Trauma is an injury that has the potential to severely negatively affect an individual, whether physically or psychologically.
[1] An adverse experience that is unexpected, painful, extraordinary, and shocking results in interruptions in ongoing processes or relationships and may also create maladaptive responses.
The 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfire in Alberta was a collective trauma for not only that local community but also the large Canadian province of Alberta despite causing no direct deaths[7] yet the much larger Peshtigo Fire responsible for thousands of deaths is largely forgotten.
[9] The former peoples of the Confederate South in the American Civil War and the German Empire in World War I both created post-war mythologies (the Lost Cause in the former and the Stab-in-the-back Myth in the latter) of "glorious" defeat in unfair fights.
[9] The post-war experience of Germany after World War Two, however, is much more complex and provoked reactions from a sense of German national guilt[10] to collective ignorance.