Nursery World - Trauma: Part 1

In the first of a two-part series, Caroline Vollans advises practitioners on how to support children who have experienced trauma

Different children can have different emotional reactions to the same experience (see Case study) PHOTO Adobe Stock

Trauma is a commonly used term these days. Whether an experience is ordinarily unpleasant or truly horrific, we might refer to it as a trauma. A child who is upset may be described as experiencing trauma, or a member of staff caught up in a road-rage incident may say they are traumatised by it.

While each of these might well be true, they also might not be.

When training as a psychoanalyst, I was struck to learn that ‘what is experienced as trauma by one person may not be by the next’. Until then I understood that if an event was dreadful or shocking then it was traumatic.

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