I was reading an article about a study of the impact of wartime stressors on Ukrainian adolescents, looking at impacts like depression and suicidality. It is interesting because the testing measured across two phases of the Russian invasion, with the more exposure to war indicative of a large spike in negative mental health outcomes. It is unsurprising, but it also noted negative mental health outcomes from relatively low exposure to trauma.
It is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but I wonder what constitutes trauma in a world where people are highly sensitive to their emotional state, and physically reactive. Could the conditions required to evoke a trauma response be lessened?
Trauma is an overwhelming experience involving actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence that shatters a person's sense of safety, overwhelming their coping mechanisms and leading to lasting emotional, mental, and physical distress. It can stem from single events (accidents, attacks, disasters) or ongoing situations (abuse, neglect, war) and is defined not just by the event itself, but by the individual's intense reaction and subsequent impaired functioning, often involving shock, helplessness, and difficulty integrating the experience.
That was from a search, but there are two things that I would highlight from it at this point,
involving actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence
A lot of the trauma people mention today, doesn't fit into those categories, but that doesn't mean it doesn't qualify as trauma. This is because we have largely conflated actual threats to our safety and threats to our ego. We can experience similar fears responses, even when we aren't actually in any danger at all. And for most of us who have never been in a warzone, faced serious injury, or sexually assaulted, low-level fear can seem traumatic, because we don't know what high-level feels like.
and is defined not just by the event itself, but by the individual's intense reaction and subsequent impaired functioning, often involving shock, helplessness, and difficulty integrating the experience.
And this is the next part I will highlight, as it is connected. It isn't the event faced, the warzone, the assault, the near-death experience, it is our response to it. And if we have lived a relatively safe and secure life, when there are small events that scare us, they feel much larger, molehills into mountains. And these relatively small events can trigger the various trauma responses, even though under a different set of experience, the same events wouldn't be traumatic at all.
Despite globalisation, the experiences of children around the world are highly varied, with many facing actual existential threat often. And even in countries that are considered wealthy and stable, the experiences of individual adolescents varies widely also. However, if we are looking at relatively stable, healthy situations, it means that the children haven't likely faced very much trauma in their lives, and that means that they become more sensitive to possibilities of trauma. Those who face a lot of trauma and survive, can become desensitized to the conditions, which can be traumatic in itself.
The source of trauma can take many forms, and I try to be understanding with people who talk about the trauma in their lives. Yet, I am also aware that if we are set too sensitively, like a floodlight with a motion sensor, we are going to be triggered by everything. We become hyper reactive to any negative emotion we feel and we get the; "intense reaction and subsequent impaired functioning, often involving shock, helplessness, and difficulty integrating the experience." - which is just not a healthy way to live.
A client of mine was a peacekeeper in Kosovo back in the day and despite being older now, he looks like he can handle himself. So I asked him if he ever get scared when out in a bar. His answer was a definitive "no" with a smile. But he added, that he knows that he can take pretty much anyone, and those he might struggle with, he knows before he would even attempt it. But, they can see it in him too. He is trained to deal with stressful, traumatic experiences and he has been battletested to harden him further. He said he still sees traumatic things that affect him to this day, but he can handle his emotional state.
Many can't.
And while no person let alone children should have to deal with war, the thing is that life becomes a warzone when we aren't trained to deal with what we are going to experience. If we don't build those fundamental skills when young, when we face the challenges of an adult, we are going to breakdown, because it is going to be traumatic. Remember, it is not the event, it is the reaction to the event.
I believe that we have taken some wrong directions in how we raise children today, as they are failing to experience the events to teach them resilience and emotional self-sufficiency. Yet they are also exposed to a lot of unreal experience that convinces them they understand the situations of reality, with violence and sexual content. They think they know how to act and react, but when reality hits, they are traumatised instead. It has set them up to be highly affected by conditions them to find basic situations stressful, causing anxiety and emotional and mental helplessness.
There are a lot of broken adolescents.
And they will turn into broken adults. Traumatised by pasts that were relatively good and stable, with few actual risks that threatened life or limb. But now, kids are beating and killing each other because of social media drama. They are raping each other because they are so entitled and believe they should have all their desires met, with desires driven by fantasy content. They are intentionally making each other feel unsafe.
They are traumatising themselves.
And making themselves victims.
Taraz
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