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What is Trauma?
Trauma is any life-threatening and emotionally overwhelming event, which disables a person’s ordinary coping and defense mechanisms and gives rise to feelings of helplessness. Trauma may be experienced as a single episode or of life-long duration (e.g. abuse) as a child or as adult.
A few examples for traumatic events are a life-threatening illness or surgery, an accident or a natural disaster, violence in and out of the family or in war, date rape or sudden loss of a loved one.
People experience and respond to trauma in different ways. Please go to “Common Trauma Responses” for more information.