The Impact of Trauma
Trauma. It’s a word that carries a lot of emotional weight. What qualifies as trauma? How do you know if you have experienced trauma? What if you say something is traumatic and someone disagrees with you?
Trauma, if you use the power of Google, is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. Again, what does that mean to you as an individual? Trauma is an individualized experience. What you may define as traumatic, another person may not. And that’s okay. What is deeply distressing or disturbing to you is how I view trauma. Traumatic experiences can include childhood abuse, being the child of an alcoholic or other substance user, a car accident, a school shooting, a miscarriage, relationship violence, losing a loved one, seeing a loved one injured, bullying. The list could go on and on.
What I would like to do is differentiate trauma to some extent though. We often refer to individual traumas as a “Big T” trauma or a “little t” trauma. Again, this is largely based on individual experiences. While one person may define a car accident as a “little t”, someone else may define it as a “Big T” based on how distressed or disturbed they were by the experience. “Big T” traumas are highly distressing or disturbing while “little t” traumas are distressing or disturbing to a lesser degree.
There is evidence that Adverse Childhood Experiences (which can be defined by an individual as traumatic), impact the development of our brain and influence our physical and mental health later in life. Those Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), which occur before the age of 18, include physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, a family member who is depressed or diagnosed with another mental health condition, a family member who is addicted to alcohol or another substance, a family member who is in prison, witnessing a caregiver being abused, losing a parent to separation, divorce, or death. I’ll step aside for a second and let my brain crush, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, former (and first) Surgeon General of California, speak to this. You watched it? Good. Now we can continue our discussion with all of that knowledge in our brains. All of this data was collected in a study conducted by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente in the mid to late 90s. Feel free to explore Dr. Burke’s website to enrich yourself further.
What’s my ACE - 6. With that, you could expect that my likelihood of repeating a grade was higher than that of my peers, that I’m 7.4x as likely to abuse alcohol or 12.2x as likely to attempt suicide. Keep in mind that is multiplication not percentages. I’m not 7.4% more likely, I’m 7.4x (or 740%) as likely. Why don’t I fall into these categories? Protective factors such as a support network, access to mental health care and physical health care. Largely due to my own white privilege.
And what is astonishing to me is that 50% of these ACEs are acquired/experienced by the age of 3. Yet, when I worked with foster youth, I saw so many foster and adoptive parents who wanted babies and kids under 5 because they assume the child has been through less trauma or that trauma has not impacted them the same as older youth. It is incredibly difficult to place a teen in foster care into a home as there are not as many people willing to work with teens. Yet, if 50% of those ACEs are acquired by age 3, why do we assume that trauma is not impactful to our littlest humans? Just because a child does not have verbal memories of a trauma does not mean they lack nonverbal memories. It does not mean that they don’t see monsters who go bump in the night, have nightmares, experience somatic symptoms or that they are less at risk of being 12.2x as likely to attempt suicide. Our littlest humans experience trauma fully, and they don’t have the words to talk about it. This, by no means, implies that they don’t have some kind of memory of the trauma.
Those nonverbal memories are a reason why play therapy is such an important part of therapy with our children. Play is quite literally the language of children and their use of toys are their words. We may assume that a young child is fine, but what if we chose to intervene when they are young? Could we negate some of the impact of the ACEs? I strongly believe we could.
RESOURCES
The National Child Traumatic Stress Network
Ride Sharing Sexual Assault Safety
