Understanding Trauma and Free Trauma Recovery Group
What is Trauma? By Loretta Grieve, LSW Traumatic events are events that cause or threaten to cause physical, emotional, and psychological harm. They include rape, child abuse, battering, and other threats to one’s life and/or physical or emotional integrity. They may also include natural disasters, accidents, death, loss, injury, illness, crime, domestic terrorism, or wartime experiences. Traumatic events overwhelm a person’s coping capacities and result in feeling out of control and experiencing intense fear and helplessness. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner which undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far
