What is Trauma?

In a psychological sense, trauma is often defined as long-lasting mental, emotional, and physical changes that occur as a response to a scary, harmful, or challenging event (or series of events).  Trauma can take on all kinds of forms- violence, abuse, neglect, disasters, accidents. Anything that shakes our sense of safety could be a potentially traumatizing event, and these events have a greater impact on us the younger we are when we experience them.

We often talk and think about how childhood traumatic experiences- like abuse and neglect- have long-lasting consequences for individuals, but trauma can occur in any age or stage or our life. 

During and after experiencing a traumatic event, a person has a series of stress responses that encode the memory of the traumatic event into our brain, body, and nervous system.  Our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world change to include new sources of danger and instability. This is an adaptive response that essentially serves to protect us from greater harm.  However, this adaptive response can last for years after the initial traumatic event, causing even more pain and compounding the damage even more.

As Gabor Mate put it, “Trauma is not what happened to you.  It’s about what happened inside of you as a result of your experiences.”  

Trauma is a common experience.  Most people have had some kind of traumatic experience that shifted their perspective and left a scar on their hearts.  Part of the human experience includes being hurt, scared, and unfortunately, in danger at times.  Our brain and bodies have adapted to react strongly to those threats, so please remember that if you are having traumatic responses- there is nothing wrong with you.  We are designed to respond this way. 

The good news in all of this is that traumatic wounds can be healed.  The experience will always be with you and part of your story, but it does not need to define or control you. 

Have you ever healed yourself from a traumatic wound? What did you do? What helped you the most? Share in the comments below.