Knowing what trauma is and experiencing trauma are two entirely different situations. Engaging in any form of media (TV news, Hollywood stories, radio news, even written fiction) allows some of us to create a distance between our own feelings and what is being discussed. We can watch news and movies about earthquakes, murders, plane crashes, hurricanes, floods, assaults, robberies, rapes, Columbine shootings, WLD (Weapons of a little Destruction), terrorist attacks and statistics on heart attacks, breast cancer, strokes, fibromyalgia or Sudden Infant Death and still go on with breakfast, our commute, our meetings of the day, evenings with friends, and kissing the kids goodnight.
Once any one of those acts happens, you are either a direct victim (it happened to you) or you were a secondary victim (it happened to someone you love or you witnessed the event), you become a victim. Those caregivers who serve this population also are vulnerable to the effects of T.R.A.U.M.A. In my early days as a psychotherapist, my first patient who was recovering from severe, prolonged childhood sexual abuse, needed tell her story as she was in the process of recovering lost but life impacting memories. For months I listened to stories much worse that I had ever heard or seen in any media. I was falling into my own tar pit of dark, unsafe, suspicious and required my own psychotherapy sessions with my supervisor to move out of that secondary victim place.
What response one has to an event experienced or witnessed is at the core of the definition of traumatic stress. In some situations, the reaction is increased adrenaline, a fight response, an accessing of one’s resources and strengths and one responds with a sense of victory.
However, just in the research on learned helplessness, if there is literally nothing one can do to avoid the effects of the event, then the body and mind learn that one is a helpless victim and the response is horror, shock, terror, or even a sense that the event wasn’t real.
Some people remember all the details like I did when I got my initial cancer diagnosis, or when I heard about President Kennedy being shot (yes, I do remember that, even though I was really, really young).
Some do not. I have supported victims of extreme and recent sexual abuse who blocked out so much of the details that they were not able to give police enough of a description of the perpetrators to help in the investigation. (In this case, careful, thoughtful hypnosis allowed a recall of significant faces and places without re-truamatizing the victim).
Although psychotherapists have a clinical definition of what constitutes traumatic stress, for our purposes, anything that causes a shift from good, promising, safe, and sunny and in an instant to awful, doomed, scary and dark and, worse yet, promises a recurrance of those feelings - falls into a trauma. It’s the reaction to the event that defines the significance of the event.
T: The
R: Reaction
A: After
U: Unbelievably
M: Mortifying (to kill, or destroy the vitality of life)
A: Acts
Here’s to the return of those good, promising, safe, and sunny days to come.
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