Trauma

Trauma can represent:

• Physical trauma, an often serious and body-altering physical injury, such as the removal of a limb.
• Psychological trauma, an emotional or psychological injury, usually resulting from an extremely stressful, life-threatening, or spirit-murdering situations.
• Trauma Studios, which created Desert Combat, the most successful mod of the computer game Battlefield 1942.

Trauma is well-known in genocide, war, and crime situations. It is almost always seen in torture victims (see psychology of torture. It also occurs in natural and man-made disasters, castastrophic mishaps, and medical emergencies. It is less well known in domestic vice/domestic violence, pedophilia, and incest situations. It also occurs in victims of child or elder abuse.

Trauma is often defined as a coping response to and a consequence of overwhelming situations. However, since overwhelm is subjective the occurrence of trauma is also subjective. There is evidence to suggest that how people cope with extremely stressful situations is associated to the traumas so suffered. Those people who cope well often show few signs of trauma while those who choose to overwhelm often suffer trauma afterward.

There is evidence from disasters that shows that some people proact, some people react, and some people overwhelm to the point of doing nothing in extreme situations. Those people who proact often overcome the extreme stresses and cope well in the situation, while those people who react often cope less well. Those people who overwhelm often die in their original positions with no noticeable coping actions. These observations suggest that overwhelm (and its associated trauma) is connected to these independent coping abilities.

There is also a distinction between trauma induced by recent situations and trauma that has been buried in the unconscious from past situations such as childhood abuse. Trauma induced from recent situations is known as 'simple' trauma in the psychological literature. Trauma from long past situations is known as 'complex' trauma. However, it should be noted that there is nothing simple about either form of trauma and that both forms can be induced by extreme situations.