What is Trauma?
Trauma has become a sort of catch-phrase in the wellness realm, a word more and more commonly used to refer to painful experiences. But what exactly is trauma?
Trauma still has a reputation of being something haunting, dark, an almost abstract thing that we humans only go through when faced with extreme situations. What do you immediately associate trauma with, if someone was to ask you what it was about?
In most cases, people will come up with soldiers or survivors of natural disasters or sexual abuse experience or “have” trauma. Partially, that’s because up to today, in order to be clinically diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), you need to meet a set of criteria defined by the American Psychiatric Association in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). In the context pf psychiatry, these criteria for receiving a PTSD diagnosis are of course relevant and important. In the context of our human experience, they are, however, pathologizing a common human experience and unfortunately, they lack a completely holistic acknowledgement of what trauma is.
And while the wellness realm has opened up to using the term “trauma”, the general public is still in denial, preferably hushing anyone who dares to discuss what’s behind the curtain of the past.
It is a human tendency to gravitate to safety and being in control and that tendency guides many of these behaviors and the denial towards trauma. But we can only heal what we bring to consciousness, what we allow ourselves to see and explore. So, trauma healing begins with learning what trauma is.
What is trauma?
Trauma is not an event or only an emotional response, it is a protective mechanism and tool for survival. Your individual experience of a perceived or actual threat, an overwhelming event, situation, person, or incident that may even seem insignificant to some (i.e. being called stupid or too loud) leads to trauma. Trauma is created whenever something happens too fast, too soon, too much - anything that exceeds the brain’s capacity to make sense of or integrate in the moment it happens causes trauma.
A threat can be anything that attacks your physical well-being, anything you say, believe in or do, care about or yearn for. This is a much broader definition of threats which allows for the individuality of everyone of us, our personal suffering. A threat can also be anything that you are not familiar with or that you do not understand.
Experiencing someone else get traumatized or harming another person can also be the source of becoming traumatized yourself.
Trauma is unique to each person, depending on previous experiences and your emotional, mental, social constitution. The threshold for overwhelm is different for everyone and partly depends on your current existing stress levels. If they are already high, you may be closer to the tipping point that leads to overwhelm, determining your ability to cope. It is never a personal failure, but a normal reaction to abnormal circumstances.
Normally, the more emotional we feel, the stronger the imprint of a memory will be. But, when your brain is overwhelmed, it cannot complete the processing of memory. This is the reason why the memory of what traumatized you is stored in fragments. These fragments are comprised of negative thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations and shape your beliefs about yourself and the world. This fragmentation and the splitting off of an overwhelming experience are at the root of dissociation.
Under normal circumstances, your brain processes your day and everything that happened during your sleep. It makes new connections and transforms negative thoughts and sensations into lessons learned during the deep sleep phase (called REM). As the fragmented storage of trauma hinders your brain from processing memories this way, trauma affects your mind, brain, emotions, and body, it has an ongoing effect on how you cope in each present moment you encounter. In a way, the unprocessed trauma causes you to live in the past whenever you are triggered and as long as traumatic memories are not integrated, you can hardly integrate or make sense of any new experiences you make.
The beauty of our species is our incredible resilience. And the ability to transform ourselves and evolve even within the span of just a single lifetime, over and over again. We are not doomed. But we are faced with the ever-evolving work of learning to love and embrace our whole selves, so we can heal and be who we truly are.
And how do we heal? By taking one step at a time, one day at a time, one trigger at a time. Every time you feel triggered, upset, angry, sad and heavy, use that as a door to transform. It begins with the question, why did that land for me? What happened? And then, it leads you to a new path of creating new solutions, new behaviors, shifting it all, and loving yourself through the process.
Are you ready to start healing? You can download my free Trigger Transformation Tool to get started and use your triggers as catalysts for lasting change and deep healing.
If you want to commit to deeper healing, check out my Online Course The Journey and dive into the beauty of becoming your own healer.