What is Trauma?

Trauma, put bluntly, is something that happens to a person that they experience to be less than nurturing. I know that this sounds to be victimy, snowflake, BS thinking. And if it is used as an excuse for people’s poor behavior, I might agree.

However, when you look at trauma in the context of the development of people through their childhood into adulthood and the impact it has on a person’s sense of safety and identity, it can help you make sense of a lot of things that otherwise seem crazy.

A child’s brain is not like an adult brain. Our brains do not finish developing until our mid-20s. As a newborn, our brains are primarily wired for attachment. Our only chance for survival at that stage is to connect with the caregivers in our lives, because we are completely incapable of taking care of ourselves in any way. If our caregivers do not connect with us enough to be willing to do all the work it takes to care for us and keep us safe, we will die.

Attachment is a matter of life or death. From the baby’s point of view, safety isn’t a thought at all. It is a series of experiences. Such as the feeling of being held, feeling other people’s touch, hearing their voices and their heartbeats, being able to hold their eye contact. It’s in how caregivers respond to their needs which are communicated through crying, fussing, and other simplistic ways. All these things combined help them to feel safe and cared for.

If the child gets enough of these experiences, they feel safe and begin to develop a sense of being calm (or internally regulated) through his/her connection with their caregivers. If they don’t, their bodies spend more time in Fight, Flight, or Freeze. These are self-protective responses we are all familiar with, and they aren’t a choice.

If we feel safe, we don’t have these reactions. When we feel unsafe we go into fight (anger) or flight (fear) and do something about the threat. If we can’t do anything because we don’t have the skills (like a baby) or because we are overwhelmed, then we move into freeze.

Freeze is a bit harder to explain, but in its most severe form we can’t do anything. We can’t move or talk. In some of its less recognizable forms, we may just stop noticing what is going on around us. We can get lost in our thoughts, day dream, or become completely oblivious.

Now, children moving into a fight, flight, freeze response do not automatically make it a traumatic event. We are wired for this to happen. It’s part of our nature.

What makes it a traumatic event is if we experience being in fight, flight, freeze and do not experience a return to safety. Every child will experience some of this growing up. No situation, environment, parent, or anything related to human beings is perfect, so all of us have some of these experiences.

The more of these experiences a child has of “bad things” happening without experiencing a resolution to them, the more likely they are to go into either fight, flight, or freeze as a habit, even when they are not in danger.

People are most vulnerable to trauma when they are babies; as they grow older this vulnerability decreases because the person becomes more skilled in protecting themselves. As their brain becomes more developed, they can make more conscious choices about how to react. However, if they have trauma, their reactions are part of the involuntary systems and habitual.

Without appropriate interventions, what children learn to do is to try and suppress these reactions, typically through self-shaming thoughts. Over time, this significantly impacts a person’s sense of self-esteem and turns into a complex maze of triggers and reactions that leaves them feeling defective and broken.

In therapy, our goal is to start to undo the negative impact of the trauma through looking at both the conscious and involuntary ways we cope and helping to develop more adaptive patterns.

Methodologies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy help to address the things we are aware of, while techniques like Somatic Experiencing and EMDR help to address our involuntary strategies.