Trauma and Trauma Psychobiology

Trauma is an experience, series of experiences, and impacts from social conditions that break or betray our inherent need for safety, belonging, and dignity (Haines, 2019). There are four main types of trauma:

Shocking Adversities Trauma

These could include a single-incident trauma such as abuse, assault, injury, disaster, or massive loss. Shocking adversities may also be vicarious.

Relational-Developmental Trauma

These are also known as ACEs burden and occurs because of enduring circumstances such as emotional neglect, failures in human connection and attachment, and intergenerational trauma.

Trauma of Oppression

This type of trauma is commonly experienced by racialized and marginalized populations and those with intergenerational, multigenerational, and historical trauma.

Complex Trauma

When relational-developmental, trauma of oppression, or shocking adversities trauma occur simultaneously or in accumulating experiences.

The trauma experience overwhelms the person to the degree that there is no cohesive, coherent, first-person sense of the experience i.e., of “this is what happened to me.” The client’s integrative capacity was exceeded in the overwhelming moment(s) and the experience thus remains unintegrated in the present.

Fragments of information about the overwhelming experience are scattered in the body and mind, unattached to any linear narrative of the event. Confrontation with charged implicit memory fragments via environmental stimuli or by requests to remember and recount the trauma as a narrative often result in overwhelm, autonomic nervous system dysregulation, and dissociation.

A simple way to describe this to clients is that trauma is ‘too much, too fast, too soon.’

Video: Peter Levine's Secret to Releasing Trauma from the Body

6:08

A psychobiologically-informed perspective on trauma sees trauma not as an event but as the nervous system’s response to the overwhelming event which influences thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. Therefore, working with the body to heal trauma is essential. In this video, trauma expert Peter Levine demonstrates working with the body to heal trauma.

Justice, Equity, Dignity, and Inclusion

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is only one way that trauma symptoms can present, as described in the DSM-V.

Video: Is Everyone Traumatized?

2:56

Many people who would be recognized as “traumatized” in a clinical setting may not cross-sectionally meet the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis, especially clients with intergenerational, multigenerational, racial, historical or collective trauma. Watch this brief video for Gabor Maté’s perspective on trauma outside of the classic PTSD diagnosis.

Differences in defensive responses reflecting relational power differentials—particularly by gender—such as the “tend and befriend” and “fawning” response are often also ignored in conventional conceptualizations of PTSD (Taylor, 2006; Taylor et al., 2000). Informally, the terms “trauma history” and “complex trauma” or “C-PTSD” are used to capture the experience and presentation of traumatized people for whom the PTSD diagnosis is inapplicable or too limited.

An Ongoing Legacy

To ensure trauma-informed and culturally safe care, it is critically important practitioners have a fulsome understanding of how intergenerational, multigenerational, and historic trauma may impact the daily lives of Indigenous families with Indian Residential School or Boarding School Survivors.

— Dr. Lindsay Farrell (2022).

Activity

What are the symptoms related to trauma that you’ve seen in your therapy practice? Consider trauma-related phenomena beyond the PTSD definition. Post your video or text response on Flip. When you have posted your response, select the button below to see some further examples.

Inflexibility in patterns of perception and behaviour
Difficulty with personal boundaries (negotiation of proximity/distance, needs, autonomy/support, and power/authority), particularly in intimate relationships
Frequent—and often dissociative—defensiveness (aggression, withdrawal, passivity, fawning)
Unstable, negative, or absent self-concept and lack of a consistent core sense of self and personal identity
Re-enactments, or trauma repetition
Comorbidity (comorbidity is the rule, not the exception, in PTSD):
- Health consequences (increased allostatic load leading to chemical imbalances, initiation and acceleration of certain disease processes, and even alteration of brain structures) resulting in complex health problems across the life span, with frequent acute and life-limiting chronic illnesses present
- Diagnoses of multiple mental disorders
High rates of problematic substance use
Self-Harm
Suicidality
Brief psychotic episodes
Dyssomnias, persistent sleep disturbances, poor quality of sleep
Amnestic episodes
Distorted experiences of time
Somatization
Sensory integration difficulties
Sexual problems
Impaired problem-solving ability
Distress intolerance, low frustration threshold
Panic, persistent anxiety, catastrophizing
Impulsivity or indecision
Excessive paranoia/distrust OR excessive credulity/over-trusting
Excessive risk seeking or risk aversion
Relationship problems (inability to connect and stay OR fusion and staying when being hurt)
Chronic shame and self-loathing; self-blaming explanations OR personal grandiosity, contempt for others, lack of empathy, and refusal of personal accountability
Poor health choices and/or self-neglect
Developmental interruption/delay

References

Haines, S. (2019). The politics of trauma: somatics, healing, and social justice. North Atlantic Books.

Taylor, S. (2006). Tend and Befriend: Biobehavioral Bases of Affiliation Under Stress. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(6). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2006.00451.x

Taylor, S. E., Klein, L. C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107(3), 411–429. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.107.3.411