Trauma

Trauma comes from the Greek word for injury (Cerney, in Pickett, 1998). The word trauma is used to describe events or situations experienced by the victim. Traumatic event or experience will be lived differently among individuals with one another, so everyone will have different reactions when faced with traumatic events. Traumatic experience is an event experienced or witnessed by individuals, which threatens the safety of himself (Lonergan, 1999). Therefore, it is a natural thing when someone is suffering from shock, both physically and emotionally as a reaction to the stress of traumatic events. Sometimes these aftershock effect only after a few hours, days or even weeks. Individual responses that occur commonly are feeling scared, helpless, or horrified. Symptoms and symptoms that appear depend on how severe the incident. Similarly, the way individuals deal with the crisis will depend also on the experience and their past history.

According to Stamm (1999), traumatic stress is a natural reaction to events that contain violence (like violence groups, rape, accidents and natural disasters) or in the life of the terrible conditions (such as poverty, deprivation, etc.). The condition is called post-traumatic stress (or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder / PTSD). According to Pickett (1998), there are two forms of symptoms experienced by the individual, namely: (1) the constant recollection of the incident or event, and (2) experience numbness or loss of individual responses to its environment. These conditions will further affect the function of individual adaptive to its environment. Often, the traumatic event would be very painful, so the help of experts will be needed to cope with trauma.