Understanding trauma and the different types of trauma

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Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional. The content in this article is not a substitute for a licensed mental health professional.

Through my own experience with PTSD, coming face to face with your trauma is something I never wanted to do.

Who wants to talk about some of the worst days of your life? I can't speak for everyone with PTSD, but my biggest struggle was even talking about what caused my PTSD.

Even though I didn't want to face it and felt safer not facing it, there were still consequences. The traumatic events that I experienced affected every part of my life, from my social life to my work life to my relationships with everyone and myself.

But understanding the trauma behind my PTSD was vital for me to heal.

So, to understand PTSD further, let's look into what trauma is.

What is Trauma?

Trauma can and will look different for everyone. Many aspects of trauma may be misunderstood. For one, at any age, trauma can occur.

Trauma is an occurrence or situation that leads to harm in one or more ways:

• bodily harm
• emotional harm
• grave danger to life

In fact, most of us will experience something in our lives that could count as traumatic.

Trauma is the result of one of more upsetting, frightening, or stressful events. Typically, these situations are either beyond our control or too challenging to handle.

Furthermore, the traumatic event might impact us at anytime, even years after the incident. While some people may never experience lasting effects from a traumatic event.

Following an incident, shock and denial are common reactions. Trauma can look different for everyone. In fact, you may experience things comparable to someone else's, but your reaction may differ.

Overtime, the incident or situation negatively impacts the person's wellbeing. This includes their mental, physical, and emotional health, for a long time.

Types of Trauma

As we know, trauma can look different for every person. To dive a little deeper into trauma, we have to understand different types of trauma.

There are many different types of trauma, so this list is not all-inclusive. But it's essential to understand the broad scale of how trauma can look, so here are a couple of examples.

Collective Trauma

When a traumatic incident occurs to many people at once, it is referred to as collective trauma. An example is the coronavirus pandemic, as it changed the lives of everyone around the world. Experiencing the fear of this new virus with no cure scared many people.

This does not imply that everyone present was traumatized by the occurrence or that everyone had the same thoughts about it. But instead, it's an event we all went through as a society.

Although we all experienced the same pandemic, we experienced different things individually.

Childhood Trauma

What we experience in childhood can directly impact how we develop.

Early-life traumatizing experiences, including abuse, neglect, and disturbed attachment, can frequently have disastrous effects.

Experiences that we have in childhood impact us for the rest of our lives, good, bad, or ugly. These events may increase someone's risk of developing mental health issues as an adult.

To learn more about the other various types of trauma, click here for the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

Takeaways

Trauma can take many different forms and look different from person to person. No two people will experience the same lasting effects from trauma. The traumatic events that may have caused someone to develop PTSD are what the person will live with.

Trauma can come in many different ways and look different for everybody. From a shared experience, such as a global pandemic, to trauma we experience in childhood can all qualify as trauma.

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