Traumatic events of all kinds take place all day, every day, everywhere: natural disasters, accidents, shootings, rapes, interpersonal violence, wars. Trauma is a particular version of toxic stress: high-risk events or situations in which one’s physical or psychological integrity is threatened (school shooting, gang violence, natural disaster, sudden or violent loss of loved one, physical or sexual assault, war).
Some estimate that over 50% of adults in the United States experience trauma at least once in their lives. Each year millions of them will suffer florid symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, nightmares; trouble sleeping; problems concentrating or being around others; constant anxiety or vigilance; irritability and anger.
Also, they might be weighed down by a different set of PTSD symptoms—more invisible, but just as distressing—shutting down, numbing, inability to feel or remember feelings, cut off from their own experience.
Trauma is shattering for adults. It eats into an already formed personality. For young children, its effects on the brain put future development on the line. It derails and shapes their emerging personalities. Their stress response systems are flooded with excess adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone. They are on alert, primed to response to perceived threats or danger, and their pleasurable hormones are reduced.
Abused children feel intense fear, helplessness and horror. Incidents of child abuse or severe neglect can be a one-time episode (acute trauma) or a repeated, dreaded chronic occurrence. When the abuser is also the parent, a child faces an unmanageable dilemma: living in an unsafe world where the person who should provide comfort (and maybe does sometimes) is also the source of terror.
A solution many children find is to locate the “badness” in themselves—if only I hadn’t gotten a bad grade, or broken that glass, mommy or daddy wouldn’t get so mad. Though painful, it is easier to feel like a bad person than to feel like your world is frighteningly bad.
These experiences prepare a child to cope with negative environments, rather than having the expectations of a good experience with other people. They are focused on detecting threats, instead of learning or playing. At school, children may feel they must defend themselves from the teacher’s correction or be so worried about getting a negative reaction that they can’t risk answering when called on or taken in the lesson.
Trauma doesn’t just hurt when it happens, it goes on hurting and doing damage, psychologically and neurobiologically. Stress response systems, designed to alert us to danger, that were severely jarred as they were forming, can go off at the wrong times, or incessantly, or fail to go off at all when there is an actual threat.
Many kids grow up feeling they are just bad, or unlovable, making it impossible to feel the love of others. The rage or deep sadness that trauma engenders may lead to acting out and landing in the juvenile justice system or eventually, the criminal justice system. Substance use can look like relief when you can’t bear the way you feel.
The world that trauma creates has no time and no boundaries. When a reminder—a smell, a song, a place—comes up, it can peel a person like an onion, right down to that frightened, helpless child, once again face to face with a terrifying experience.
I have found, in my psychotherapy practice with survivors of trauma, and in life, that the light of hope comes in the acknowledgement of all that has happened in the presence of a caring other. When, together with someone in a safe space, a traumatic experience can be named and described, the power goes out of it. The place it once occupied and the energy it took to keep it in that place are freed and growth becomes possible.
