What is Trauma

Trauma challenges our ability to cope. Because children have been around for less time, they have less experience of coping and fewer resources of their own to use to help them. They have less understanding of the whole picture of what has happened. They also have little power to take charge of things and alter them.

Big things and little things can traumatise a child – some of them are ones we wouldn't automatically think of.

So, although trauma in children can be the result of major environmental events like shootings, floods, war and fires, it can also be the result of a dog suddenly jumping at them when no one was there to protect them. Or a medical procedure they were frightened by because they didn't understand or there was no one familiar nearby.

In between come the experiences of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, and the multiple losses they may have to endure when families split up.

It can be traumatic for the child to witness violence to others – some children have seen parents be violent with each other, others have watched violence on television and in their minds or dreams imagined they were part of it.

The thing that defines something as 'traumatic' for a child (and an adult, too, for that matter) is that it is outside what they can cope with. So it gets pushed aside, avoided as too painful, not processed, and therefore liable to be triggered by anything that reminds them of it.

The symptoms of trauma are many: perhaps nightmares, avoiding people or things, flashbacks to parts of the event, regressions to earlier behaviour, bedwetting, aggression, becoming depressed, playing in a 'stuck' way, becoming clingy and fearful, or in the case of older young people, resorting to drugs or alcohol to try and deaden the memory. There are other effects of trauma, but these give a general idea.

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