Trauma is Not a Competition

Over the years I’ve had the privilege of presenting to, and engaging with, a wide range of audiences to share my experiences and lessons learned. One of the recurrent interactions I’ve had with many audience members is them approaching me afterwards and opening with the line “It’s nothing compared to your experience but…” and then proceeding to recount a stressful event that traumatised them.?

My immediate response is to inform them that their experience is?exactly?like mine and they should never diminish it. Here’s why.?

Significant stress and trauma occur when the stress of a situation overwhelms the individual’s resilience to that specific stressor. In?The Resilience Shield ?we introduce the concept of the Resilience-Stress Scales, which in their most basic form are illustrated in Figure 1.?

When resilience is greater than, or at least equal to, any given stress then things are rosy, and the situation is manageable. It’s when the stress load overwhelms the individual’s resilience to that stressor that trauma occurs.?

This situation can occur chronically with incremental life stressors adding up and then a final, often trivial, straw?breaking the camel’s back, or it can occur with one overwhelming acute stress. This is diagrammatically represented in Figure 2.?

The key thing of importance here is that:

stress needs to be viewed relative to the resilience of the individual experiencing it, and not in absolute terms

Let’s look at an example.?

One individual who approached me with a “it’s nothing compared to your experience but…” opening to their story recalled a traumatic event of being a bank attendant during an armed robbery in which a robber had threatened them with a knife.?

They had legitimately considered their life, and the lives of others in the bank, to be at imminent risk, and had quite rightly suffered significant Post-Traumatic Stress symptoms relating to the event.?

In this setting, the individual had been provided with no specific training (stress inoculation) to deal with that situation, so their resilience to that specific stressor was overwhelmed and their Resilience-Stress Scales immediately tipped.?

Thankfully the situation was resolved with no loss of life, however the psychological sequalae of that event were understandably profound for the individual.?

The perils of bringing a knife to a gunfight

If we take the same?absolute stressor?(that being a bad guy with a knife) and apply it to a special operations soldier on a combat mission the outcome would likely be significantly different.?

Let’s picture the lead man of a spec ops team, gun up and primed for combat, making entry to an enemy compound to be met with an enemy wielding not an AK-47 as expected, but a knife.?

I’m sure the reader will appreciate that this is unlikely to tip the Resilience-Stress Scales unfavourably for the operator, and the situation would quite likely be resolved in seconds.?

It is equally as likely that the situation would provide an opportunity to employ black humour to further tip the scales in the favour of resilience gained from the experience.?

This scene plays out with great drama and humour in the movie?Raiders of the Lost Arc,?where Harrison Ford’s character finds himself packing heat against a blade-wielding opponent.?

Ford’s character, Indiana Jones, watches his opponent elaborately swinging a large sword around, before casually drawing his revolver and dropping his opposition with a single shot.?

Zero Stress, maximum cool.?

What is illustrated in this albeit hypothetical and fictional interaction is that having been prepared or trained for a specific situation provides resilience to that stressor. This has the result of balancing the Resilience-Stress scales in the situation and not allow them to tip in the favour of stress, therefore not resulting in a traumatic experience.?

The key factor is the individual’s resilience to the stressor,?not?the absolute stressor itself.?

In our book,?The Resilience Shield , we discuss the Yerkes-Dodson law, which describes an empirical relationship between stress and performance.?

In essence, the Yerkes-Dodson law shows that performance will increase with increasing physical and mental stress, but only up to a certain point. After that optimal point, increasing stress causes performance to drop off.?

The resultant curve of stress versus performance forms an “inverted-U" shape.

Interestingly, the stress level that equates to optimal performance in any given domain can be increased (pushed to the right) through training and exposures to that stressor.

This is known as?stress inoculation?and it can be achieved by training techniques such as graduated reality-based training.?

If we consider the examples provided above of the bank teller and Indiana Jones being confronted by a knife/sword-wielding bad guy, the bank teller would have been understandably pushed into the black, whereas the trained Indiana would have been in his sweet spot.

On reflection, I also sadly suspect that there have been dozens of people that I have interacted with who didn’t bring up their personal experiences because they may have perceived them as trivial in the context of my absolute stressors.?

Along this same line of reasoning, I’m aware of special operations soldiers who have suffered mental health injuries and completely failed to engage in group veteran therapy sessions due to other group members being traumatised by experiences far less objectively dramatic than those of the spec ops guys.?

This is another example of the failure to appreciate that?trauma is relative to the resilience of the individual and not the absolute stressor.?

What needs to happen in these instances is once again for individuals to get active in their?own?rescue and focus on themselves, rather than the flawed tendency to measure their absolute trauma against that of others.?

Viewing the situation through that lens may allow individuals to see other group members as alike, which could then facilitate empathy and mutual healing, as opposed to disengagement from the process and potential resentment toward other perceived?lesser?trauma sufferers.?

A final pitfall of this mentality is to minimise and become internally dismissive of one’s own trauma.?

For instance, a person who has been verbally abused might minimise their experience in comparison to another who was physically assaulted. While it is a positive to have a degree of gratitude for their experience not being as bad as it potentially could have been, it doesn’t negate the fact that the individual has been traumatised.?

Once again, trauma is not a competition. ?

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Until next Friday, stay safe, and don’t forget to have some fun!

Cheers,

Dr Dan Pronk

If you want to read more of my story or our work on resilience, you can check out one of my books!

All are available through Amazon globally and on audiobook.?

Click on the images below for links to the books on Amazon Australia.