What is Trauma?
Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease. Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict.
Definitions of Trauma, by Leading Trauma Experts
- "Trauma originates as a response in the nervous system, and does not originate in an event. Trauma is in the nervous system, not in the event.” Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the event itself. They arise when residual energy from the experience is not discharged from the body. This energy remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and minds.” (Peter Levine)
- "I define trauma as any situation, any experience, that poses a threat to their safety and/or their life. And that can have many meanings, because our lives evolve in a way that we have threatening experiences. And what we do is we become sensitized to certain things. They pose a threat to us even though they might not to another person. Those kinds of threats, if they occur in a state of helplessness, the inability to deal with, to mitigate, or to prevent that life threatening experience from occurring, that will result in the event being a traumatic event. In other words, a life threat in the state of helplessness." (Robert Scaer)
- "Trauma is specifically an event that overwhelms the central nervous system, altering the way we process and recall memories. “Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then," he adds. "It's the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.” (Bessel van der Kolk)
- “Psychological trauma is the state of severe fright that we experience when we are confronted with a sudden, unexpected potentially life-threatening event over which we have no control, and to which we are unable to respond effectively no mater how hard we try.” (Flannery)
- “Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life... the common denominator of trauma is a feeling of ‘intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation.’” (Herman)
NOTE: Information above was borrowed from the SOMATIC EXPERIENCING® website. Please feel free to directly visit this site at traumahealing.org