The Given of Trauma

Understanding trauma has been a long road for the mental health profession. On a larger scale, understanding trauma has been a long road for humanity as a whole.

By “trauma” I mean an event that overwhelms our body and mind’s normal response to danger, typically an event that involves feelings of helplessness and terror.

Trauma and its lasting impact are still coming to be better and fully understood, but what we can at least conclude so far is that trauma is “a fact of life”, as trauma expert Peter Levine puts it.

To put it in more existential terms, trauma appears to be an existential given. To exist means to live in a world that involves trauma, either trauma that impacts us through experiencing it directly, or through witnessing it, or through being in relationship with those who have experienced it directly.

As psychiatrist Dr. Judith Herman has written about trauma, “It was once believed that such events were uncommon…Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.”

Long-term research by the CDC has backed up the idea that trauma is more common than we may have initially thought. The CDC reports that potentially traumatic events before the age of 18 (also known as “adverse childhood experiences” or “ACEs” for short) occurred for about 61% of people surveyed across the U.S. Beyond that, nearly 1 in 6 of those surveyed had experienced four or more ACEs.

Other research indicates that the lifetime exposure to potentially traumatic events is closer to 70%.

If this research can be generalized to the U.S. population as a whole, it means that about two out of every three people you see has experienced something potentially traumatic before they were an adult, and closer to three out of every four people has experienced something potentially traumatic at some point in their lives.

Trauma is then paradoxically both extremely common, and yet also beyond the ordinary. To put it another way, the event of something that takes us beyond our ordinary sense of meaning, of ourselves, and of the world is a common occurrence.

How does this shape our sense of the world?

Do we turn away from this fact? Do we pour ourselves into trying to prevent trauma? Or do we pour ourselves into trying to heal the wounds of those already traumatized?

If we see trauma as an existential given, then Existential Psychotherapy would suggest that confrontation with this fact itself creates anxiety for us, anxiety that we then try to defend ourselves against in some way.

It’s my belief that U.S. culture has until recently taken the large-scale defensive tactic of denial and avoidance when it comes to trauma. I believe this is why it took until 1980 for there to even be a diagnosis for the lasting impact of trauma, what we now call “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, or PTSD.

The unfortunate impact of this denial-and-avoidance approach as a larger culture is that it leaves those who have experienced trauma (i.e. most people) isolated and alone in that trauma, without a cultural framework to support, protect, and heal in the wake of trauma.

Instead, traumatic events are followed by a deep sense of isolation from others, which is its own repeating trauma, one that causes the trauma’s impact to linger and prevents the connection to others necessary for healing.

Therapy can offer a place of freedom from judgment, a place of safety to explore honestly the impact of trauma with another person, and so to begin to end the isolation that can come in the wake of trauma.

Traumatic and overwhelming events, though extraordinary in their impact, have been a part of human existence since there has been human existence. The good news being that there are timeless ways to heal in the wake of trauma. When we are not left in isolation with our trauma, we can instead find deep healing, deep meaning, and new strengths as we heal.

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