Trauma

Trauma is a person’s emotional response to a distressing experience. Few people can go through life without encountering some kind of trauma. Unlike ordinary hardships, traumatic events tend to be sudden and unpredictable, involve a serious threat to life—like bodily injury or death—and feel beyond a person’s control. Most important, events are traumatic to the degree that they undermine a person's sense of safety in the world and create a sense that catastrophe could strike at any time. Parental loss in childhood, auto accidents, physical violence, sexual assault, military combat experiences, the unexpected loss of a loved one are commonly traumatic events.

However, there is another kind of trauma that doesn't look like that description above. This kind is small, insidious, and robs a person of agency or sense of self. This type is repetitive harm that is inescapable for some reason - death by a thousand papercuts....repetitively being mocked, put down, criticized, left out, shunned, bullied, yelled at, scorned..... over time this type does much harm to the psyche and needs to be treated in the same way as the more extreme type

Types of Trauma

Acute Trauma

Acute trauma reflects intense distress in the immediate aftermath of a one-time event and the reaction is of short duration. Common examples include a car crash, physical or sexual assault, or the sudden death of a loved one.

Chronic trauma

Chronic trauma can arise from harmful events that are repeated or prolonged. It can develop in response to persistent bullying, neglect, abuse (emotional, physical, or sexual), and domestic violence.

Complex trauma

Complex trauma can arise from experiencing repeated or multiple traumatic events from which there is no possibility of escape. The sense of being trapped is a feature of the experience. Like other types of trauma, it can undermine a sense of safety in the world and beget hypervigilance, constant (and exhausting!) monitoring of the environment for the possibility of threat.

Secondary or Vicarious trauma

arises from exposure to other people’s suffering and can strike those in professions that are called on to respond to injury and mayhem, notably physicians, first responders, and law enforcement. Over time, such individuals are at risk for compassion fatigue, whereby they avoid investing emotionally in other people in an attempt to protect themselves from experiencing distress.

Impact of Childhood Trauma

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) cover a wide range of difficult situations that children either directly face or witness while growing up, before they have developed effective coping skills. ACEs can disrupt the normal course of development and the emotional injury can last long into adulthood. The loss of a parent; neglect; emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; and divorce are among the most common types of

Adverse Childhood Experiences.

These experiences include emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; emotional or physical neglect; parental separation or divorce; or living in a household in which domestic violence occurs. Other difficult situations include living in a household with an alcoholic or substance-abuser, or with family members who suffer mental disorders, or in a household with an incarcerated family member.

The Study of Childhood Experiences

In the original study of childhood experiences, begun in 1995 by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente, two-thirds of the more than 17,000 subjects who filled out confidential surveys about their childhood reported having experienced at least one adverse childhood experience. Subsequent research has focused on how these experiences have affected people's physical and mental health and well-being as they age.