1.5 Childhood trauma
WHAT IS TRAUMA?
Experts explain that trauma is not an event itself, but rather a response to a stressful experience in which a person’s ability to cope is dramatically undermined. More than 20 years ago, Lenore Terr (1992) defined childhood trauma as the impact of external forces that “[render] the young person temporarily helpless and [break] past ordinary coping and defensive operation. . . .” Terrasi and de Galarce (2017, p. 36) suggest that complex trauma is “the cumulative effect of traumatic experiences that are repeated or prolonged over time”.
Similarly, de Thierry (2017, p. 14) writes, “Trauma is an event or series of events such as abuse, maltreatment, neglect or tragedy that causes a profound experience of helplessness leading to terror”. As discussed earlier, the range of potentially traumatic events in childhood is quite broad, including not only physical threat and harm but also emotional maltreatment, neglect, abandonment, and devastating loss.
Every traumatic experience is different, and each child’s response depends on their coping skills and resources and on the context and circumstances in which the stressful event occurs. Whether a child develops a trauma reaction that increases in severity, becomes chronic, and is less responsive to intervention or has a reaction that is moderate, manageable, and time limited depends on several factors. These include the nature of the experience, the characteristics of the child, and the way the family, school, and community respond. For example, chronic or repetitive traumatic experiences, especially those perpetrated intentionally by a caregiver, are likely to result in a different set of symptoms than a single shocking traumatic event.
DETERMINANTS OF TRAUMA REACTIONS
Trauma results from an event, series of events, or set circumstances that is experienced by individual as physically emotionally harmful life threatening and has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning mental, physical, social, emotional, spiritual wellbeing. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) provide a useful ‘The Three E’ framework to understand how traumatic events impact on individuals (SAMHSA, 2013).
Events: The first ‘E’ of the framework refers to events – this is the circumstances surrounding the actual or extreme threat of physical or psychological harm (i.e., physical violence, natural disasters etc.) or severe, life threatening neglect for a child that imperils healthy development. These events and circumstances may occur as a single occurrence or repeatedly over time.
Experience: The individual’s experience of these events or circumstances helps to determine whether it circumstances helps to determine whether it experienced as traumatic for one individual and not for another (e.g., a child removed from an abusive home experiences this differently than their sibling; one refugee may experience fleeing one’s country differently from another refu