Trauma

An event is experienced as a trauma when an individual has an experience where the person feels a threat to one’s physical survival, the person feels overwhelmed and powerless, and the situation leaves the person feeling isolated and alone.  While it can take a minor negative experience to become a trauma, the experience of a trauma is also impacted by the age of the experience, number of experiences, the compounding of different experiences, and who inflicted the experience. All of this and more has a relationship with the social, cognitive, emotional and biological factors that shape our development and coping.   Researchers also understand that it doesn’t take being beaten or abused to affect a young child, but also the simple absence of emotionally reassuring responses from a caregiver to be experienced as traumatic. An early disturbance in the security of the attachment system (“Developmental Trauma”) has a major influence on how children and adults react and cope in multiple dimensions: expectations & perceptions, bodily experiences and biological responses.