Trauma – small-t

“The traumas of everyday life can easily make us feel like a motherless child – Mark Epstein”

These are the events that happen throughout our lives, and yet we pay little or no heed to them. The world in general considers them as normal or non-traumatic events, and we are forced to swallow them as part of learning, growing up or maturing.

In his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van der Kolk brings forth a multitude of instances where the adult is suffering some physical ailment which is deep-seated in one or many of these small t traumas that they had to endure in their childhood.  Our very birth is a semi-trauma if the baby doesn’t feel welcome. The infant is like a sponge and perceives, receives and stores all the reactions or responses the caregiver shares with the newborn.

The way the infant receives these responses defines the way the life of the infant begins to take shape. Adverse childhood experiences leave a deep-seated impact on the child. Gabor Mate says that the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) multiply with each other, and the risk increases exponentially. Even the good things that should have happened in a child’s life, like being seen, heard, fed, loved, and being deprived or remaining devoid of these events, are all accounted for as the small-t traumas. These seemingly ignorable events, or events considered as ‘normal’, leave a profound impact on the person. And these normal happenings, or non-happenings, are killing us.

These normal events leave no visible physical scar, so they are overlooked. The emotional scars they leave result in addictive self-preservative behaviours in our adulthood. Trauma is not what happened to us; trauma is what the body, mind and spirit experience and store as a result of the event(s) that happened to us.

Gabor focuses on the small-t traumas in his book, The Myth of Normal, and shares profound insights to help us understand and pay heed to these long-forgotten events that are embedded in our subconscious mind and are adversely influencing our conscious everyday life.