Photo by Savannah B. on Unsplash
Following on from my last newsletter, ‘Keeping up with the times’, I am continuing with topics that really struck a chord with me from the Star Institute 2025 Virtual Summit: Neurodiversity Affirming Practice. In this newsletter I want to start to think about the concept of trauma and in the next newsletter will be considering sensory trauma in more detail.
What is trauma?
Trauma is getting a lot of attention in research, practice and the media currently, and rightly so. Evidence supports the importance of trauma-informed care, and the concept is being much more understood in the UK education system.
One definition of trauma provided by SAMHSA is:
“Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional , or spiritual well-being”
Traditionally trauma has been viewed as events/circumstances such as abuse, neglect, household dysfunction with an emphasis often on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). However, each person will experience life events differently, and what might be traumatic for one person, may not be traumatic for another. Trauma could be viewed as how an individual person experiences or responds to an event/environment.
If we think about everyday experiences, we can see that two people presented with the same environment/experience may respond in very different ways. For example, two friends decide to go for a walk in the mountains. One immediately takes off their coat because they are too hot, the other keeps their coat on the whole walk. They meet another walker, one stops to chat, the other ignores the person and continues walking. They find an opened bag of crisps lying on the ground further up the mountain. One picks the bag and eats the crisps; the other is disgusted. All the time, people are picking up different information from their shared environments, perceiving as salient different things, and then responding in their own individual ways.
Many neurodivergents report trauma responses from living in a neurotypical focused world. A world where the environment is not geared to them, where their behaviour is misunderstood, a world where they are not seen to be ‘typical’, a world where everything is seen and judged through a neurotypical lens.
Picking up on the importance of listening to lived experiences of autistic people, we can start to see how the sensory experience for neurodivergent people is different to the sensory experience for neurotypical people. Don’t presume it is the same as your experience.
Listening to the lived experiences of autistic people, we see that everyday activities may lead to experiences of terror, danger, assault and attack. This is the language of trauma, and one of those traumas is sensory trauma. Next newsletter, I will look in more depth at sensory trauma.
“My earliest, most powerful memories are sensory. Of things feel chaotic. Of being terrified of loud noises. Of being terrified of a lot of foods. Of not being listened to in those experiences and then being deemed to be problematic for fighting for my right not to be traumatised. …. And I feel that, in being labelled as having this triad of deficits, I am in a sense being re-traumatised in still not having my understanding of the world recognised” Oneaspienmama
