What To Know About Trauma
WHAT IS TRAUMA?
Trauma is an emotional response to an intense event that threatens or causes harm. It’s often the result of an overwhelming amount of stress that exceeds one's ability to cope with or accept the emotions involved with that experience.
HOW DOES TRAUMA AFFECT US?
To quote Dr.John Delony, “Trauma is an event that overwhelms the central nervous system.”
New neuro science tells us trauma leaves an impression on the brain.
We call it “NEURO SCARING”
BIG T & LITTLE T
We’ve learned about the 2 types of trauma MH professionals call BIG T + LITTLE T TRAUMA.
Big T or Acute Trauma is when a person experiences a tragic event, illness, injury or disability, death of a loved one, rape, sexual abuse, etc... Obvious big events.
But sometimes we don’t consider other experiences or events our kids go through to be a trauma to us, but it’s a trauma to them!
Since we often associate trauma with big events, we don’t consider other painful events that mental health professionals call Little T’s.
Little T Trauma, which is Cumulative Trauma, isn’t often considered or obvious as Big T Trauma. Some examples are constant verbal abuse, negative narratives that are constant in the home or from an outside environment, bulling (including cyber), even moving a lot or change of schools/churches, a pet dying, or even neglect. Not to mention the stresses from the world like our recent pandemic.
Dr. Delony also says, “Trauma is not always re-living the event but, our body sets off alerts in the present that anchors to the things of the past.”
“Our body responds to a past situation as though it was happening in the present.”
“Re-experiencing the present not as a story but a body reaction.”
Displaying emotions and behavior like; fear, anxiety, anger, depression, thoughts of worthless, even isolation to name a few.
Over time those traumas cumulate and contribute to an unhealthy life and mindset you may be seeing in your child today because they’re not able to cope or reason.
What traumatizes a child, may not be traumatizes to an adult - this doesn’t mean it’s not damaging to them emotionally!
Children don’t know how to emotionally resolve all situations yet, they’re children!
When a child experiences a challenge or painful situation for the first time it may disturb the way they view life in the future because they don’t have any point of reference otherwise. As adults, we have life experience to know difficult situations can be worked out along with people in our lives to walk us through it. And, if we are a person of faith, we turn to God for help to get us through. But young immature minds don’t have that ability or understanding to deal with conflict or even know to ask you, mom and dad, for help. And having faith and praying to God hasn’t been established in their lives yet, so they are left with a new way to cope. An unhealthy way. So, they begin to cumulate these unresolved emotions that professionals call “Little T Traumas”.
For us, we learned the hard way, and too late with Bella. For years we didn’t understand how
the deep scars of being bullied affected her behavior and relationships with us as a family and
everyone else in her life. After years of her going to therapy, Jerry and I also took time to
learn how to be parents to a hurting traumatized child and educate ourselves about the MH
issues she was battling. We finally were able to put ourselves in her shoes during our last days
together and considered some of the painful hurts that wrecked havoc in her emotional health.
We had to make a change and parent her with extra tenderness, kindness and lots of grace
which helped us help her to change the care process.