What is trauma and why is it such a triggering topic?
Trauma. A simple word, and yet one of the most triggering ones. When I tell people that I work as a trauma therapist and also take trauma therapy myself, I get very different reactions. It ranges from pure interest and curiosity for the subject to defensiveness and fear, by people blocking or changing the conversation.
But what is trauma actually and what does it mean to be traumatised? Well, usually people associate trauma with major incidents, such as an accident, war, natural catastrophes and sexual abuse. But trauma is much more beyond that. In Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Theory (IoPT) we speak about psychotrauma. We get traumatised, when we experience something which is too much for our psyche to process. It feels life-threatening and we have no control over what happens to us. In order for us to survive, our psyche splits into three different parts: the traumatised parts, trauma-survival parts and healthy parts. (1)
So trauma is not only when we received something that wasn’t good for us (for example experiencing physical & psychological abuse), but also when we didn’t receive what we needed. Some examples are when we as children experience that our parents are not really interested in us, when we feel not seen, loved and supported. It is important to understand that trauma is subjective, which means that what happens to be traumatising for me doesn’t need to be traumatising for you. It depends on the development of our own psyche. Babys, infants and children get much easier traumatised than adults, because we have so little internal resources avaible at this young age.
There is a lot of trauma which is currently very little or not at all addressed by society. This includes some of the following examples:
Abortion/Miscarriage
A woman gets unwantedly pregnant, and even though she keeps the baby and starts loving the baby, the initial contact the baby made with its mother in the womb is unwelcoming
The parents want a boy, but they get a girl. One of the initial feelings the child is in contact with in the womb is “being wrong”.
The child grows up in a beautiful home, and is spoiled with toys and presents. But the parents are busy working and instead of them being there for their child, they hire a nanny.
Having a child vs. being a mom and dad. It is essential for a child to grow up in a warm, welcoming home, where it feels loved and seen by its parents. So there is a big difference between having a child and being a mom and dad.
Many parents want a child, but they have a specific idea of how the child should & shouldn’t be like, look like, behave etc. The child can never really be itself and make autonomous choices.
With the above examples I wanted to highlight that there is so much that can cause trauma than what is commonly known. As you can see, trauma starts early in life and we can already get traumatised in the womb of our mothers (2). A lot of this trauma lies in our subconsciousness, so we remember nothing or very little.
So why is this subject so triggering? Because trauma starts with our parents, precisely with our mothers. Being directly connected to our mother for about nine months in the womb makes her to our first world, through which feel and get connected to the outer world. (3) Not only does it impact us what she eats and does during this time, but especially what she feels and thinks, both on a conscious and subconscious level.
We naturally want to protect our parents and acknowledging that we have (early) childhood trauma is not very easy for many people. And don’t get me wrong, this is not about blaming our parents or any other caretaker. It is simply to show how trauma develops. Many of our parents were not capable of loving and seeing us in the way we needed it, because they did not experience this level of care in their own childhood. It is important to understand this and yet not to use it as an excuse. In IoPT we work with our identity, i.e. what happened to me? The focus is on us and not on our parents. It is easy to find explanations of why we didn’t get what we needed compared to facing and feeling that we didn’t get what we needed.
Healing is feeling. It is an individual process in our own pace. It is challenging and yet extremely beautiful. During our lives, we use a lot of energy to suppress these heavy feelings. They get buried in our subconsciousness and eventually come back as symptoms and diseases. We get depressed, burned out and sick. When we start to come in contact with these suppressed feelings and we integrate them, we also release an enormous amount of energy. Energy, which we now have avaible for living, because we no longer need to use it to keep our feelings shut down in Pandora’s box.
Thank you for reading so far and your interest in the subject. If you want to learn more about trauma and our psyche I highly recommend the books of Prof Dr Franz Ruppert, who is also the founder of IoPT.
Much love
Julia
References:
(1) Ruppert, F. (2019). Kjærlighet, lyst og traume
(2) Ruppert, F. (2014). Barndomstraumer
(3) Ruppert, F. (2021). Jeg vil leve, elske og bli elsket