Essay On Trauma

Trauma is an incident that leads to a great suffering of body or mind. It is a severe torture to the body and breaks the body’s natural equilibrium. It is defined as an emotional wound causing a psychological injury. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks and strained relationships There are many types of trauma that can affect an adolescent and without the proper treatment of the traumatic event the adolescent can have difficulty adapting and developing into adulthood. Susan Hanock defines trauma as the “inextricable link between a person’s ‘biology, conceptions of the world, and personalities’ and their inability to come to terms with traumatic experiences

Sometimes, its effect is catastrophic in which both one’s self as well as the social identity get damaged. The conditions like genocide, objectification of others, death, atrocities, and haunting have a strong impact on the senses. The outcome of these incidents causes trauma. In the world before us Jane loses a part of her identity as she loses Lilly, she also loses a key that her grandmother had gave her. Which interference connects to Jane losing the key pieces to her identity due to the traumatic disappearance of the little girl. This can also be compared to the African Americans losing their sense of identity and integrity due to slavery in the 1900s. The key that Jane lost was her grandma's although Lily was wearing it after the disappearance which traumatized Jane, however it does not have the same affect on her grandma just because it was her grandma's key. Ron Eyerman suggest that “In this sense, the trauma need not necessarily be felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any or all.” Therefore just because Slavery had happened in America does not mean all Americans felt the traumatic events that the African americans had . This distinguishes the difference between trauma and cultural trauma. “Psychological or physical trauma, which involves a wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual” which is what Jane experienced and “cultural trauma refers to a

“Memory is usually conceived as individually based, something that goes on “inside the heads” of individual human beings.” memomory plays an important role to choldren who are traumatised, “Children who are traumatised may also develop a specific worldview that incorporates their sense of betrayal and pain, meaning they ‘anticipate and expect the trauma to recur’ and respond to even minor stresses with ‘hyperactivity, aggression, defeat or freeze”
The memory of the dissapreanvce had caused “Jane [to have ]nightmares about the person who might have taken Lily appearing in their house in South Kensington”.This represents Jane’s memory of violation and pain, demonstrating the extent to which a part of Jane has shifted due to the traumatic event. However Jane was able to remember the dissaperance of Lily very vividly. In a case study “many traumatised people have difficulty remembering and relating exact details of the traumatic experience, instead experiencing ‘sensory elements of trauma without being able to make sense out of what they are feeling or seeing’’. One girl named susan “reported difficulty in remembering specific incidents from her childhood, instead remembering the physiological aspects so that whenever thinking of herself as a child she could always, immediately, ‘taste’ the salt of tears in her