WHAT IS TRAUMA

"Trauma is an invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, love and make sense of the world. It is at the core of our deepest wounds. Trauma is not the threatening event that happened to us, but what remains in our body as a result of that event." (Gabor Mate, 2019)

Trauma therefore occurs in the body as a result of a single extremely stressful and/or threatening event, or as a result of recurring events that were misaligned with an individual's basic needs for safety, love and acceptance. If the experiences of these events exceed a person's current capacities to cope with them and integrate them, then they have a destructive effect on the individual's psyche and body.

Trauma develops when an event is TOO INTENSE, TOO FAST and/or TOO EARLY for an individual. Therefore, they cannot cope with it with a sense of control and choice that would allow them to maintain a sense of physical and psychological integrity. Because people can experience the same situation very differently, it is not necessary that all participants in the same threatening event develop trauma. Whether an event will cause trauma or not depends mainly on the subjective response, which is related to the assessment of the feeling of threat and helplessness. Peter Levine, the founder of the Somatic Experiencing method, says that traumatic symptoms are not caused by the event itself, but occur when the energy that remains from the threatening experience is not released from the body. This intense, survival energy remains trapped in the nervous system, from where it can cause chaos in our bodies and psyche. "Trauma is an internal straitjacket created when a devastating moment is frozen in time. Trauma stifles the unfolding of being and strangles our attempts to move forward with our lives. It separates us from ourselves, others, nature and spirit. When we are overwhelmed by threat, we are frozen in fear; as if our instinctive survival energies are poised for exit but have nowhere to go". (Peter Levine, 1997).

TYPES OF TRAUMA

We know several types of trauma, but broadly they are divided into three groups:

• acute - shock trauma, is the result of a single traumatic event - e.g. traffic accidents, physical and/or sexual assault, natural disasters (e.g. flood, earthquake, fire, hurricane), severe medical procedures (surgeries, severe dental procedures), severe falls, suffocation, drowning and other severe physical injuries.

• chronic trauma, develops as a result of recurring events - e.g. domestic violence, war, psychological violence in the workplace, dealing with chronic pain, dealing with severe illness (e.g. cancer) ...

• complex/developmental trauma, which occurs as a result of growing up in an environment that was extremely misaligned with the child's basic needs for safety, love and acceptance.

SYMPTOMS OF TRAUMA

Immediate and natural reactions to a threatening event are feelings of fear, helplessness or even horror. The natural response to such situations can be fight, flight or freeze, which is related to what happens in our autonomic nervous system and other dimensions of functioning (emotions, thinking, behavior). Acute stress reactions can occur after a few hours, days or weeks and may include: recurring and intrusive memories, fears, emotional numbness, alienation, confusion, eating disorders, sleep disorders, concentration and memory disorders. It is natural for a person to feel some of these symptoms after a threatening event, which should subside after a few weeks. If these reactions do not end after six months, we talk about post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which may include:

• re-experiencing the event (intrusive memories, nightmares, compulsive exposure to situations reminiscent of the event, distress at phenomena reminiscent of the event)

• avoidance (of thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, situations, persons, objects that remind of the event, decline in interest in everyday activities, abandonment of activities, abandonment of life roles, difficulties in remembering the event, emotional numbness, feelings of guilt)

• too high or too low arousal of the autonomic nervous system (or fluctuation between both extremes),

• chronic arousal of the autonomic nervous system (person is easily frightened, reflexively startles at certain sudden stimuli, outbursts of anger, irritability, concentration disorders, sleep disorders, muscle tension, exhaustion, increased caution),

• changes in emotional experience (inability to regulate emotions, emotional fluctuations, recurring or persistent feelings of anxiety, fear or panic, emotional numbness, feeling of being lost, lack of contact with one's needs),

• altered perceptions of self, others, the world, identity confusion.

Traumatic reactions depend on the type, duration and intensity of the threatening event, on the person (physical characteristics, personality traits, sense of capacity to face danger), on the context of the event and on the support of the environment. Trauma symptoms can appear immediately, or they can remain hidden and surface only years or even decades later, usually during a stressful period in a person's life or after a new traumatic event. Additional consequences of trauma can also include: developmental regression in children, relationship difficulties, destructive and self-destructive behaviors, eating disorders, substance abuse ... It can also happen that we experience symptoms of trauma, but have no awareness of being traumatized. Possible explanations for this are:

• the event occurred before the operation of explicit memory, i.e. in early childhood, when involvement in or witnessing a threatening event is not stored in explicit memory,

• ongoing exposure - especially in childhood - to recurring harmful conditions, continuous threatening events, neglect, caregiver misalignment with the child's developmental and relational needs, where each individual single event may not constitute trauma, but repetition leads to the development of complex developmental trauma symptomatology.

When it comes to complex developmental trauma, it fundamentally affects the child's development and the systems responsible for regulating the individual's psychological and biological systems.