Why some experiences hold more influence than you expect
Written by drs. Pauline Bos
Psychologist NIP and educational psychologist, Amsterdam city centre
When people hear the word trauma they think of an accident, violence or war. That exists too. But a large part of what people bring to me does not look like that from the outside at all. And that is exactly why it often takes a long time before someone does something about it.
Two kinds, and why the distinction matters
The literature often distinguishes between what is called big trauma and small trauma. Big trauma is the event anyone would recognise as serious: an accident, a robbery, a medical procedure that went wrong.
Small trauma covers experiences that are not dramatic in themselves, but that repeated or arrived at a vulnerable moment. Years of feeling that you only counted when you performed. A parent who was unpredictable. A teacher who singled you out. Being systematically left out.
The distinction says nothing about the severity of the symptoms. People with only small traumas can get just as stuck as people with one large event. It does say something about treatment, because with repeated experiences we work through several memories in sequence rather than one.
Why you often do not recognise it in yourself
Most people who come in with trauma start by saying it is not that bad really. There are people who have been through far worse, they say, and that is usually true.
But your nervous system does not do comparisons. It reacts to what it could handle at the time. A six year old with an unpredictable parent had no option other than becoming watchful. That it does not look spectacular from the outside changes nothing about what it did on the inside.
There is also the problem of habituation. If something was that way for years, you do not know any different. You only notice that you were tense on the day you were not.
What you can notice instead
- Reactions you find illogical yourself and cannot explain
- Situations you avoid without being able to give a good reason
- Sleep that has not really been good for years
- A body that fires faster than the situation warrants
- Recurring patterns in relationships or at work
- An inner voice harsher than you would ever be to anyone else
And then?
The good news is that treatment does not depend on how bad something was. EMDR works on the charge still attached now, not on the category the event falls into.
What does matter is how stable you are at the moment. With repeated experiences we often start by stabilising, so that processing is safe. That is not a detour, it is the foundation.
And if we are not the right fit, we say so. With severe dissociation or an unsafe home situation, treatment should start elsewhere, and we help you think about where.
drs. Pauline Bos
Psychologist NIP and educational psychologist, Amsterdam city centre
More than 25 years with people, behaviour and the stories people have come to believe about themselves.