alt Hacker NewsFor me, making a distinction between the big Trauma with a capital T and little trauma with a lowercase t has been helpful. Any experience that has a lasting negative impact on you could be considered a trauma, but only very extreme stuff - violence, sexual abuse - would count as Trauma.
A car accident is a car accident. Sometimes they are fatal, sometimes the paint gets scratched. People sometimes get long term health effects from a fender-bender.
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Fr0styMatt88 • yesterday at 9:55 PM
I almost feel like we need a different word that doesn’t have the confusing association. Like scratching your car (‘little t’ trauma) vs smashing the frame (big ‘T’ trauma).
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I think there's a degree of some people being maybe genetically predisposed to having more serious adverse reactions to trauma as well. An obvious example is when it leads to psychosis. So the objective reality of what happened is not necessarily the only thing which factors into how it affects somebody's functioning.