Ashok Gupta explains how ordinary intense emotions can become trauma when a person—especially a child—lacks support, empathy, or resources to process them. The mind may repress overwhelming feelings and memories to protect the child; repeated or developmental traumas compound this repression, leaving persistent, simmering emotions that create bodily "buttons" or triggers and a hyper-reactive nervous system.
Now, what turns an experience into a trauma? It's often if Kyle doesn't have the support or the empathy or the resources to be able to handle that experience. When we experience an emotion, if it's very intense, it could be fear, anger, sadness. Normally we would observe that feeling within us, we would acknowledge that we have that feeling, we would validate it, and we would then look to be able to resolve it in our own minds. Because that emotion is trying to tell us something, it's trying to inform of something that we need to do. So we need to understand what those messages are. We need to understand why we're experiencing that emotion and process it, talk it out with somebody, know often what do we do when we have a difficult emotion? We'll speak to a friend about it. And by speaking to a friend, it helps us overcome that emotion or move through it, or we feel into our bodies and meditate, you know, whatever ways that we have the resources to do that. But as you can imagine, Kyle, if she's a child, doesn't necessarily have the resources to be able to process that emotion. And, and that can be very terrifying for a child. It can be overwhelming. So when we don't have the support, the empathy or the resources, then an emotion is overwhelming and we can't cope with that emotion. So the mind comes up with a very clever idea. What it says is, let me repress that emotion and that feeling because it's too scary to feel right now for a child, let me repress that memory as well. So sometimes the memory becomes a bit hazy and becomes hidden. And that is a way that the mind says we aren't ready to experience that pain, that emotion, that negativity. So we're going to bury it and we're going to bury the memory and, or bury the emotion. And if you think about it, that's very clever of the mind to come up with that strategy. Now, if those events are one offs, they may not affect Kyle so much, but if they are complex and developmental, so what that means is the trauma is experienced or the events are experienced again and again and again and again. So the trauma or the traumatic events build on top of each other. And that then means that the mind has to repress a lot of our childhood, a lot of those experiences, just to be able to cope and function day to day. Now, of course, it's not a perfect repression because some of those emotions keep fizzing up into the mind. So even though our mind is trying to protect us, those emotions still simmer up from our consciousness. And then we still experience glimpses of those pain, glimpses of those emotions. And what it actually does is create little buttons all over our body that when someone else does something similar to what we are repressing, it brings up the emotion again. So it becomes easy to push our buttons. Some people might call that a sensitivity. We often talk about the highly sensitive person where because they've been through a lot of those experiences and those traumas, their nervous system is more trigger happy, waiting to respond to something.
