What makes an event (or series of events) mentally traumatic? What is the effect on the person that makes this a trauma, instead of just another event?
We use the term trauma to refer to events and the effects of those events on persons when the effect is some sort of harm. For the purposes of this essay, I am going to focus only on mental trauma. It is quite common for mental trauma to co-occur with a physical trauma and certainly physical events are mentally traumatic, but I am not expert with addressing issues of physical trauma so I will limit myself to the mental intra-psychic realm.
Trauma is a disruption of normal functioning that has lasting effects on the capacity of the person to function optimally. For that reason it may help to begin by looking at some aspects of normal functioning.
All events have both an interior and an exterior. What appears to us from the outside may be very different from what shows up on the inside. When we go inside to the interior of our experience we find a rich and varied world that has all of the complexity and wonder of the exterior world. We have far more social support for attending to matters in the exterior world of shared experience so we are likely to be less familiar with the interior domains of our consciousness.
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