WHAT IS TRAUMA?

TRAUMA is an emotional response to a distressing or disturbing event or circumstance (physical, emotional or environmental) that hasn’t been resolved.

 Personally I’m of the belief that trauma can arise from a wide range of things, not just from obvious and severe distress. 

As children we are completely dependent on our caregivers to have our needs met and because of this our relationship with them is everything. If we perceive a situation to be threatening to that relationship we automatically adjust ourselves in order to keep having those needs met.

In this process we suppress and disown the parts of ourselves that we perceive to be in conflict with or rejected by our caregivers. This is how internal fragmentation happen. We can imagine these split-off aspects as being frozen in time, unaware that the threat is long gone.

It’s common for our adult selves to rationalise and downplay traumatic incidents from childhood as our grown-up perspective greatly differs from our child self.

Perhaps you grew up in a household that you deem “normal” and can’t find any valid reason for your continuous grow-up struggles. Chances are you suffered from some sort of emotional neglect as a child where instead of being taught how to regulate your emotions, you were expected to suppress and deny them as they may have been inconvenient and triggering to your parents/ caregivers/ teachers. Naturally, this can lead to deep feelings of guilt, shame and unworthiness.