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Fundamentals of Working With
(Re)traumatized Populations

Yael Danieli

Introduction

This book is about collaboration between mental health and spiritual
care providers working in disasters, and this chapter is included to pro-
vide a background for understanding how disasters may “reactivate” vari-
ous prior forms of trauma so that disaster responders will be prepared to
understand how the crisis they are responding to may be complicated by
the presence of unresolved previous traumatic experience. In this chapter,
I use retraumatization to denote all the categories mentioned below.
Retraumatization is defined herein as one’s reaction to a traumatic expo-
sure that is colored, intensified, amplified, or shaped by one’s reactions
and adaptational style (Danieli, 1985) to previous traumatic experiences.
In the literature and in differing contexts, one can find this phenomenon
and its effects variously referred to as additive or cumulative trauma, rev-
ictimization, reactivation, reexperiencing, and reliving.
A potentially useful distinction is among retraumatization denoting
(a) the same trauma repeated over and over again, such as in recurring
instances of child abuse and rape; (b) the occurrence of a new and different
trauma from the past, original one, such as a flood happening to an adult
who had been exposed to abuse as a child (see Moinzadeh, 1998); and (c)
normative life transitions or events that are experienced as traumatic by
previously traumatized individuals, such as the reaction of a genocide sur-
vivor mother to her adult daughter leaving for college, a torture survivor’s
panic in response to a necessary medical examination, or WW II veterans

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