Traumas With and Without a Sense of Agency

The authors differentiate two types of traumatic experience: trauma with agency and trauma without agency. The types are different despite the fact that the symptoms of both look similar enough to fall within the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The differentiating factor is the sufferer's sense of agency during the circumstances surrounding the trauma. What is traumatizing is that the individual acted in some way that, however adaptive in the moment of threat and crisis, was ultimately loathed simultaneously or subsequently by the person's larger self and seen by this larger self as defining of character. Traumatized clients with a sense of agency require treatment that comes from being cared for and loved despite this hated facet of self.