Trauma-informed means that the person or agency providing health services is sensitive to and understands the impact of trauma and its effect on the whole person - their physical, emotional, and mental health, as well as their behaviors and choices.
A trauma-informed service provider, unlike the traditional medical-model-based practitioner, thinks less about treating a person's symptoms, and is more likely to wonder, "What happened?" He/she understands that unresolved traumatic experiences, remembered or unremembered, leave a physiological imprint that works behind the scenes to drive our decisions and choices, emotional states and patterns, and impact our health.
Redefining Trauma
There are obvious traumas like rape, car accidents, sexual and physical abuse, seeing someone (especially someone you love) injured or killed, natural disasters, combat, or losing your home to fire, just to name a few. But there are other traumatic experiences - like having an invasive medical procedure, being separated from a parent in a store when you were little, being left at home alone, or "playing doctor" with neighborhood kids. For many people, the experience of being born or of giving birth is traumatic.
The point is that there are no set rules for what qualifies as traumatic. How your nervous system responded to an event, for whatever reason, and how well it processed the chemicals that were released, determines whether or not an event was traumatic enough to impact you now.
The after-effects of trauma can be debilitating, as with PTSD, or they can simply show up as mild depression, recurring relationship problems, or feeling stuck in some aspect of your life.
"If I was traumatized, why don't I remember it?"
There is a popular misconception that if a trauma was significant it would be remembered. Most of the general public doesn't understand the complexity of memory and how it is stored. Even many therapists still believe that valid memory is only that which can be described, like being able to recount what you did and what you had to eat yesterday - like a narrative laundry list. We call this declarative memory. But it is only one of six general types. Four of the other types of memory cannot be called up deliberately and are not necessarily accessible with conscious, rational thought.
The combat veteran returns home and knows that he's safe, but hits the ground when he hears a car backfire. The incest survivor feels nauseous whenever she smells the same aftershave that her perpetrator used. These reactions aren't processed through the rational. thinking brain. They're automatic.
How to Heal Trauma. What the Latest Research Says.
The latest in neuroscience research, especially that of Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD, has revolutionized the way we treat trauma. We now know that traditional talk therapies have limited value in helping people resolve trauma. Therapists familiar with body-centered approaches know that when it comes to trauma, it's not over until the body says it's over.
But long before the research literature was popular and available, Shelly Smith discovered and experienced firsthand, the necessity to dive deep below the surface of the thinking brain, to access unconscious, traumatic material stored inside the body. In time she developed a roadmap - a way to navigate through the layers of memory to access and release traumatic material and help others do the same.
“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself . . . The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.” Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD