Key Concepts

• The central shift: from 'What's wrong with you?' to 'What happened to you?'
• The Three E's: Event, Experience, Effect — why two people can experience the same thing differently
• The brain under threat: amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and why the thinking brain goes offline
• Fight, flight, freeze, fawn — automatic survival responses, never choices
• The Window of Tolerance — and how trauma shrinks it
• The ACE Study: childhood adversity and adult health outcomes
• SAMHSA's six principles: Safety, Trust, Peer Support, Collaboration, Empowerment, Cultural Humility
• Trauma-informed care is not therapy — it's a way of seeing and responding to people