What is Trauma?

Survivors.org defines trauma as both:

1. the lasting emotional impact of a distressing event
2. anything that overwhelms our ability to cope

Trauma is both a specific experience and our emotional experiences that arise after that event. 

Survivors often report that when they discuss their trauma, others may try to tell them that their experience wasn’t “bad enough” to be considered traumatic. In reality, trauma is personal. Something that may overwhelm one individual’s ability to cope may be within another person’s bandwidth. We do not have a say in what memories our brain decides are traumatic. The encoding of a memory as traumatic is involuntary, and so are the symptoms of it. While therapy and medication can help us manage our emotions, we are not always in control over what incites emotional reactions within us.

Any event can be traumatic.

Oftentimes, trauma is described as a list of life events that are traumatic for most people who experience them. Even in the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-5), the definition of a traumatic event is, “death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence.”  However, defining trauma this way excludes and invalidates many people whose traumatic experiences do not fit that rigid description. Whether or not threatened bodily injury was part of the event has little to do with the brain processes that encode a memory as traumatic. Trauma is highly personal and can stem from a variety of events. 

Trauma is relative.

No individual’s personal trauma is more or less “bad” than another person’s trauma. While survivors of multiple traumas may internally place the intensities of their traumas on a scale for themselves, known as “Big T” and “Little T” traumas, we cannot make that same distinction for other people. Our reference for the emotional impact of something can only be defined within the scale of the most intense emotion we have experienced, and we cannot feel the feelings that another person is experiencing. Therefore, we cannot actually compare our emotional experiences to someone else’s. 

If someone is experiencing the symptoms of trauma– it was traumatic.