Understanding Trauma
Traumatic experiences often involve a threat to life or safety, but any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and isolated can result in trauma, even if it doesn’t involve physical harm. It’s not the objective circumstances that determine whether an event is traumatic, but your subjective emotional experience of the event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized.
Emotional and psychological trauma can be caused by:
One-time events, such as an accident, injury, or a violent attack, especially if it was unexpected or happened in childhood.
Ongoing, relentless stress, such as living in a crime-ridden neighborhood, battling a life-threatening illness or experiencing traumatic events that occur repeatedly, such as bullying, domestic violence, or childhood neglect.
Commonly overlooked causes, such as surgery (especially in the first 3 years of life), the sudden death of someone close, the breakup of a significant relationship, or a humiliating or deeply disappointing experience, especially if someone was deliberately cruel.
Coping with the trauma of a natural or manmade disaster can present unique challenges—even if you weren’t directly involved in the event. In fact, while it’s highly unlikely any of us will ever be the direct victims of a terrorist attack, plane crash, or mass shooting, for example, we’re all regularly bombarded by horrific images on social media and news sources of those people who have been. Viewing these images over and over can overwhelm your nervous system and create traumatic stress. Whatever the cause of your trauma, and whether it happened years ago or yesterday, you can make healing changes and move on with your life.
Types of Trauma
Many professional helpers refer to 2 basic types of trauma; “big T” trauma and “little t” trauma. Big T trauma is commonly understood as event based or shock trauma. Examples of these “big T” traumas include accidents, being attacked, witnessing tragedy, experiencing a natural disaster. These are understandably traumatic, and most of us would recognize such events as traumatic pretty easily.
These same individuals also refer to “little t” trauma as less overwhelming to our nervous system and emotions in the moment, but definitively traumatizing because of their chronicity.
Both lead to PTSD, and professionals are starting to describe their clients/patients in terms of 2 main streams of PTSD. The first one we are quite familiar with, and years of research has identified some fantastic treatments for PTSD from big T trauma.
The second is not yet diagnosable, but I believe that we are getting closer & closer to the APA (American Psychological Association, developers of the diagnostic tool called the DSM) recognizing the need for a designated diagnosis for “little t” trauma. It is commonly referred to (& recognized by mental health practitioners) as C-PTSD (Complex PTSD) or Developmental Trauma.
Personally, I have a tremendous dislike for the terms “big T” & “little t” to describe trauma, because they both represent devastation to an individual, and because we do not benefit from thinking that one person’s trauma is worse or more significant than another’s.
I track with the term Developmental Trauma, and am very excited with the headway made in both recognizing the difference between it and event based PTSD and in treating it. VERY EXCITED!
As many are not yet familiar with the terms Developmental Trauma, or Complex PTSD, let me share a little here:
Chronic stress during a child’s early years has been shown to impair right brain development, resulting in compromised nervous system regulation and sense of self, leading to significant emotional and interpersonal deficits. The distress referred to here stems from any one of a number experiences, examples of which are listed here, (this is not an exhaustive list):
Emotional mis-attunement from caregiver
Separation from a caregiver - such as divorce, death or incarceration of a parent
Emotional vulnerability of caregiver - eg. Parent grieving a loss when baby is born or in first few years of child’s life, parental depression, parental struggles with PTSD, mental illness or addiction, just to name a few
Neglect - needs going unmet on a regular basis, be it for emotional attention & affection, or for basic physical needs like food, shelter, clothing, safety
Abuse - be it emotional, physical or sexual
