Trauma Never Occurs Only Once: Being Traumatized by a Slap is Like Making Meaning of the Game of Peek-a-Boo

Abstract

ABSTRACT It is argued that the lack of a normal developmental perspective along with a dominant psychopathological perspective framing our thinking about trauma limits our understanding of trauma, the value of trauma theory, and trauma informed practices. A developmental perspective sees dysfunction emerging from chronic repeated experiences and processes, primarily external interpersonal relational experiences and internal somatic and brain – neurosomatic processes. Repetition of trauma occurs because of the individual’s on-going endogenous reiterated neurosomatic meaning making processes of the meaning made of a recurrent or singular event given the flow of the context in which it occurs. Thus trauma, for me, is like a bulge in a landscape that we note in our language and diagnoses as if it was the only feature of the landscape, but typical trauma is in fact just a more severe outcropping on many small and large bumps making up a desolate toxic landscape. And while becoming traumatized is hardly a game, the process of making meaning of it and of a game, such as peek-a-boo is pretty much the same. At the heart of the similarity is the repetition of endogenous meaning making processes which most often, but not always because there are single occurrence events, travel with the event’s exogenous re-occurrence. The repetition instantiates the trauma and the game into the individual’s way of experiencing and being in the world. Thus, what makes sense for us as a guide for therapy – for children and adults – is to take our cue from the development of meaning: Approach therapeutic change like learning peek-a-boo. Do it often, do it in multiple ways that fully engage every level of the individual, and let the individual agenically control the process.