When Trauma is Right in Front of You and You Don't See It.
What is trauma?
Trauma is an emotional or physical response to an event or a set of circumstances that is deeply upsetting. It makes a person feel helpless, frightened, and overwhelmed, leaving lasting negative effects on their mental and physical well-being. (American Psychological Association)
It isn’t too difficult to look up a definition of trauma, or to find symptoms listed online.
You can easily look up the different types of trauma.
However, when you encounter someone who has been deeply hurt and displays signs of trauma, it isn’t always so easy to put the label on what is being witnessed.
There’s a woman at church whose eyes are constantly shifting around.
She can’t hold still during conversations and zones out occasionally, missing parts of conversations or repeating what had been said before.
Sometimes she just stands there awkwardly in silence.
She rarely accepts invitations to come over for coffee, and even when she does, she will back out at the last minute with a flimsy excuse.
This isn’t a woman suffering from a disorder like ADHD.
This is a woman who has had to live life constantly on edge, always on alert. Fight or Flight has been her life, maybe for years and her body and mind have been trained to behave this way.
She’s constantly checking her surroundings, making sure she says the right thing, looks the right way, rethinking what she has said and making sure she didn’t say anything that might be taken the wrong way.
It is exhausting to be in social settings.
The child that lives a block over. He’s 10 and still wets his pants sometimes.
You’ve caught him stealing some small toys from your kids playroom and hiding them in his pockets.
His clothes never fit him right, they’re always so baggy. He has layers on in the middle of the hot summer or refuses to take off his coat when he comes indoors in the winter.
He tends to look dirty and smells, like he only showers once a week. You think his parents are lazy or selfish, ignoring him.
You wonder if his parents are neglectful. They’re not.
That little boy had been abused by a loved one for many years.
His layers are his armor.
His compulsion to take toys is his way of holding something when everything has been taken from him.
He is terrified to go into the bathroom because that is where the abuse usually happened.
Your friend's Mom. She visits the new Moms from church, always bringing a meal.
She will be the first to have a sympathy card in the mailbox of a grieving member of the congregation. She sends a birthday note to all the members of the congregation on their special day.
She is usually quite nice, but when her husband is around, she is really short tempered.
She snaps at him over the smallest criticism that he makes. Some of her kids even say she has a really bad attitude and has no patience for her husband.
She has become a bit of a hoarder. She struggles to decide if something is important enough to keep and just keeps it all.
This woman isn’t angry.
She doesn't have a bad attitude.
She is constantly criticized and put down by her husband at home. The house is never clean enough. The one particular shirt he wants to wear is in the wash and he won’t wear a different one. No matter what meal she makes, it isn't what he wants. He says she spends too much on groceries, but is angry that she never has enough food in the house for him.
He knows her limits and pushes her to that limit before they go out in public. When there are others around, he’ll make a light criticism of a hair she has out of place, or a shoe that is untied, or something so small, so insignificant to us, but it pushes her beyond her limit.
She is exhausted and emotional, and she responds in kind.
Your roommate in College. She is so nice, but she’s a lot to handle.
Anytime you make plans to go out, she has to ask over and over who will be there.
She has a secret stash of alcohol under her bed. She’ll start drinking before you even leave the dorm if there will be guys at the get together.
When your boyfriend and his friends are around, she is so flirty and dresses really provocatively. Around the other girls in the dorm though, she’s hilarious and loud and pushes the boundaries — wanting to sneak out, or try to buy beer from the local store even though you're all underage.
She only sleeps a few hours each night and drinks Monsters and coffee mixed with alcohol to get through the day.
This girl isn’t attention seeking.
She was raped when she was in high school while at a sleepover at a friends house.
She can’t sleep or she dreams of her abuse. She drinks to numb the pain and guilt. She flirts and dresses that way because there is nothing about her that is sacred anymore. Her modesty, her body has been taken from her.
She's trying to appear normal when inside she feels everything but normal.
Traumatic responses don’t fit into a definition.
Each and every victim has a different personality, a different upbringing, a different psychology and each and every one will respond to trauma differently.
We are prone to making assumptions and judgements of behavior because we don’t recognize symptoms of trauma.
Most times, there are deep questions that need to be asked.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
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