What About My Experience?
People sometimes want to know whether their specific experiences are traumatizing. They can be hesitant to ask this question because the answer can be uncomfortable either way. (1) Someone might know they have been through an awful experience but getting that confirmation doesn’t necessarily feel good. (2) Other people just don’t want to think about it at all. Those people might have glanced at the title of this blog post and closed the page.
Let’s talk through some key features of traumatic situations to help you make up your own mind. I list some examples of traumatic situations below. This is not an exhaustive list.
One of the easiest traumas to recognize is a single incident trauma: A car accident, a tornado, a murder. These kinds of situations happen, and then the event stops happening. We know when that first trauma started and stopped, even if another single incident trauma happens later.
Some people want to say that “it’s not a big deal! It’s over and done with!” The event has already passed, but its effects can linger. This is a difficult truth to accept. A terrible occurrence that happened just once can have a big impact, for a long time.
Other traumatic events can occur repeatedly: domestic violence, emotional abuse, combat exposure, neglect, human trafficking. Repeated exposure to toxic situations has a negative effect over time. This is effect goes beyond the effect of a single incident trauma. One unfortunate feature of these traumas is people sometimes think they are “used to” the trauma. This is like a frog in a boiling pot. Right now, your nervous system might be tolerating this increase in stress, but that doesn’t make it healthy, and your tolerance doesn’t last forever. None of this is good for you in the long term.
Repeated traumas can be harder to define on a time scale. Sometimes we know when it started, but the situation may have happened so many times that discrete events can be hard to pinpoint. In these situations, the trauma might also be ongoing. In some cases, it feels like these traumatic events have been going on forever. This is especially true when the trauma started in childhood.
When the trauma began is another important feature to consider. Most childhood trauma is caused by someone the child knows, whether family, friends, acquaintances, or other trusted adults. Violation of trust is a common feature of childhood trauma. “I thought I could trust you, but I couldn’t, not then!”
Trauma in adulthood is also uniquely upsetting. On the one hand, adults may have resources and opportunities to protect themselves from trauma: healthy coping skills, belief in themselves, experience overcoming challenges, supportive people in their lives, etc. But this isn’t always the case. Also, toxic stress can wear down even the best defenses. For many adults, one of the factors that can help people overcome trauma is the ability to change one’s circumstances: e.g. finding another home to move into after it was lost in a flood.
Another problem is that traumas in adulthood can reawaken earlier traumas, such as in childhood. When this happens, the earlier trauma may feel worse than it ever did, and the later trauma may feel more intense than anything in the past.
Hopefully these examples are giving you some food for thought about your own experiences. Talking through the difficult events of your life with a therapist can be a helpful step. There are various steps you can take to prepare yourself to talk about trauma in therapy. This will be addressed in another blog post.