ABSTRACT
Traumatic events such as these are profoundly disturbing and, unsurprisingly, they have the capacity to seriously compromise the mental health of those who experience them or who they directly affect. Indeed, it is common for people who endure extreme trauma to report the experience as 'life changing'. In particular, it would appear that there is considerable scope for these models to be enriched by a theoretical framework which recognises the social dimensions of trauma and resilience as also lying at the heart of the process. The first, and most important, is that when trauma has an adverse psychological impact, this is because it fundamentally compromises a person's social sense of self and their relationship to the world at large. Indeed, in ways that are not immediately obvious in the case of more general stressors , we would argue that problems created by trauma can therefore often be understood as problems of social identity.
