What is emotional and psychological trauma? 
Adapted from HealingResources.info 

Emotional and psychological trauma is the result of extraordinarily stressful events that shatter your sense of security, making you feel helpless and vulnerable in a dangerous world. 

Traumatic experiences often involve a threat to life or safety, but any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and alone can be traumatic, even if it doesn’t involve physical harm. It’s not the objective facts that determine whether an event is traumatic, but your subjective emotional experience of the event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized. 

A stressful event is most likely to be traumatic if: 

• It happened unexpectedly.
• You were unprepared for it.
• You felt powerless to prevent it. 
• It happened repeatedly. 
• Someone was intentionally cruel. 
• It happened in childhood. 

Emotional and psychological trauma can be caused by single-blow, one-time events, such as a horrible accident, a natural disaster, or a violent attack. Trauma can also stem from ongoing, relentless stress, such as living in a crime-ridden neighborhood or struggling with cancer. 

Commonly overlooked sources of emotional and psychological trauma 

• Falls or sports injuries 
• Surgery (especially in the first 3 years of life) 
• The sudden death of someone close 
• An auto accident 
• The breakup of a significant relationship 
• A humiliating or deeply disappointing experience 
• The discovery of a life-threatening illness or disabling condition 

Trauma is an experience that overwhelms our capacity to regulate our emotions and results in fragmentation and dissociation. 

• Trauma impairs our capacity to regulate our emotions. We feel worried, irritated, anxious, or afraid, consciously or not, and we cannot self-soothe or seek support from others. 

• Trauma creates fragmentation and dissociation. Whether we understand this as an unconscious defense mechanism (e.g., splitting, projection or repression) or as a neurological issue (e.g., thalamus gone offline, hypersensitive amygdala), dissociation is a key trait of trauma.