In my last piece, I shared six reasons how and why many people struggle to see themselves in the historically understood definition of “childhood trauma.”
Those six reasons boiled down to the limitations of historical definitions, the subtlety of certain experiences, because mother was the abuser, because the abusers may not have been guardians/parents, because they viewed the privilege they had also experienced as some kind of neutralizer of the experience, because they experienced gaslighting about their experiences, and because they had preconceived notions about what “counted” as abuse or trauma.
There are, of course, many more reasons why people struggle to see themselves inside the definition of “childhood trauma” and all of those reasons are what led to me using the term “relational trauma” very often in my work.
In today’s essay I want to share my definition of childhood trauma with you and share some amalgam vignettes that reflect experiences captured by this definition with the hopes that you may see the subtly of your own experiences more clearly.
My definition of relational trauma.
Over time, in response to what I experienced as limitations in how we have historically and collectively come to understand childhood trauma, I created a relational trauma definition that, to me, felt more expansive:
“Relational trauma is the kind of trauma that results over the course of time in the context of a power-imbalanced and dysfunctional relationship (usually between a child and caregiver but also between a child/adolescent and systems/communities) that results in a host of complex and lingering biopsychosocial impacts for the individual who subjectively endured the trauma and was overwhelmed by the experience.”
– Annie Wright, LMFT
And honestly: one of the biggest pieces of feedback I receive about this definition and what I put out online is this:
“Ah, finally, there’s a name for what I went through…”
I’m not here to say this is the only or penultimate definition of relational trauma.
But I am here to say that when we ourselves use a more expensive definition of trauma – one that includes subjectivity at its core and more nuance in the how and why – we can help clients see themselves and their lived experience more clearly and, quite frankly, feel more validated.
