This is Trauma

Talking about trauma with Caribbean people as a psychologist is a lot like jumping in the sea and asking the fish, “How’s the water?” and getting a response like “What’s this water thing he's talking about?”

 It’s the same parable related by the late philosophy professor David Foster Wallace’s speech titled “This is Water” wherein the point is that sometimes the “most obvious and important realities are the hardest to notice”. That is to say, omnipresence can be its own kind of camouflage.

 Stress and disorders of stress, particularly those that show up in communities defined by a history of trauma, tend to follow this pattern. It saturates every aspect of life, our bodies and indeed our minds and in so doing hides the toll it exacts from us. In my view, the first step to fighting trauma comes from the ability to render it visible by understanding its many shapes, and where it comes from.

Defining Trauma

Trauma refers to a disturbing event that overcomes a person’s stress-management system. It provokes a sense of overwhelm, internal collapse and ongoing distress that impacts one’s ability to function in life. Fundamentally, it is a type of change that your body and mind are exposed to, and to ensure your survival, all resources are mobilised to reestablish stability (Hood, 2025).

From this point, the four Fs (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) of survival activate. Here, freezing refers to a sudden paralysis that encompasses the body and mind in the face of danger, while fawning refers to desperate attempts to please the aggressor until the threat is gone (Knight, 2025). 

For persons living with trauma or experiencing chronic stress, this response does not turn off and instead shapes their lives and those around them. Prevalence rates for persons encountering a traumatic event in their life have been reported across multiple countries to be as high as 70% (Kessler et al. 2017). 

 Overt signs of trauma include -

●          Heightened emotion

●          Avoidance of people/thoughts

●          Intrusive memories and or difficulty recalling certain memories

●          Self-destructive and aggressive behaviours

Some subtle ways this can be seen include-

●          Feelings of detachment and estrangement from others

●          Persistent feelings of numbness

●          Tightly held negative beliefs about oneself, others or the world.

Part of the reason why this prevalence may be so high is that we are now understanding that war and near-death experiences are not the only circumstances that threaten overwhelm and danger to our basic sense of self.

Modern life brings many everyday stressors. Crime, financial insecurity, professional failure, peer humiliation, isolation, abandonment, and emotional neglect from close others, especially during moments of crisis, to name a few. They are our personal “tigers in the forest”, the scary faces in the gloom that haunt and terrorise.

The Caribbean- A Common Cultural DNA Shaped by Trauma

Caribbean history is the history of upheaval and resistance against the colonial violence that imposed and continues to impose the realities we struggle against.

Scholars have discussed the Caribbean as a region populated with the descendants of the longest holocaust against a group of people through the Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade (Hasan, 2020). This was a part of a long campaign of colonial violence wherein the sense of belonging, rights and freedoms of many peoples were stolen and replaced with alienation, deprivation and torment. 

We all have inherited communities rocked by and continually shaken by chronic trauma. Some examples of recognised forms of this community-wide trauma include cultural eradication, indoctrination (Hasan 2020), unwanted migration, discrimination, poverty, domestic violence,  and substance abuse (King, 2022).

 Hood (2024), in his commentary on the research on communities impacted by intergenerational trauma experienced by African-Americans, described the atmosphere of these communities as marked by vacant/low self-esteem, ever-present anger and internalised racism/inferiority.

Chances are that you are a few generations removed from someone who has had to wrestle with this type of chronic trauma. If not, maybe you live in a community where you see trauma translated into culture in the people around you. This fight for survival consumes our awareness and can lead us to ignore the scars left behind.

Dear reader, we ignore these scars to our own detriment as the strain of trauma touches not just our lives, but our children’s as well. In the sister article to this post, we will explore exactly why and how we can explore fighting these harms.

Brandon Koo, M.Sc., Registered Psychologist