Mithra Trust
Understanding Trauma
A guide to understanding what trauma is, its impact on the mind and body, symptoms to look out for, and potential triggers.
What is Trauma?
An individual experiences trauma when an incident or event overwhelms their capability to cope, or when they experience an event that is deeply disturbing or violent. Such events include rape, intimate partner violence, domestic abuse, child sexual abuse, abuse of power, persistent discrimination, war, natural disasters, or death.
Physical violence is not the only thing that causes trauma; a person can experience trauma when they are faced with loss of control, emotional abuse, emotional manipulation, neglect, and/or betrayal. These experiences violate the body and mind, and can cause survivors to experience immense pain and suffering. In this resource, we focus on trauma and triggers caused by sexual violence.
Traumatic incidents may happen in a quick moment, or may build up slowly, progressively, and repeatedly, over a period of time.
What does it feel like?
The impact of trauma
Traumatic incidents may not only impact a person’s self-image and confidence, but also their emotional, psychological, and social development. They can hamper an individual’s growth and distort their perception of the world in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish the safe from the unsafe, the real from the unreal.
As a result, they may find it challenging or entirely impossible to navigate and cope with their daily circumstances after the traumatic incident(s). Trauma can hamper daily activities, including work or study, and the ability to form and maintain relationships. It can also deeply impact a person’s sense of safety and self.
Varied responses to trauma
The reaction to a traumatic incident(s) can be as varied as the source of trauma, and depends on a person’s life experiences. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to trauma. It changes with time, circumstance, availability of resources, individual backgrounds, the intensity of the incident(s), and the support systems they have (or do not have) in place.
Experiencing Trauma: in Mind and Body
A real or imagined threat typically activates the body’s fight or flight response in the nervous system. Traumatic incidents push the nervous system outside its ability to regulate itself. For some, the system gets stuck in the ‘on’ position. Such persons can experience overstimulation and be unable to experience calm. Anxiety, anger, restlessness, panic, and hyperactivity, can all be a result of when we stay ‘on’ in this ready-to-react mode. For others, the nervous system gets stuck in the ‘off’ position, resulting in depression, disconnection, fatigue, and lethargy. Many survivors alternate between these two states.
Those who are able to regulate their nervous system experience the danger and return to their baseline when the threat has passed.
