Crisis Awareness and Communication in Peer Support: Post Traumatic Growth Self-assessment
Experiencing something traumatic can have a profound effect on your life. It changes the way you think, feel, and experience life on a daily basis. The difficult part of defining trauma is that
there’s really an unlimited number of things you can experience as being traumatic.
The key to understanding the definition of trauma is that it’s not really the event that happens
to you that matters, it’s how you experienced that event that matters.
The best definition of trauma is any experience that overwhelms your thoughts, emotions, or
body.
Trauma is a very personal experience. How you remember an event can be very different from
how someone else experienced the very same thing.
You can see this when two children are raised in the same home, with the same parents and
siblings, and have very different memories or experiences of what it was like growing up in the
same family.
Please rate yourself on how comfortable you are discussing certain types of traumatic
experiences. You will use a scale from 1-10.
• Rating yourself a “1” means I cannot think about this let alone talk about this in a work setting.
• Rating yourself a “10” means I can talk about this easily without strong emotional responses.