Pop Quiz! (Yes, I hear every teen (and used-to-be-teen) groaning… 😄)
In my YA fantasy novel, Evangeline’s Heaven, which of the follow scenarios can be defined as “trauma”?
- Evangeline’s mom dies when Evangeline is three and she barely remembers her.
- Evangeline is whisked all over her world by her father, without the stability of a home.
- Evangeline is ostracized by kids she meets in each new town her father Lucifer drags her.
- Evangeline is bullied—including a physical attack—by her roommate in high school.
- Evangeline’s father disappears.
- Evangeline is detained by authorities.
- Evangeline suffers from the shock of a sudden, violent death of a beloved family member.
- Evangeline is betrayed by someone close to her.
- Evangeline is forced to act in ways that she never believed she was capable of.
Trick question.
Not because they’re all traumatic scenarios, but because the correct answer is that they all could be traumatic scenarios depending on the individual.
We often think of trauma as something BIG. Something explosive. Something unreal and horrific, like a devastating car crash, an appalling sexual assault, a tour of duty in a war zone. We’ve also come to acknowledge that witnesses to such catastrophes—not just the victims—could also experience trauma.
And we’re not wrong. These events can be traumatic. We call them “Big T Trauma” because they are singular, anguish-inducing events.
But that’s not the whole picture. We often forget about “Small T Trauma”, which are less explosive, but no less insidious. They are events or behaviors with a cumulative effect, like ongoing bullying, or emotional neglect. They’re not splashy, they’re not in-your-face, but they are as damaging and dangerous as Big T Trauma events.
Or, they can be.
Because here’s the other thing we often don’t think about: Everyone experiences trauma differently.
Trauma, simply, is your body and mind’s way of telling you you’re unsafe. It impacts our nervous system and can be activated by triggers that set us off on a flight/fight/freeze/fawn reaction.
That means that what could make one person feel extraordinarily unsafe—a lifetime of being called names, for example—could roll of another person’s back. Or someone returning from war could readjust without difficulty. In other words, it’s not the event (cumulative or otherwise) but your own body’s reaction to it.
Often, we dismiss or minimize another person’s traumatic experiences. If we wouldn’t have been affected, we assume others wouldn’t be either.
We do everyone a disservice with that limited thinking.
That’s why YA literature is so powerful; we get to read about protagonists who experience trauma, triggers and impacts in a myriad of ways. We see and we feel how they respond, and we learn to understand.
We learn empathy.
So let’s return to Evangeline. Any one of the above scenarios could cause trauma to an individual. For Evangeline, she misses her (barely-remembered) mother, but her dad Lucifer gives her all the love she could ask for (well, until he doesn’t…) She has no stable home base, and gets teased as the new kid a lot, but she’s grounded emotionally by her dad, so her early childhood, while unconventional, does not trigger her. There’s no trauma. She feels safe. But when she attends school, when her father leaves her to deal with the bullies on her own, when, later, she learns the truth about the death of her beloved grandfather-figure, when she learns the truth about her own father, she is most definitely traumatized. How can she be safe ever again??
The answer is different for all of us. For Evangeline, she learns to shift her trust, and find new anchors, including trust and faith in herself.
Overcoming trauma is not easy for anyone; but it is possible. YA books remind us that no matter our trauma, there is hope.