it's burning? ...Neither do you have to be IN the bad experience to know it WAS a bad experience).

These are just three examples of what we call "secondary gain," the downside to healing that can get in the way of improvement when not addressed.

By changing our wording and telling the client --

"That bad thing that happened, tapping isn't going to change the fact that it happened. Nor is it going to change the fact that what happened was terrible, unfair, horrifying, etc. What we're going to work on with EFT is healing the ongoing pain from what happened so you don't have to live with the residue"...

-- we avoid triggering secondary gain and, at the same time, honour and respect the client's life experience without suggesting we can wave a magic wand and take any part of that experience away.
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And this often clears the way for the client to let the tapping do what it does so beautifully: Tell the client's nervous system that awful thing is no longer happening, it's in the past, so there is no need to still be in fight/flight/freeze.