Acute stress affects people differently – All stress is a mix of environment and perception. As a result, people are able to shrug off some threats and close encounters easily, whereas other threats are harder and may have a greater negative effect.
Traumatic Stress lives within the psychological framework of cultural realities and in the person’s internalizations and intrapsychic representations of those realities. That means that culture and the way culture has been internalized inside us will frame the meaning of a traumatic event. We will extract meaning of an event that can be shaped by our the messages we have heard about ourselves from our larger community context. For example, there are implicit meanings we extract about ourselves from our family, community, and large institutions. For decades psychologists defined measures of masculinity and measures of femininity as measures of mental health.
Culture has always effected and shaped our gendered experiences. These experiences influence our responses to traumatic stress. All of us come to identify ourselves as gendered beings and those self-identifications shape how we will see ourselves in a traumatic event.