TRANSCRIPT
I divide psychological trauma into eight different categories. I came up with these categories after making a really long list of all the different traumas that I went through in my childhood, in my early adulthood. And often what I found is these categories overlap; they don’t always overlap, but sometimes there is overlap between the categories.
The first type of psychological trauma is abandonment. That is when we have a relationship with someone we’re really dependent on—especially when we’re a young child—and that person has an expectation to meet our basic needs, our basic emotional needs especially, and they fail to do it in some way. In some way, they don’t live up to the expectations of their relationship. They basically fail at their duty. And it could be mild or it could be extreme. An extreme case of this would be those orphans—I believe in like Romanian orphanages—that were given all the food that they needed, they were given all the clothes they needed, and they were kept really, really clean. But they really were not given any physical affection. They weren’t given any love, any emotional nurturance. And the result is they shriveled and they died. They literally died because of the psychological abandonment. Now, I didn’t go through that personally. But I did go through certain other types of abandonment that were pretty severe. And I think most people have. Because really the needs of a child are very, very, very broad. And it’s pretty easy for parents, especially when they have limitations, to fail to meet these needs.
The second type of psychological trauma is betrayal. Betrayals happen when we have a trusted and important connection with someone else—often a dependent connection too—and that person in some way violates that connection, violates that trust, or behaves in a way that is inconsistent with our connection with them. And the results of that—they violate our trust, they could also violate our sense of values, they can violate our worldview, our belief system, they could also violate our sense of self—and the result is that we lose a lot of that trust. We lose that sense of being able to really have faith in other people. And this can really, really traumatize a person. Now, there can be a lot of overlap between a betrayal and an abandonment. So basically a lot of betrayals are also abandonments. And a lot of abandonments also are betrayals.
A third type of psychological trauma is violence. Violence is an attack on our physical body. But it is also simultaneously an attack on our psyche. Part of the reason for this is that our psyche is housed within our body. Our body is the temple for our psyche. Also, our psyche is the defender of our body. So, when someone attacks our body, they also attack our psyche. So in the same way that a physical attack can leave bruises on us, cuts on us, broken bones even; it always leaves a scar somehow on our psyche.
The fourth type of psychological trauma is sexual trauma. This is an attack or a violation on our sexual essence or our sexuality. It can happen physically, it could also happen mentally, it can happen emotionally, it can happen involving touch, it can happen involving no touch at all. It can be verbal, it could also be nonverbal, it could happen through things we see in movies, it can happen through things we read in magazines or see in television or things we hear about or things we witness. It can happen within families, it can happen in very intimate relationships, and it also can happen with complete strangers.
The fifth type of psychological trauma is psychological attack. That is an attack on the psyche using psychology. This can take a lot of different forms, but some of them that I can think of off the top of my head are: using manipulations against someone, lying, humiliating them, shaming them, gaslighting people, teasing, ostracism, putting them down… mmm… bad therapy could also fall into this category, using psychiatric diagnosis against people. The list can go on and on.
The sixth type of psychological trauma is witnessing horror. Witnessing horror can also take a lot of different forms. It doesn’t mean the horror necessarily directly happened to one oneself, but it can be seeing it in someone else close to you or even reading about it sometimes or hearing about it from people. Vicarious trauma would fall into this category of witnessing horror. It can happen by witnessing horror or violent treatment against animals, violations of the earth, violations of people close to you that you love, witnessing horrible fighting between people… witnessing sexual trauma and other people going through it, seeing even videos of it can happen or movies—you can, people can get traumatized by witnessing horror in that way. Another way that people witness horror, and this is a secondary type of trauma, is by replicating the traumas they have gone through on other people. That is when someone violates someone else in a replication of the traumas they have experienced. They’re perpetrating some sort of horror on someone else; so the person who’s doing it is actually witnessing this and can themselves also secondarily be traumatized through traumatizing someone else.
The seventh type of psychological trauma is threat of harm. When people feel they’re under threat for being harmed in some way, they can get traumatized by it. These threats can be really varied. It can be emotional threats, it can be physical threats, it could be sexual threats, or it can be combinations of all three. Now, you might say that this by its very nature is a secondary trauma. Because if someone hasn’t already been violated in some way… if someone hasn’t already suffered pretty awful things, they’re not even gonna know what a threat is. Because you can’t threaten someone until they know something bad that’s gonna happen. But part of why I think it can also be a primary trauma is that people can get threatened at such early ages and in such repeated ways… that it basically is so deep in who they are; that it actually becomes a sort of primary trauma.
Now, the eighth type of psychological trauma is reinforcement of shame. The shame that we already hold is a sign that we’ve been traumatized in the first place. And so, when the world reinforces that shame, they’re actually violating our psyche again. Now, the shame that we hold is all this hatred and negativity and contempt that the world has been throwing at us, that we take and we actually turn toward ourselves. So it actually it’s like self-loathing and self-contempt. And it’s actually not really fair. It’s really just absorbing what the world has given us, but not a real reflection of who we are. But… so we hold it inside ourselves for all sorts of different reasons as the result of our traumas. Now, when the world reinforces that through its actions and its attitudes and its comments, it takes the shame that we already have, and it concentrates it… it condenses it and it becomes much more intense and much more painful and leads us to be even more traumatized. Perhaps more fearful of the world, perhaps more fearful to get out there and be ourselves and express who we really are. And so this is why it becomes another violation of us and another trauma.