How I Wish Trauma Had Been Explained to Me

When people collapse, they usually slide into one of three feeling states: a muddle (they are confused), a wallow (they feel no one adequately sympathizes with their travail), or a pit (an emotional replay of an old wounding, often an uncorrected and unaccounted-for injustice done to them when they themselves were children).

Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on—unchanged and immutable—as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.

Talking about painful events doesn’t necessarily establish community—often quite the contrary. Families and organizations may reject members who air the dirty laundry; friends and family can lose patience with people who get stuck in their grief or hurt. This is one reason why trauma victims often withdraw and why their stories become rote narrativ

Shock trauma is the effect of a relatively brief and sudden event like an assault or a drug overdose. Developmental trauma results when exposure occurs over a longer period of time. Eventually, the tissues around the interoceptive receptor sites may become physically threatened, at which point the person begins to feel pain.