Traumatic experiences are overwhelming, they invoke intense negative affect and they involve some degree of loss of control or vulnerability. These experiences are subjective and they are developmentally bound. What I mean is that no two people are going to define trauma in the same way or going to experience a single event in the same way. What might be traumatic for one person may not be experienced as traumatic by the next person.
Of course there's some kinds of experiences that would likely be traumatic for most anyone, But there really is a huge degree of subjectivity around traumatic experience. When we talk about being developmentally bound, we are referring to the fact that younger people, littler people, are more vulnerable to experiencing life experiences, life events as traumatic. They're less skilled. They have less capacity. Their brains are less developed. And so we know that children and even adolescents are more vulnerable to being affected by trauma. They're more vulnerable to developing trauma based disorders than adults.
Historically, when we've talked about trauma, people have referenced car accidents, combat, single episode traumas. For the longest time that was the perception of what trauma involved. Over the course of decades, we have arrived at a very different understanding with regard to trauma. That often trauma doesn't involve a single incident. It involves multiple experiences over time. It involves prolonged repeated exposure to adverse life experiences.
Often embedded in that are single episode traumas that are extreme, that are even life threatening. But it is that whole big picture that equals complex trauma. It's the experience of what happened and the experience of what didn't happen. It's the lack of protection, lack of safety, lack of accompaniment in life paired with some really bad things that have happened over the course of time.