ABSTRACT
The idea of trauma and being traumatised has become increasingly employed in everyday language and also in clinical practice. Many people describe that they feel that they have been ‘traumatised’ by an event, or that certain events are traumatic. Traumatic states include the important feature that psychological processing, and importantly the ability to protect oneself and one’s loved ones in the future, may be incapacitated. From its inception, the issues of trauma and dissociation have been central to attachment theory. Danger, threat, safety and protection are the bases of attachment theory in that the function of parents or carers is to provide protection and comfort for the infant when they are threatened. Trauma and loss are in a sense the extreme ends of the general process whereby children in families require comforting and soothing.
