I take trauma to broadly include all those experiences that dismantle meaningmaking schema and call into question the social, cultural, and physical understandings of how differing bodies and identities fit into the larger world.
Alexander et al. (2004) go on to explain that trauma “is a socially mediated attribution” that in fact doesn’t have to occur at all; it must simply be imagined (8). In fact, while trauma can happen in real time, the attributions of trauma can happen before an event or after an event, as a “post-hoc reconstruction” (Alexander et al. 2004, 8).
An individual’s trauma cannot exist outside of the way that individual exists socially