What is Trauma?

What I think is really important is that whether or not you are affected by trauma exposure has nothing to do with how ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ you are. Because I am a clinician, I often use clinical analogies. When someone comes into ER with a broken leg, we don’t stew over why their leg broke. Yes, in rare cases there can be concern about whether or not the patient has ‘brittle bones’ as this could be an indication of osteoporosis, which will require further investigation, but by and large when osteoporosis is not of concern, the why doesn’t really matter because a broken bone is a broken bone. We don’t look at the patient and consider them weak. We need to think about our minds in the same way. There are any number of valid, credible and very important reasons why some people exposed to some circumstances will be significantly impacted and others may not. Weak mindedness has nothing to do with it.

So, let’s get back to how we can define and understand trauma. After I did a whole bunch of data collection and analysis, here’s the definition I came up with based on what research evidence tells us about trauma. I define trauma as when an event, or series of events, overwhelm an individual’s capacity to psychologically self-regulate and can negatively affect the individual’s internal well-being, inter-personal relationships and functioning in society. That might sound all scientific-y and very jargon-y, but in a nutshell here’s what I mean.

It’s really important to recognize that trauma can manifest in different ways because people are different. There is one common theme, however, and that is when a person is ‘trauma-affected’, meaning they are struggling in some way with some type of trauma exposure, it always affects their emotional regulation or ‘internal well-being’. Some people become very angry and aggressive. Others can become very withdrawn and quiet. Or there can be some combination of the two. But the classic hallmark of trauma, across the board, is some type of mental/emotional alteration or disruption. This is what I mean by ‘internal well-being’. There is a disruption to, or loss of, overall internal (mental/emotional) well-being. And then there are the trickle-down effects of this disruption to our internal well-being.

Trauma often, although not always, impacts our ability to maintain healthy interpersonal relationships, and trauma can also impact or disrupt our ability to maintain our general functioning in society, meaning we may not be able to function as well (or at all) in school or work or whatever our daily routine or occupation is. I also want to point out that while many people assume the ‘event or series of events’ typically mean event or events we experience directly (meaning something is done to us or we experience a natural disaster or some type of accident ourselves), the event or series events could be via others’ experiences. This is known as secondary trauma or vicarious trauma meaning that the trauma exposure occurs via another individual or group of people relaying their experiences of trauma. This is very applicable to police officers and prosecutors, as just a few examples, in that they are often and repeatedly exposed to horrific events via the gathering and processing of evidence and testimony.