Types of Trauma

Trauma is a deep wound to the mind, body and spirit, and it comes in many forms. Understanding the type of trauma you have experienced is the first step toward understanding its impact and charting your path to healing.

Trauma is generally categorized by its duration, source, and timing.

Core Trauma Categories

These categories define the timing and duration of the traumatic event.

Acute Trauma

An acute trauma is a singular traumatic event that is brief in duration and narrowly focused. The mind and body have a specific event to reference to.

Examples of acute traumatic events:

• Car accident

• Combat

• Terrorist attacks

• Sudden grief (death of a loved one)

• Physical or sexual assault or abuse

• Motor accidents

• Natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, fires)

• Being diagnosed with a life-threatening condition

Developmental Trauma

Developmental trauma is the impact of early life repeated distress and loss that took place within the child's important relationships and environment. These are experiences that arise from things that happened when they shouldn’t have happened or necessary things that were consistently absent.

Examples include:

• A baby or child relinquished by birth parents

• A baby or child removed or relinquished from birth parents because they have been physically/sexually/emotionally abused

• A baby or child who has been neglected

• A child who lives between harmful birth parents and safe friends/family over a long

• A child removed at birth and who goes on to experience multiple adverse experiences,

• A child living with a safe and loving family, but who suffers sexual abuse from outside the family from a young age

• A baby or child removed from safe foster care placed into a safe adoptive family

• A child who experienced severe health problems and multiple medical interventions

Trauma Beyond the Individual

These categories illustrate how trauma can be passed down or shared across groups, meaning you don’t have to have directly experienced the event to feel its effects.

Intergenerational Trauma

Intergenerational trauma is when ancestors or older relatives went through a very distressing or oppressive event and their emotional and behavioral reactions ripple through the generations of your family and affect you. This means that even though you did not directly experience the event you still experience the trauma symptoms and trauma responses since those were inherited genetically. With this said stress responses are linked to more physical health issues manifesting as medical issues including heart disease, stroke, or early death.

Examples:

• Family traits

• Family survival physiology of generations

Collective Trauma

Collective trauma is the distress that a group — an entire culture, community, or another large group of people — experience in response to a shared trauma. These events live in a group’s collective memory even after the actual trauma has resolved and impacts the decisions people make, the values they hold, and the way they live.

Examples of events that can cause collective trauma:

• War, occupation, and other military conflicts

• Terrorist attacks

• Pandemics and epidemics

• Recessions and depressions

• Genocide and religious persecution

• Racial trauma, misogyny, apartheid, and class-based violence

• Mass killings

• Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters

Early & Implicit Trauma

This describes the impact of external and internal circumstances on an infant during their developmental stages while in the womb or early infancy (typically the first four years). The experiences cannot be explicitly remembered, but they profoundly shape later development and well-being because the body remembers even when the mind cannot.

Preconscious/Precognitive Trauma

Preconscious or Precognitive trauma is how we develop given both our external and internal circumstances during our developmental stages while we were in the womb or early infant stages shortly after our birth. This means that even though experiences that happen during pregnancy or within the first four years cannot be explicitly remembered it can still shape our later development and well-being because the body remembers even when the mind cannot.

Scenarios examples:

• Mother was in a violent relationship with a partner, friend or family member

• Mother used alcohol and substances

• Mother has a history of trauma herself

• Mother suffered serious mental health problems or toxic stress

• Baby in an accident

• Baby born prematurely or with the umbilical cord around its neck