Having a safe place to go and having your words and experiences welcomed and encouraged is so important. They would be the one to respond to a child’s experience if something is off, and if the child does not get what they need from the parent at that moment, its cumulative effect can be dramatic. This might mean a family member, often a parent, is always or often enough misattuned. Relational TraumaĬumulative relational trauma is a less-talked about type of trauma. In today’s day and age, “trauma” has become a word to describe any upsetting experience. If they are dismissed, particularly if they are a younger child, then they may begin to feel that they made up the experience, or it was their fault… and that’s what determines the impact of the trauma.Īnd readers beware. And if they go to a parent to share the experience with, does the parent respond positively and supportively? Or does the parent invalidate and dismiss the experience? Context is everything someone’s age, who they were surrounded by, and the support response (or lack thereof) they receive affects whether or not it’s traumatic.įor instance, something that happens to an 11-year-old is different from a 17-year-old. Moreover, not everyone responds to these events the same way. Often, we think of media sensationalized events as trauma, but that’s just a sliver of what trauma is. For her, this took on significant meaning and affected her self-esteem, gender identity, and so on.įor others, trauma could mean emotional neglect chronic misattunement and of course, bodily trauma. While this might not seem very traumatic to some, for her, it was when she went back to her childhood home during the time of COVID and everything was online, the experience came flashing back to her in an overstimulating way. Heather cites a client she had who had a sexual experience online with a male cousin when she was a teenager. What might be seemingly not so traumatic to one person might actually be very traumatic to another. So consider us real lucky to have her join us here. To be honest, her works are some of my favorites when it comes to eating disorders and psychoanalysis. She’s written academic papers for decades and I love her work. She’s also a review editor for Psychoanalysis, Self and Context and she’s written about eating disorders from a self psychological, relational, and neurobiological perspective (if those words mean anything to you).Ī lot of her work has inspired and informed the talks and webinars I’ve given.
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