Traumas Big and Small but Mostly Small

By Kevin Murphy MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


I was reading a study on the impact of trauma on refugees from Chechnya recently and how the fact of other people knowing about the trauma makes a big difference in terms of recovery. Obviously the people of Chechnya underwent severe and real trauma. The report outlines the various traumas suffered and an extensive list includes such things as bombardment, execution, massacre, torture, forced breakup of families, rape, illness without access to care, malnutrition and robbery. The main finding of the study* was a negative correlation between social acknowledgement of trauma and post traumatic stress disorder, concluding that social acknowledgment of trauma could promote recovery from it.
That’s why the reconciliation efforts in South Africa and Northern Ireland have had to base so much of their work on simply acknowledging the traumatic reality of what had taken place for all sides in those conflicts.
Obviously there is no mistaking trauma when it occurs during war or civil unrest. A bomb or a murder is unmistakable in terms of the consequences it can have for people.
But we can be mistaken if we tend to think of trauma as exclusively belonging to these incidents.
Psychoanalysis sees trauma – broadly defined as an unpleasant experience that we feel overwhelmed by, that often takes us unawares, that has no obvious meaning to it and that we are unable to do anything to defend against – in these terms too.
But there is another form of trauma that is far less dramatic or noticeable. Freud in his early theorizing wanted to know what it was that turned relatively healthy people into neurotics whose lives became unmanageable. His first idea was that some trauma had occurred that had effected them badly.
He postulated that it must have been sexual trauma of some kind. He eventually moved away from this notion because it was simply unsustainable to believe that everyone with a problem had been sexually abused. But what he did discover was that trauma, under the definition above, was possible during normal human development, in almost inconsequential ways, especially when we are infants.
The nature of unexpected or unwanted things happening to us at an early age, such as the necessary absence of our primary care giver for however short a period of time, can be mildly traumatic on us. Hunger, weaning, the arrival of a new sibling, unexpected frights, the dark, and later moving on to all sorts of fears that young children have about monsters under the bed, worries about their parents and so on.
Each of these mini-traumas have two features: they teach us how to cope and adapt to the nature of absences of comfort, or security, or food and so on, so that we can learn to develop as more mature functioning beings.
Secondly, they can often leave miniscule traces of fear behind that linger within us until triggered later by real experiences in life. Very often, part of the negative impact of larger traumas is that they can reinforce a pattern already laid down by these early traumas and make it very difficult for a person to ‘get over’ them.
If we don’t overcome or only partially overcome a particular ‘mini-trauma’, say coping with the temporary and necessary absence of our primary care giver, we can grow up unable to let anyone dear to us out of our sight or suffer greatly at any form of separation from a significant other.
Or if, say, as young children we react instinctively to a fright or any form of unpleasantness by 'freezing' until the threat has receded, it can lead us to an adult life where we use denial, or a refusal to communicate, or emotional paralysis when faced with a new threat.
Freud said famously that the earliest traumas that we undergo as infants are simply not noticed by our conscious mind. Or, as he put it in a 1917 lecture ‘The Paths to Symptom Formation’, “The significance of infantile experiences should not be totally neglected, as people like doing… They are all the more momentous because they occur in times of incomplete development and are for that very reason liable to have traumatic effects.”
This is the context in which I am talking about what we might call ordinary trauma, as opposed to the direct, blunt trauma of war, sexual abuse or violence in general.
Often you find in therapy that people are looking for the direct, blunt trauma, the ‘incident’ somewhere in their lives, that will throw light on why they are the way they are.
But very often there is no big incident. The ‘trauma’ is buried in the smallest of details within the particular experiences of their lives. Sometimes it is buried in even the most trivial of things.
This is not to say that people are somehow misguided in looking for the big ‘incident’. As I said, Freud himself was convinced of this line of thinking for a period in his own life.
Undoubtedly some people will have had horrendous real events that have happened to them. Others will have found their experiences so normal that it is only when they talk them out and hear themselves say it, that they begin to get a sense of how unusual they might have been.
And still others believe that because there has been no big ‘incident’ in their lives that they are being self-indulgent in feeling the way they do. But this latter group falls directly into the category around which so much of psychoanalytic theory revolves. The ordinary business of living can be traumatic by itself and can leave traces that echo and repeat throughout peoples’ lives.
The study about Chechnya confirms something that psychoanalysis has been saying since the late 19th century: acknowledgement of trauma by a single other or many others can promote recovery.

* ‘Is Acknowledgment of Trauma a Protective Factor? The Sample Case of Refugees from Chechnya’: (in) European Psychologist, Official Organ of the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations (EFPA); Vol 14, No 3, 2009. pp 249-254.