SEGUNDO ESTUDIO

In a child whose boundaries are evolving, ebbing and flowing with new life experiences, vulnerability to traumatic stress is extreme. In our society, we are taught from infancy by means of word, inference, or sim-ple behavior that our sexual expression constitutes the most private and central part of our self, and therefore represents the most vulnerable zone of our boundary awareness. It is quite reasonable that “. . . devel-opmentally inappropriate sexual experiences without . . . violence . . .”

might still constitute a threat to survival of the vulnerable child¹ (p. 424). In addition, the child’s caregiver(s) and immediate family provide the child with their intrinsic sense of self, and create their ini-tial sense of safe boundary with the world. Death, critical illness or in-jury, or even the threat of these events happening to those important individuals clearly represent to the child a threat to his or her own exis-tence. Even in adulthood, the meaning of those individuals in our life remains as it was as a child, and threats to the existence of our former caregivers remain a threat to our survival.

The most devastating form of traumatic stress therefore clearly occurs when caregivers, the intrinsic safe haven, the providers of our basic sense of boundaries, become the existential threat. When the maternal caregiver at times is also the raging and alcoholic abuser, when the lov-ing father is also the source of incest, molestation, or physical abuse, there is no safe haven and no safe boundary between the child and his or her outside world. The child’s perception of self is constricted and shrunken, with little residual buffer between what is perceived as a safe, bounded space and the unknowable threats of the external envi-ronment. As a result, it takes a much smaller or less intense perceived threat to create traumatic stress for such a child when the source of that threat is a caregiver. In the absence of a generous boundary, the child

Concepts of Traumatization: The Role of Boundaries 5

has lost resilience and the ability to test the world, to take risks in order to establish a healthy sense of self-perception. As this child approaches adulthood, stresses and threats that might be considered trivial tend to assume the proportions of threats to survival. This at least in part con-tributes to the well-known phenomena of vulnerability to trauma, and of retraumatization in these individuals.

The next line of defense, the next presumably safe line of boundary formation, lies within the expanding network of other members of our human species. As one progresses from less immediate family mem-bers, through close friends, neighborhoods, tribes, cultures, religions, and nations, the pivotal importance of these members of our human so-ciety to maintain our safe boundary perception gradually diminishes.

Eventually human members of other tribes, religions, or nations may represent mortal threats. Nevertheless, those members of the human species apart from our immediate caregivers who are still perceived to be close in their relationship to us represent to a significant degree a source of safe boundary perception. Therefore, traumatization may be especially severe when it is inflicted by any other human being.

Trauma resulting from rape, assault, and torture is known to be espe-cially devastating, probably because all of these acts represent a loss of sense of safety or boundary between us and members of our own spe-cies.

CONCLUSION

From a conceptual standpoint, then, we are defining trauma, or a traumatic event, as anything that represents a threat to our survival as a human being. The mechanism by which traumatic stress occurs is by impinging upon, or rupturing, that intangible but very real percep-tual boundary that separates our safe sense of self from the world around us. Although this, of course, is a theoretical model, it explains why the severity of trauma is worst with experiencing, less with wit-nessing, and least with learning about it—in other words, the closer the traumatic experience, the worse the damage. The boundary model explains why even lesser degrees of trauma inflicted by another per-son may be a mortal threat if that perper-son represents a vital resource in the formation of our safe boundaries. Finally, it illustrates the reasons why trauma is most devastating when it comes from persons or

events surrounding those persons who are the primary source of our safe boundary formation, our primary caregivers.

We specifically did not address the issue of the person’s response to a traumatic event, although as we shall see, that response is critical to the victim’s physiological response to that trauma, and its effect on his or her resulting well-being. We do not feel that fear or horror are necessary to the process of traumatization, but concur that helpless-ness is an intrinsic variable without which traumatization is unlikely to occur. The neurophysiological features of the response to trauma in a state of perceived helplessness forms the thesis for this book. As you will see, the concept of boundaries is also central to that thesis.

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Chapter 2