"Real" Trauma

    Sometimes, when I talk to my therapist about things like going to church, some details about my Evangelical upbringing, or the Baptist school I went to during childhood, she'll listen and then she'll say something like, "That was traumatic for you." Or, "X is hard when there is trauma related it." In my earlier days in therapy, I always felt weird when she'd mention trauma related to those areas of my life. I was even quick to dismiss it to myself and occasionally to her as "not real trauma" because the things I was dealing with didn't meet the definition of trauma that I had in my head because they weren't really "serious" or "big" enough. 

    When we think of trauma, we typically think of "big", objectively terrible events like war, natural disaster, car accidents, being the victim of a violent crime, living in a domestic violence situation, or witnessing the sudden death of someone. If any person lived through any of the things I just listed, they would be reasonably expected to have trauma as a result, meaning the event would have mental health-related consequences, like anxiety, panic attacks, depression, or another clinically diagnosed mental health condition.

    But...what about the events that aren't objectively terrible that still cause a person trauma? This kind of "smaller" more subjective trauma is often dismissed as "not real trauma". People tend to say, "Oh, this isn't a traumatic event for me, so it can't be a traumatic event for you either." 

    That's not actually how trauma works, though. According to the American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology, trauma is defined as, "any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings severe enough to have a long-lasting effect on a person's attitudes, behavior, or other aspects of functioning." That definition points out the part of trauma that most people miss. The "any disturbing experience" part of the definition highlights the subjective piece of trauma.

    Trauma isn't caused by the event itself, really. Trauma is caused by the person's experience and perception of an event. Different people experience and perceive events completely differently because different people bring different feelings, thoughts, and associations to the event that color how they experience and perceive it. Trauma, like mental health treatment, isn't a one-size fits all kind of thing. An event that causes trauma for one person might be a normal day for someone else. Many events can cause significant fear, helplessness, and other disruptive feelings for someone depending on how any individual perceives that event.

    An example that comes to mind for me when I think about how subjective trauma actually is, is my own experience with going to Tuesday chapel in college as a person with religiously-based OCD that involves blasphemous intrusive thoughts. Since I went to a Baptist college, chapel was a requirement. Every Tuesday that I had to go into church, I was absolutely sure that, before the service was over, I was going to be struck dead in my pew because of my intrusive thoughts. Can you imagine the fear and the helplessness I felt going to church, sure I was going to die each time but being forced to go for a school credit requirement? Some days I would actually dissociate, only to snap back into reality as I was walking to my first class. For everyone else, chapel was just an average Tuesday while I perceived it and experienced it as the event that would immediately lead to my death. (Thank God for my therapist, y'all, because I'm not in that place anymore.) Just because everyone else didn't experience Tuesday chapel as a traumatic event like I did doesn't mean that the resulting trauma I had to work through with my therapist was any less real than someone else's trauma after a car accident or some other objectively terrible event. 

    I'll end with this: The trauma that results from a traumatic event isn't caused by the event itself. The trauma is caused by the way an individual perceives and experiences the event. Sure, some events are objectively terrible, and anyone that went through any one of those objectively terrible events would be expected to have trauma as a result. However, "smaller", more personal events can cause trauma as well because the trauma depends on how the person feels and thinks about a thing they have experienced. So, just because something wasn't traumatic for you, or just because the thing wasn't an objectively traumatic event, doesn't mean it wasn't a traumatic event for someone else.