What is trauma? Derived from the Greek language, the word trauma means “wound, damage, or hurt.” Trauma may manifest as a powerful psychological and emotional response to a distressing event or set of circumstances. Individuals may feel they are powerless to control the event or circumstance and very frightened. This has the potential to change the individual’s beliefs about themselves and the world around them, as well as their interactions with it.
Trauma is an embodied experience, touching all the neural pathways in our bodies: our muscles, the brains in our bellies and hearts, our autonomic nervous systems, our brain stems, our primary emotional-motivational systems, our lambic regions and neocortices, and reaching down to even finer systems at the level of our cells and genes.
From The Heart of Trauma by Bonnie Badenoch