Have You Experienced Trauma?

Not everyone I work with at Orchid Story has experienced trauma. Women usually fall into one of two categories: 1. They feel like they have “lost themselves” or 2. They have been through a traumatic experience. But what is a traumatic experience?

Definition of traumatic experience

My definition of a traumatic experience is an event that shakes you to your core. It makes you question everything. You wonder if what you previously believed was true or real. It’s like putting on a pair of glasses that make you see the world differently.

A traumatic event can make it hard to cope and function. We often think that, to be considered traumatic, the event must fit into a certain category, but I’ve learned that people can have traumatic experiences outside of the classic examples. What are those classic examples of experiences that can be traumatic (noting that they are not traumatic for everyone who goes through them)?

Combat war
Natural disaster
Car accident
Rape
Childhood abuse and neglect
Domestic violence
Imprisonment
Terrorism

What else can trauma look like? Let’s consider here, all the research that has been done on Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACEs. ACEs occur between the ages of 0-17.

Five ACEs are personal: physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect.
Five are related to other family members: a parent who’s an alcoholic, a mother who’s a victim of domestic violence, a family member in jail, a family member diagnosed with a mental illness, and experiencing divorce of parents.

Each ACE counts as one. So if you had a parent who was an alcoholic and your parents divorced when you were a young person, your ACE score would be two. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente conducted a big study in the 90’s of more than 17,000 people. Two thirds of people had an ACE score of at least one — 87 percent of those folks had more than one. The results of the study (and many studies since then) showed a link between childhood trauma and chronic diseases, like heart disease, cancer and diabetes that people develop as adults.

Generally speaking, the greater the number of ACEs, the greater the risk of a negative outcome. The negative outcomes are many and they include mental health, specifically anxiety, depression, suicide and PTSD. ACEs have also been found to impact a person’s ability to obtain an education, find a job, and make a living. It’s important to bring justice and equity into this conversation of ACEs - certain communities are more likely to experiences ACEs including those with high rates of violence, poverty and high unemployment rates.

If you want to learn more and calculate your own ACE score, click here to visit an excellent resource, ACES Too High.

The research into ACEs has allowed us to see how common it is to experience trauma. Other types of traumatic experiences may occur over time and can have a cumulative effect. Things like exposure to racism or other forms of hate, homelessness, the justice system, medical trauma from surgery, hospitalization or chronic illness, a break up or divorce, a partner or child with addiction, bullying or emotionally abusive adult friendships; all of these can be traumatic experiences.

So, if you wonder whether that thing you went through “qualifies” as trauma, you can ask yourself these questions:

Did the experience affect your ability to function in your typical activities (work, family, home life, etc)?
Does the world look and feel different to you following the experience, like you are seeing everything through a new pair of glasses?
What is your ACE score?
What does it feel like to me when I ask myself the question: Was this trauma? If your body says yes, then you have your answer.

Perhaps the most important point of all: You get to be the judge of whether an experience was traumatic or not.