The extent of trauma

The sixth newsletter is (mainly) about 'small' trauma

When I was 8 years old, I was traumatized.

It happened during the evening festivities of ‘Sinterklaas’ (the terribly outdated, weird, Dutch holiday that I’ll probably get into in a later edition).

As part of the celebrations, people (‘Santa’) would come to your house and knock (read: bang) on the doors and the windows excitedly, to announce they were there to bring you presents and candy. So far so good.

Sometime during the evening, I was sitting next to the window with the curtains drawn. We were playing a board game with the family and were having a good time.

Suddenly there was a loud banging on the window that I was sitting very close to.

Because it was so unexpected and loud, it scared the hell out of me. I remember time slowing down and I sort of crumbled out of my chair in panic. My parents immediately tried to calm me down and explained that this was ‘Santa’ knocking, but I was in shock. I can’t recollect the rest of the evening.

Deep down

Years later, having totally forgotten this event, I was still very sensitive to sounds. Whenever my neighbors had the radio on, or their children were laughing in the yard I could suddenly feel unsafe. I just thought this was part of my character because it was my ‘normal’ mental state.

As part of a course on Internal Family Systems, during one of the exercises, I uncovered this memory and the part of me that was still holding onto this burden. The exercise surfaced the connection to the original event and helped me release it.

I’m way less sensitive to sounds now, although I’m still hyper-aware of them. Sometimes, when I’m tired or stressed, they’ll still impact me disproportionally and make me emotional (usually angry or anxious).

I realize that ‘traumatized’ sounds pretty heavy here, but that’s sort of the point. It wasn’t anything heavy, shocking, or horrific that I went through but I still call it trauma. Usually when we hear trauma, we think of something extremely terrible.

Coaching

As a life coach, I can see quite clearly how ‘small’ trauma shows up in clients. I coach people for longer periods of time (sometimes years). When you’ve gone over all the immediate problems, blocks, and things that are not working, after a while you start to see themes emerging. Underlying beliefs that govern people’s behavior. Stuff that isn’t ‘fixed’ with a bit of conversation about planning and accountability.

Very often these themes, beliefs, and recurring blocks are caused by some or multiple accumulated trauma-events in the client’s past. These don’t have to be big and heavy, and can be insidiously small. But they add up to barriers that aren’t surmountable without assistance.

In coach training, we’re made very aware of the difference between coaching and therapy. We are trained to spot ‘red flags’ and support people who need something else than coaching. Knowing how and when to forward someone to another professional is part of a (good) coach’s toolbox.

But there is still room and necessity for coaches (and even non-coaches) to work with trauma. Especially when it’s ‘small’.

I’ll talk about this more in the next newsletter.