Adversity: Serious or continued difficulty; a negative experience. Often used interchangeably with the term Trauma. 

Burnout: Depletion of physical or emotional strength or motivation, resulting from prolonged work-related stress.

Compassion Fatigue: A secondary traumatic stress response resulting from absorption of trauma and emotional stresses of others. Symptoms may mimic PTSD or burnout.

Containment: Act of receiving or holding another’s emotions. May function to alleviate anxiety and facilitate processing of emotions.

Implicit Bias: Unfair feeling or dislike of a person or group, often not consciously recognized.

Moral Injury: Distress resulting from perpetrating, failing to prevent, or witnessing an event that contradicts one’s own moral beliefs.

Positive and Adverse Childhood Events: Experiences or aspects of one’s environment during childhood (age 0-17 years) that reinforce (positive) or undermine (adverse) one’s sense of safety, stability, and bonding, with lifelong effects on physical and mental health.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): a condition that develops in some people who have experienced a shocking, scary, or dangerous event resulting from prolonged activation of a typical brain-body reaction meant to protect a person from harm.

Regulation: Biological and emotional processes to adapt to change while maintaining a stable internal environment. Emotional Regulation involves the intensity with which emotions are felt, experienced, and expressed. Neurophysiologic regulation occurs through the autonomic nervous system.

Resilience: Ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune or change.

Secondary Trauma: Acute emotional and psychological duress resulting from exposure to the details of another’s traumatic experience (e.g., hearing someone recount a traumatic experience). Symptoms may mimic PTSD.

Strengths-Based Language: Choice of terms to describe a person which emphasizes the individual’s dignity, unique qualities and strengths rather than focusing on their deficits or illness.

Structural Trauma: Emotional damage from inequity enforced through public policies, institutional practices, cultural images, and behaviors which are built into the structure of the culture, and which reinforce social inequity.

Trauma: Events or circumstances experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening that have lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and well-being.

Trauma-Informed Care: Care which acknowledges that understanding a person’s life experiences and partnering with the person in the treatment process is key to quality care and improving health outcomes.

Traumatic Stress Response: A range of responses along a continuum following exposure to a trigger. A person may experience a fight-flight-freeze response physical, emotional and cognitive symptoms. These symptoms are from activation of the autonomic nervous system. (National Center for PTSD)

Universal Trauma Precautions: Shaping policy, practice and organizational culture around the expectation that trauma is common in the lives of individuals being served and all who work for the organization.

Vicarious Trauma: Cumulative psychological and emotional effects of repeated exposure to other people’s trauma over time.

Window of Tolerance: The optimal arousal zone between hypo-arousal (parasympathetic immobilization) and hyper-arousal (sympathetic “fight or flight” response) within which a person can function and process stimuli most effectively.