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

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.

This article is referred to by:

Unpacking and Reworking Trauma

The Slap: Playing with Reality in Discussing Ed Tronick’s “Trauma Never Occurs Only Once”

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge Bruce Perry for working closely with me on the central ideas in the paper. Marilyn Davillier and Alex Harrison for the critical insights, and the Fellows in my Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship Certificate Program for expanding my thinking.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Ed Tronick

Ed Tronick is a developmental and clinical psychologist, Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and a past member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Boston Process of Change Group. He created the Fellowship in Early Relational Health at the Medical School. Dr. Tronick has focused on neurosomatic and psychodynamic processes of meaning making and the inevitability of mismatches and their repair. He sees infant-parent engagement as metaphors for psychoanalysis therapy. He created the Still-Face Paradigm, the Caretaker Acute Stress Paradigm and formulated the Mutual Regulation model. His research focuses on the effects of maternal depression, infant memory for stress, and epigenetic processes affecting behavior and trauma. He has studied development and parenting in India, Guatemala, Peru, and several communities in Africa. Related studies are being carried out on the relation of stress hormones to SES, exposure to violence and possible unique effects in ethnic and racial groups. He has published more than 300 scientific articles and 7 books, several hundred photographs and has appeared on national radio and television programs.