 When you think of trauma, what things pop up in your mind? Is it a natural disaster? A terminal illness? A plane crash? Yes, experiencing these life-threatening events, also known as large T- traumas, may engrave a deep emotional scar and render you feeling powerless and helpless. In an interview with Real Simple Magazine, psychiatrist, Dr. Christine Moche, mentioned that there are other seemingly less significant experiences that can cause similar devastating emotional impact. These occurrences, also known as small T- traumas, are ego-threatening instead of life-threatening because they impair our emotional functioning and surpass our ability to cope. But don't allow the lingo large T- and small T- traumas to fool you into thinking one is more important than the other. The categories are intended to guide professionals toward the appropriate treatment options for different people. What makes minor T- events so bewildering is their cumulative influence, which may create psychological damage as time passes or with repetition. One of the examples of small T- traumas or the ones that we often dismiss, frequently moving. Home is usually a familiar, secure place. It's layout is second nature to you. Even if it's totally dark, you're still able to find your way to the toilet. The same goes for the grocery store you go to, to buy your favorite ice cream or the route you take to the bus stop. Your brain is on autopilot. It knows the surrounding area inside out. But what happens when you have to pack up your entire life over and over again? Moving makes you lose your life map, and then you have to remap it from scratch each time you move to a new place. Licensed marriage and family therapist, Yale Hakklai Nyaku, explained that moving is stressful and traumatic because of the loss of familiarity. Not only does your new environment impact how you react to your new surroundings and culture, but it also impact how you relate to yourself. For instance, culture shock and language barrier might cause a sense of foreignness and self-esteem concerns. Relocation also changes the nature of all types of relationships because you're no longer as physically close to family and friends as you once were. You may no longer be available to each other in the same way. As a result, the level of emotional connection you have with each other also changes. Emotionally invalidated. Ouch, that hurts. You scream in pain after you fall on your knees while running in a baseball field. The pain is so intense that you start crying. Your father then says to you, what are you crying for? You're 10 years old, man up. Big boys, don't cry. Clinical psychologist, Dr. Salel Feenberg, explains that when your emotional experience is invalidated and you are told that your thoughts and feelings are unacceptable, you're actually experiencing emotional invalidation. It sends a message, I don't care about your feelings. Your feelings don't matter. Your feelings are wrong. A study by a group of researchers published in the Journal of Child Abuse neglect looked at the link between emotional invalidation as a child and psychological distress as an adult. The findings reveal that childhood emotional invalidation was linked to chronic emotional restraint in adulthood. Consequently, it caused psychological distress, especially manifested as depression and anxiety-related symptoms. Parents with emotional dysregulation. Imagine a singer who can sing several octaves higher than the people around her. If the muse hits, she can't help but sing spontaneously. Now, take her singing and replace it with emotions and you begin to understand what it means to have emotional dysregulation. Psychology professor, Dr. Annie Tanisugarn, says that growing up with parents who have difficulties regulating their emotions may cause you to also experience emotional dysregulation. We need our parents to show us how to feel big emotions as children. If our parents overreact to situations that become overly dramatic or display anger outbursts, we may subconsciously learn that these are the right emotional responses to situations and adapt to similar response. Living in tumultuous and unstable environments as a child may cause us to grow into adults that struggle with anger issues or feel alienated from their emotions. This can raise the chance of creating traumatic bonds with romantic partners, being invisible. Let's take a moment and reminisce about when you were a child. Would you, with a smile on your face, say, my parents, they weren't perfect, but I always knew they loved me just as I was? Or would you say, my parents always wanted me to be something I wasn't? Licensed professional counselor, Dr. Sherry Steins, says that growing up as an invisible child means that you may battle with your needs to be seen and heard. We are driven by our core human needs to be seen, heard and authentically expressing ourselves. You wouldn't be able to fulfill these emotional needs if your parents were not open with who you actually were, and instead they wanted you to be what they wanted you to be, filtered through their own desires. To gain affection or acceptance, you begin to reject aspects of your true self. You are conditioned to consider others' needs, wants and desires, and not your own. As a result, you struggle with knowing who you are on the most basic level. Once this conditioning is in place, the invisible child grows into an invisible adult who has difficulty finding their own voice in place in the world, constant yelling. As a young child, how do you feel if you face your mother's constant tirades, her loud voice, her shrill tone, her scornful facial expressions? Do her insults still haunt you even as an adult? Licensed and clinical social worker, Hilary Hendel, shares her client's story, who recounts that it was traumatizing to experience frequent yelling as a child. Researcher Josh Sisler explains that constant yelling impacts the mind, brain, and body in numerous ways, including causing your emotional brain or the amygdala to become more active, increasing stress hormones in the blood, and your muscles to become tenser. Our experiences of being yelled at as children impact how we feel about ourselves, even when we become adults. Because the brain is wired according to our experiences, we hear our parents' voices in our heads even when they're not around. Clinical psychologist Ruben Kodam says that the overwhelming majority of people will experience a traumatic incident at some point in their lives. However, not everyone faces challenges after a distressing event, but if you are experiencing difficulty, trauma therapy may assist you in feeling more grounded, secure, and in charge of how to properly handle suffering when it does arise. Yes, therapy will not immediately make the ache disappear, but it will transform your connection with your trauma such that it becomes just one part of you rather than controlling your life. And remember, you matter.