I want to explain a little bit about trauma; trauma isn’t so much what happens to you, but what happens inside of you because of what happens to you. (Gabor Mate) Trauma isn’t about how strong or weak you are. Trauma is about your capacity. When something happens that overwhelms your capacity, it causes trauma. That same thing could have happened a thousand times before in your life, but you had the capacity to handle it at that time so it didn’t cause trauma. The same thing could happen to someone else with a different capacity and it may not cause trauma for them. We can’t compare trauma because we can’t compare capacity.

Capacity is a dynamic, multifactored, complex concept. Capacity can change based on the day, how well you slept that night, what you ate, and who you connected with. It also is determined by personality, some people are born more sensitive, they feel things deeper than other, this means that they need a larger capactiy to handle life. Capacity can be determined by the environment you grew up in; some people were born into a supportive, loving family that was able to manage and deal with emotions. This can build their capactiy. Other people are born into a supportive family, but one that doesn’t know how to manage emotions; this can decrease their capacity. Other people grow up in an outrighly hostile family environment, which most likely will decrease their capacity.

Not only does environment, personality, and childhood environment affect capacity, but everyone’s capacity is different in different areas. My dad is a entrepreneur. He has been building businesses since before I was born; my dad has a very large capacity for business stress because he has regularly exposed himself to it and has been able to find a way out of it. This builds his capactiy. But yet, that doesn’t mean he has a large capacity for stress in all areas of his life. As a psychologist, I might have more capacity for stress in the area of listening to and sitting with people’s trauma, because it is something that I regularly am building my capacity for.

Now added to this mix, one of the problems with trauma is that it actually decreases your capacity. This means that the more trauma you have been through the less your capacity will be and the more susceptable you are to being re-traumatized. What my friend was going through was a series of smaller things that consistently were retraumatizing her, shrinking her capacity, to the point where she could hardly handle anything. Yes, I agree, It is not fair! But, just to clarify, stress that doesn’t overwhelm your system causes an increase in capacity, stress that overwhelmes your system causes trauma which decreases your capacity.

Now lets come back to my friend who was blaming herself for not being able to cope with the overwhelming stress in her life. She was wishing that she could have “grown” more from it. If we understand capacity, we see that she couldn’t have grown from it. She was consistently overwhelming her capacity, causing trauma, causing her capacity to continuously shrink. Shame on how she responded only serves to increase the stress, adding to the decreasing capacity.

What she needed was to get herself out of the situation, which she did. Now she is working on building up her capacity again. This is the hope with trauma, we can build up our capacity again after it has been broken down. Growth can come as an outflow of trauma, but generally not during the traumatic situation. Trauma is the breaking down, the growth comes after you have been broken down. We put expectations on ourselves that we just weren’t strong enough or else we wouldn’t have had the trauma, but trauma has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with capacity. Capacity isn’t our choice, it is the result of a conglomerate of complex systems. The hopeful thing is, we can grow our capacity again coming out of trauma, it just takes a whole lot of patience, kindness, and compassion towards ourselves.