What Is Trauma? Causes, Childhood Trauma, and More

Trauma is experiencing one or more intensely disturbing or threatening events that lead to long-lasting negative changes in how you act, think, or feel.

In the moment, it can cause intense feelings or mental states like fear, helplessness, confusion, or dissociation.

Experiencing trauma in childhood, also called childhood trauma, is thought to lead to many different mental and physical health issues. It can have a strong impact on a person’s life and relationships.

A person’s interpretation of the traumatic experience is everything. It’s highly subjective.

Experts on trauma have found that the way a person interprets the traumatic experience is more powerful than the characteristics of the experience itself in determining the negative effects on that person.

Some people may find the same experience traumatic while others might not.

• Causes: Many, many different types of events can cause trauma. Examples include experiencing war, natural disasters, child abuse or neglect, emotional abuse, or intimate partner violence. It can be caused by people or acts of nature.
• Lifelong effects: Trauma can have deep, lifelong effects. Experiencing one or more traumatic events can lead to many different, long-term effects in the brain and throughout the body, such as the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It can change the course of someone’s life and their day-to-day feelings and behavior, sometimes severely.
  • Mental health effects of trauma: Trauma can lead to negative changes in mood and thinking, as well as mental health conditions including depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, and sleep issues.
  • Physical health effects of trauma: Trauma increases the risk of many different health conditions, including obesity, diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and autoimmune disorders like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
• Trauma responses: People tend to have one or more trauma responses when facing a traumatic event, including fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fix.
• How can trauma affect relationships?: It can change the way the person who experienced the traumatic event behaves toward others, negatively affecting their personal relationships and ability to function socially.
• Treatments: Experts have developed evidence-based treatments for the mental health effects of trauma, like PTSD and CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder). Evidence-backed psychological treatments can lead to big reductions in PTSD symptoms. They include trauma-focused cognitive behaviour therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), prolonged exposure therapy, and cognitive processing therapy. Drug treatments have also been shown to help.
• How to prevent harmful effects of trauma?: Early interventions in the hours and weeks after a traumatic event can help prevent someone who experienced it from developing PTSD. Trauma-focused cognitive behaviour therapy is one evidence-backed intervention. Research is ongoing and more is needed.

For a deeper understanding of how trauma relates to relationships, explore these related articles on Relationship Smart:

• 7 Ways Childhood Trauma Can Affect Your Relationships
• How to Break the Cycle of Generational Trauma: Expert Q&A
• How Reparenting Your Inner Child Helps Your Relationship
• This is What a Toxic Relationship Feels Like: 4 Signs