Little T Trauma - it's not as little as it sounds...

STOP! I've just been triggered

In this episode we are chatting about Little T Trauma and sharing a couple of simple therapy tools you might find useful. For a long time in the trauma space even professionals were led to believe that trauma only existed when we experienced life threatening events, like war, rape, natural disasters and horrible things like that. But over time it became overwhelmingly obvious that people were experiencing events not typically defined as trauma and having the same emotional and physical impact which led to a huge expansion in the definition of and our understanding of trauma. Little T Trauma refers to events that typically don’t involve violence or disaster, but do create significant distress. Meaning, things like an ongoing situation what causes you to feel distress, hear, or a sense of helplessness can cause little T Trauma. So it might be a relationship breakdown, loss of a job, financial worries, not being heard, seen or validated as a child, times where you felt isolated and alone. These trauma’s can often be a little more difficult to identify because there wasn’t necessarily one big obvious event that stands out that caused the trauma to be trapped in the body. Remembering that trauma isn’t the event, it’s the response that happens within you.