Although everyone encounters many intensely upsetting and stressful situations during the course of their lives, not many of these would be considered traumatic events. An experience can be described as traumatic when a person’s normal ability to cope has been completely overwhelmed by a terrible event.

There are many ways in which traumas can occur. Usually, an event would be considered traumatic if a person had experienced or been a witness to an event that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury. There might also have been a threat to this Person's or other people's physical integrity, so that they feared physical harm would come to them. This threat could have been so overwhelming that the person would have experienced intense fear, helplessness or horror, at least some of the time during the event. Sometimes the after-effects of a trauma can even be experienced as more traumatic than the initial traumatic event itself, for example if a person suffers serious injuries, which require one or more painful and life-threatening operations. In addition, other people's unhelpful responses after a traumatic event can sometimes be further sources of traumatization - if others cast blame on the person or if there is an expectation that they should recover from an event far quicker than they are actually able to.

(C.Herbert & A.Wetmore "Overcoming Traumatic Stress")

(Faure - "Pavane")