What is Trauma?
Let’s make a distinction between traumatic events, and traumatic reactions. A traumatic event, is a deeply troubling experience to the person or people that experience it. On the other hand, a traumatic reaction, also knows as a trauma response, can result from a traumatic event.
An old school trauma model said that events could be considered traumatic if people struggled to wrap their heads around what happened. On the one hand, this makes some sense. People can experience all kinds of disruptive and horrible situations that are very hard to understand. Our minds struggle to make sense of these moments in time. Traumatic situations can lead people to being mentally out of sorts, confused, and overwhelmed. But a glaring problem with this theory is the underlying assumption that, “if you just thought differently about this situation, it wouldn’t be such a big deal.” That perspective is neither helpful, nor accurate. I have yet to meet a single person who thought their way out of their trauma.
A modern take on this issue suggests that traumatic events disrupt the normal course of people’s thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and nervous systems. This comes with an underlying message that certain situations are toxic, and that being exposed to horrible circumstances is the problem. In other words, traumatic situations are horrible all on their own; it’s not people’s thinking that makes them that way. There’s no psychological inoculation that guarantees immunity to a terrible situation: Not money, or age, or fame, or good looks. Not anything.
Along this line, we might think of stressful events as occurring on a range of intensity. Mildly stressful situations are those that cause a temporary, minor, and short-term impact on a person. Moderately stressful events may be harder to shake off. But worst of all is toxic stress. Even if it’s experienced briefly, but especially if it occurs repeatedly, toxic stressors are very likely to cause damage. In other words, toxic stress is likely to lead to a trauma response.
A single event could be traumatic, but guaranteeing that to be the case is risky. People’s individual circumstances and reactions can make them resilient to trauma. That is, people can resist trauma, at least for a while. People sometimes find mental, emotional, and behavioral ways to cope with these situations that keep them from becoming overwhelmed. These coping strategies might be great, but they might have their own serious downsides.
So, what happens when someone experiences a traumatic event? Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a well-known series of reactions to trauma: Intense disruptions in emotion, finding it difficult or impossible to feel safe, reckless behavior, needing to always be on guard, repeated memories and nightmares about what happened, having out of body experiences, re-experiencing the trauma over and over again…
Beyond PTSD, there’s growing consensus in the mental health field that a wide variety of mental health concerns can be caused or worsened by traumatic events: Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sleep disorders, psychosis, attachment problems, sexual problems…
It can be hard to decide whether you, or someone you love, has been through a traumatic event, or is dealing with traumatic reactions. Therapy can help you make sense of these challenges, and ultimately decrease your distress around them. We can’t change the fact that a traumatic event happened, but we can lessen its impact.