Complex trauma occurs through repeated and prolonged exposure to trauma-inducing situations, most of which take place in a caregiving situation. When a child can’t rely on a close caregiver for comfort and safety—whether due to the caregiver’s own emotional suffering or because the caregiver is the source of trauma—that young person’s ability to metabolize and recover from toxic stress gets seriously hampered.
A useful metaphor to explain the effects of complex trauma is that of a vinyl record. When a song is played, again and again, a groove is worn into the record. If, when playing a different song, someone accidentally knocks the record player, the needle will skip across the record and land in the deepest groove, playing that song yet again. Even when you reach the end of the song, sometimes the groove is so deep the needle skips back to play it once more.
Like a needle on a record player, complex trauma wears a groove in the brain. So when something non-threatening happens that reminds us of a traumatic incident, our bodies replay the traumatic reaction—mobilizing us to either run from or fight the threat while shutting down other systems that help us think and reason. If this happens over and over, we become more easily triggered into that fear response mode, never giving our bodies time to recover. After a while, as we adapt to this chronic triggering, our behaviour can seem crazy or rude when taken out of the context of trauma.
For a child in a classroom, something as simple as the teacher raising his or her voice to get everyone’s attention or accidentally getting bumped by another classmate can steer that child into this groove. When triggered, the child’s out-of-proportion emotional and sometimes physical reaction often makes no sense whatsoever to the teacher, making it difficult for the teacher to respond appropriately.
