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The Consequences of Trauma: A Treatise
Nobody escapes this world without trauma.
When I was twenty-eight, I entered treatment and got clean and sober from an advanced addiction to alcohol and cocaine. After coming home, I continued in therapy and while there, bit by bit, revealed various traumatic experiences growing up in an alcoholic home. My father’s bloody self-destructiveness, sneering verbal abuse and offhand physical abuse butchered my self-esteem. Adding to my already outsized shame, when I was seven I was sexually abused. I vowed to never tell anyone. If nobody else knew, what difference did it make? Or so I thought. I carried the over-weighted secret for twenty years and then it spilled out anyway, a burden too onerous to carry anymore.
How does one convey traumatic experiences with a goal of helping others similarly afflicted? Perhaps a starting point is to find an adequate definition. A quick web search produced some ideas: “Complex trauma is exposure to varied and multiple traumatic events, often of an invasive, interpersonal nature.” Complex trauma in children is often referred to as “developmental trauma,” the point being that healthy development is damaged in the formative years. Another definition noted that childhood complex trauma is “pervasive.” An apt adjective that captures how trauma’s insult to…
