Welcome! I want to start with a little background on the inspiration for the creation of this educational blog. I have now been doing clinical therapy for about a year and a half since graduating with my Masters of Social Work and have found such a love for understanding and treating trauma. I recently met with the caregivers of a young girl who experienced trauma for the first 5 years of her life. Her caregivers were concerned about her behaviors and were looking for help in knowing how to support her. As I helped them understand how early childhood trauma affects the brain and the basic perception of the world and the self, I realized that this “basic” information really isn’t so basic to most people. Now, being a therapist, I realize my bias when I say how important I think it is that people understand the effects of trauma, and especially childhood trauma.
The fact of the matter is this: EVERYONE will experience some form of trauma in their life, if they haven’t already. Now you may think I’m wrong because trauma only comes in the form of a sexual assault or seeing war. So let me set the record straight.
Trauma can come in many different forms ranging from something as severe as rape or surviving a natural disaster all the way to growing up in a home where your feelings were invalidated and there was always the fear of doing something “wrong.” If you google “what is trauma,” this is what you get:
“A deeply distressing or disturbing experience.” This could be the loss of a loved one, witnessing a violent crime, made to feel small or embarrassed by a loved one, etc. I like to describe trauma as any situation that we find ourselves feeling helpless or “stuck” and leaves us with an altered perspective of the world.
We differentiate types of traumas by referring to them as a Big Trauma and a Little Trauma (Big Ts and Little Ts). A Big T is what typically comes to mind when we hear the word “trauma” such as experiencing abuse, neglect, or sexual assault. A Little T is more along the lines of being bullied at school, emotional abuse, or a death of a loved one. A lot of Little T’s can certainly add up and become what is called complex trauma, and it can have the same effects as one Big T if they are left to fester. Whether or not you’ve experienced a Big T, I’m certain that you’ve experienced a variety of Little Ts. Everyone’s experiences are different and each one of those Ts you lived through has altered or affected your worldview and self-perception in some way.
If you still think you haven’t ever experienced a trauma, that’s okay! I hope you’ll read this blog anyway to educate yourself on what trauma means for all of the survivors in your life. I promise you have come across them already, whether you know it or not. 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused by the time they are 18. That statistic ALONE should tell you something about the people around you, and that’s only one kind of trauma.
So take this knowledge into consideration as you interact with others around you. Have some compassion for their idiosyncrasies and quirks, because you never know what they have had to do to survive.