What is trauma?
In general, trauma is considered to be anything that overwhelms the capacity of your system and its resources at the time the it happens. Trauma is also any event or experience that you find deeply disturbing or distressing.
Examples of what can be considered as trauma:
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Sexual abuse - experiencing it, witnessing it, knowing about it & being unable to do
anything about it -
Physical abuse - experiencing it personally or witnessing
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Psychological abuse, abandonment, neglect
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Being in or witnessing a serious accident
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Sudden unexpected or violent death of someone close
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Serious injury, major surgery or life-threatening illness
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War or political violence
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Natural disasters
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Vicarious trauma for those in helping roles & professions
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This is by no means a complete list, it is given as an idea of the many things that can be traumatizing and change your life and system functioning. If there experience and their impacts & effects are left untreated it can affect your entire life and can, among other things, lead to complex trauma, PTSD, PTSI and a wide variety of health & wellness issues.
What is Developmental trauma?
Developmental trauma in general is about the things that we have experienced during our developmental years have a wide variety of impacts, singularly and compounded. Each thing that was developing at the time time has been affected. Developmental Trauma work looks at where things were paused, to help develop things that never had the opportunity to grow, while repairing and resetting those things, that were habits, patterns & responses imprinted ways that do not serve us now.
Examples of what can be considered developmental trauma are:
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A parent or caregiver having a mental illness
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A parent or caregiver having a substance abuse issue
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Losing a parent or caregiver to divorce, death, abandonment or incarceration
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Witnessing a parent experiencing domestic violence
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Not having primary needs met - food, clothing, shelter
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Personally experiencing any sort of abuse or attachment loss.
Obviously this is not meant to be a complete list, but something to give you an idea.
Please take a moment to just breathe. The content and images on this website, are not meant to be distressing but that doesn't mean your body & nervous system will not experience them as such.
