When I teach other providers about Trauma Informed Care I love showing clips from Healing Neen, in which we follow the story of Tonier Cain, who went from living in the streets to becoming an acclaimed international speaker on the topic of Trauma Informed Care. In the documentary she talks about her road to recovery, starting with being introduced to a program for incarcerated parents. On the topic of trauma she states “I don’t know what that is, but I know I got it!”

This is a statement that resonates with so many survivors. Many people who’ve lived through adversity don’t necessarily have the language to talk about what they’ve been through, just a felt sense that something’s not right, and a nagging feeling that what they’re struggling with today is somehow related to the past. So what are we talking about when we talk about trauma?

Trauma Defined

So many time I hear my clients say things like “I don’t know if this really counts as a trauma” or “I know what other people have been through is so much worse” as though their experiences don’t count if they’re not extreme (though I still hear this from people who’ve experienced horrific child abuse or came inches from death at the hands of their own partner). It’s as though when we experience trauma there’s a part of us that feels guilty for having been negatively impacted by events we had no control over. An important part of recovery is learning that you are having a normal reaction to having lived through an “abnormal” event.

Here’s how trauma is defined by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

Trauma is the unique individual experience of an event or enduring condition in which a person’s ability to integrate their emotional experience is overwhelmed. The person’s experiences, either objectively or subjectively, pose a threat to their psychological safety, bodily integrity, life or the safety of a caregiver or family member.

To put it simply: You are the one who gets to define whether or not your experience was traumatic, not your friends and family, not your doctor, not even us trauma therapists, YOU.

When we think about trauma we often go to the obvious: being assaulted, getting into a car accident, going off to war, but there’s a long list of things that can impact a person just as deeply: being bullied, growing up with an overly critical parent, incidents of racism, sexism or homophobia. These things also have real potential to overwhelm a person’s capacities to cope. As the well respected physician and trauma expert Gabor Mate puts it in his book The Myth of Normal “trauma is not what happened to you, its what happened inside you” Only you can know how you’ve been impacted by past experiences, its that impact that makes it traumatic or not rather than what the event was, though it can take some extra support to unpack what it all means.

Final Thoughts

So to recap, you get to define whether or not your experience was traumatic, and know that your reaction to trauma is normal no matter what kind of events you went through. When it comes to trauma it’s not a contest of who had it worst and there is no reward given out for who toughed it out or bottled it up the best. You don’t need to carry your experiences alone. And finally, if you really have to ask yourself the question “was this traumatic?” chance are, the answer is yes, but that doesn’t mean it needs to have power over you forever. There is recovery, there is resiliency no matter what you went through and how deep its impact has been.

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