What is Trauma?

[Music] hi everybody my name is dr scott jakumuchi i'm the director and founder of the phoenix center for experiential trauma therapy in media pennsylvania i'm board certified in clinical social work in sociometry psychodrama and group psychotherapy and my specialty is in trauma and traumatic stress i'm really excited that you found this video and i hope that you do find it helpful in your work so in this video we're going to be talking about trauma what is trauma so trauma is simply an emotional response to a distressful disturbing and overwhelming experience trauma is really a subjective experience in that two people could experience the same event the same disturbing event and they would have different responses to it one person might have a traumatic response while the other person doesn't actually only one out of four adults develop post-traumatic stress from a traumatic experience while at the same time one out of two children who experience a traumatic experience develop traumatic stress response so trauma really exists on a continuum it's a word that is becoming more and more popular in our culture more and more popular in clinical spaces it used to be reserved specifically for military veterans and that's where the the history of the diagnosis ptsd can be traced back to it actually wasn't until 1980 about 40 years ago that ptsd was recognized as a diagnosis and ever since then uh our acceptance of trauma and its pervasive impacts within our society is becoming more and more accepted so trauma exists on a continuum i like to think of the difference between capital t and lowercase t traumatic experiences one way to think about it capital t traumas would refer to traumatic experiences that most people would look at and say hey that sounds like or that looks like that feels like it would be a trauma things like rape things like war things like violence however at the same time there's also lower case t traumatic experiences these are the types of events that not everyone might categorize as traumatic things that certainly have the potential of causing traumatic stress and impacting people throughout their life but sometimes go unnoticed unidentified as traumatic a simple example is a prolonged and reoccurring experience of bullying as a child this is something that we may or may not label as traumatic however when we look at how it impacts one's sense of self one's sense of trust in relationships one's beliefs about the world one's arousal and reactivity in their nervous system their avoidance or dissociation certainly has the potential of developing into ptsd symptoms so lowercase t traumas certainly can lead to ptsd in my work i like to use a really inclusive definition of trauma and that definition includes neglect it includes abandonment and it includes more complicated and traumatic types of loss i think in the field and in society unfortunately we often neglect to consider how harmful neglect and abandonment are it's less easy to identify as active traumas where there's clearly an event that was traumatic whereas neglect and abandonment are the absence the lack of having needs met emotionally or physically or socially in my experience as a trauma therapist as a clinician neglect and abandonment sometimes are even more difficult to heal from than active traumas so i like to include them in my definition of trauma trauma the word trauma actually can be traced back to the greek language and it means wound so one thing i've been thinking about recently is how in the medical field when we talk about trauma we're talking about the actual wound the physical wound whereas in the social sciences and in pop culture when we talk about trauma we're usually using that word to describe the experience out in the world so i think it it is helpful to to reconsider how we're using the term trauma and to use it in really specific ways there's many different types of trauma there's single incident trauma there's complex trauma recurring trauma shock trauma there's relational trauma trauma that takes place within the context of relationships there's a thing called collective trauma which is why an entire group of people experience a traumatic experience simply based on their group identity based on their collective identity or experience of course there's racial trauma there's financial trauma even ancestral trauma so there are a lot of different categories and different types of trauma it's important also to consider that our experience of trauma is situated within culture within the belief systems and the ways that we make sense of the world so i think this is one of the reasons why two people might experience the same event and one of them might experience it as a traumatic event whereas someone else might not experience it as a traumatic event the way that we perceive the world the way that we make sense of the world the way that we integrate and process our experiences is significantly related to our cultural background our religious background our racial background our all the different belief systems that we hold and that we use to interface with the world so whenever we're working with trauma it's also important to consider cultural factors another thing that comes with working with trauma is that many people don't want to talk about their trauma it's hard to talk about it's painful some of the neuroscience research even shows that when someone is asked to remember a traumatic experience the left hemisphere of their brain which has to do generally speaking has more to do with rational thought with language and speech decision making the left hemisphere the brain is mostly offline whereas the right hemisphere the brain is overactive this includes the brocas area in the left hemisphere of the brain which has to do with speech and language so when we ask someone to remember or to talk about a traumatic experience there's less activity in the speech and language part of the brain which kind of supports what we already know and see and feel that it's difficult to talk about trauma sometimes we don't have the words to express our experience or our feelings about trauma these findings really challenge us in the in the trauma therapy field to consider some alternatives to talk therapy to bring the body into treatment to consider the importance of relationships and healing to not only focus on talking or thinking or cognition but to really offer more holistic approaches so while some clients might not be willing to talk about their trauma others may have experienced distressing experiences and they simply don't label them as trauma and some clients might not remember the traumatic experiences that they've had in their life it's actually quite common for traumatic experiences to be suppressed for someone to have no conscious recollection of a traumatic experience this is especially common when traumatic the traumatic experience takes place in the first few years of life the part of the brain that holds and stores memory called the hippocampus it doesn't actually fully develop until someone's two or three years old so for someone that's experienced trauma before they were two or three they're probably not going to have any memory of it similarly when we experience trauma that's overwhelming the the stress hormone cortisol has the potential of impacting our hippocampus's ability to store memories when we're overly stressed this includes when we're experiencing overwhelming traumatic stress so there are cases pretty common where someone doesn't remember a trauma that they experienced or they remember bits and pieces of it but they can't remember the entire memory it's quite common for traumatic memories to be very fragmented and incoherent for them to feel very fuzzy and for traumatic memories to surface at different points in someone's life they might not remember a traumatic experience right now but later on once they feel safer in their life and safer in their relationships and safer in their therapeutic relationship dramatic memories might start to resurface they might start to remember things that were previously forgotten so when we're working with trauma it's it's important to take all of this into consideration um if you're interested in learning more about how to work with trauma specifically i encourage you to check out some of the other videos on my youtube channel here [Music]

Channel: Phoenix Trauma Center & Dr Scott Giacomucci

Views: 7,689

Keywords: trauma, traumatic, ptsd, traumatic stress, traumatic experience

Id: R4Js6VTu9yw

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021