What Is Trauma?

I sometimes hear people ask, “I think I have trauma, but I’m not sure. How do I know if I have trauma?” I generally do not answer that question immediately. Instead, I respond by asking, “Why do you think you have trauma?” I know that something has compelled that person to come into my office. Something has become uncomfortable in their life, and I want to hear their explanation before I give mine.

Sometimes people can point to a specific event, such as an assault, an abusive relationship, a serious accident, or a combat deployment. Many others have a much more difficult time identifying what has compelled them to seek therapy. Some tell me they do not remember much about their childhood, that large portions of it seem blurry, or that they simply have a feeling that something happened to them.

Explicit and Implicit Memory

I describe this as the difference between explicit memory and implicit memory. Some people explicitly remember the events themselves. They can describe what happened, where it happened, and who was involved. Others carry in their bodies a sense that something happened, even though they cannot currently articulate or consciously remember all of it. They may react strongly to particular situations, relationships, tones of voice, or forms of conflict without fully understanding why. Their nervous system appears to remember something that their conscious mind cannot yet explain.

That does not necessarily mean there is a specific forgotten event waiting to be uncovered. It does mean that memory is more than a verbal account of the past. We also carry memory through emotional responses, bodily sensations, expectations, and patterns of behavior.

People Often Minimize Their Own Experiences

Another thing I frequently notice is that people try to minimize what happened to them. Some are hesitant even to use the word trauma because they know someone else who had it much worse. They may tell me that they were never physically beaten or sexually abused, as though those are the only experiences that can leave lasting wounds.

I encourage people to stop making those comparisons because their trauma is their trauma. I have worked with clients who experienced severe physical abuse, others who experienced sexual abuse, others who were verbally berated and humiliated without ever being touched physically, and others who were profoundly neglected. I can say unequivocally that each kind of abuse or neglect leaves its own kind of wound.

The issue is not whether someone else suffered more. The issue is what the experience taught your nervous system and how that learning now shows up in your relationships, your emotional reactions, and the way you experience the world.

The Story Often Begins Earlier

As people begin answering the question of what happened to them, or what they believe brought them into therapy, they frequently start somewhere in the middle of the story. They may point to an abusive relationship, panic attacks that began after a stressful period, a serious accident, or a combat deployment. Because the symptoms became obvious after that experience, they understandably assume that this is where the trauma began.

However, something we know well from both research and clinical experience is that most adults who had a secure, safe, and nurturing childhood are able to metabolize a trauma that occurs during adulthood, particularly if they receive adequate support afterward. The experience may destabilize and upset them for a period of time, to be sure. It may change them, and they may need time to grieve and make sense of what happened. But with support—and support is key—they are often able to process the experience, integrate it, and move forward.

We also know that people who experienced significant childhood adversity, insecure attachment, inadequate parenting, neglect, or abuse are more likely to develop post-traumatic symptoms after experiencing trauma as adults. The adult event matters, but it may not be the beginning of the story. It may instead be the most recent event in a much longer developmental history.

If the message of someone’s childhood was, “I am safe, I am loved, and I can trust,” then after an upsetting event in adulthood, that person may struggle with it for a while before eventually returning to some version of those earlier conclusions: sometimes bad things happen, but I am still loved, I can still depend on people, most people are genuinely good, and the world remains a reasonably safe place.

When the lessons of childhood were, “I am not safe, I am not adequately loved, I cannot trust people, and being seen is dangerous,” an adult trauma may simply confirm what the person’s earlier experiences had already taught them. When I explain this to clients, they will often respond with something like, “Yes. The reason I joined the Army was to get away from my family.” What initially looked like a story that began with a deployment turns out to have begun much earlier.

Three Ways Trauma Changes Us

When I explain trauma to clients, I usually describe three areas in which it changes them. Trauma changes how the nervous system responds, it changes the way memories are processed and stored in the brain, and it changes what we learn to believe about ourselves, other people, and the world around us.

Trauma Changes the Nervous System

A traumatized nervous system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. When something overwhelming happens, the nervous system shifts into survival mode and activates some version of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or collapse. These are adaptive responses to danger. In the environment that produced them, they were necessary.

The difficulty arises when the nervous system has not caught up with reality. The person is now objectively safe, but the nervous system continues responding as though the danger is still active. Logically, the person may know that the abusive relationship has ended, that the deployment is over, or that the threat is no longer present. Their body, however, continues preparing for something terrible to happen.

This is why one of the first questions in trauma therapy must be whether the person is genuinely safe today. If the person is still living in an unsafe environment, establishing safety has to come first. If the person is safe and the nervous system continues behaving as though danger is present, then part of the therapeutic work involves helping it update to current reality.

Trauma Changes How Memories Are Stored

The second area trauma affects is the way experiences are processed and stored as memories. Under ordinary circumstances, the hippocampus and other parts of the limbic system help organize recent, emotionally significant experiences. Because this activity is closely connected to the emotional and survival-oriented parts of the brain, recent memories can feel vivid, immediate, and emotionally charged.

Over time, as people think about what happened, talk about it, receive support, and make sense of the experience, the pattern of brain activity associated with the memory changes. The memory becomes more fully integrated into cortical networks that allow us to understand it as something that happened in the past. It becomes less immediate, less emotionally active, and more like part of our autobiographical history.

I sometimes describe this as moving a memory into “cold storage.” The memory has not disappeared, nor have the facts changed, but it has been filed away as information. We can retrieve it when necessary without responding as though the event is still happening.

Post-traumatic stress develops when this process does not adequately occur. That failure can happen for several reasons. A person may have remained in survival mode for too long. They may not have had adequate support. It may not have been safe to talk about what happened, or the adults around them may have denied, ignored, or minimized the experience.

In fact, some people who experienced complex trauma during childhood do not begin to manifest obvious post-traumatic symptoms until they leave the adverse environment and become objectively safe. While they were still in danger, the nervous system was occupied with survival. Only after reaching safety did the unprocessed material begin to emerge.

Trauma Changes What We Learn

The third area trauma changes is self-referential learning. Every emotional experience teaches us something. We chew on an experience and process it until we arrive at the lesson we believe we need in order to predict our world, protect ourselves, and remain safe. Once that learning has occurred, we can ordinarily file the experience away.

In situations that produce post-traumatic symptoms, this process can become distorted. Sometimes the lessons were accurate and necessary in the environment where they developed. A child may learn, “It is not safe to be seen,” “I should not express my needs,” or “I should avoid people.” Those beliefs may genuinely have helped the child survive an abusive or unpredictable environment.

The problem is that the person may now be safe. They may be living independently or participating in a secure relationship, yet their nervous system and belief system continue operating by rules that belonged to an earlier environment. In these cases, the beliefs are not necessarily irrational. They are outdated.

At other times, the conclusions drawn from developmental trauma are genuinely warped or distorted. A child may come to believe, “I deserved this,” “I was a problem child,” “I am unlovable,” or “People can never be trusted.” These beliefs are not accurate descriptions of the child or of the entire world, but they may nevertheless become deeply embedded. As adults, people continue organizing their lives and relationships around conclusions they reached while trying to survive circumstances they could not understand or control.

Trauma Does Not Have to Be Permanent

These changes in the brain, the nervous system, and a person’s belief system are not permanent. They are not set in stone. The encouraging news is that the brain continues to change and develop throughout life. Memories can be reprocessed, beliefs can be revisited, and a nervous system that has spent years preparing for danger can gradually develop a genuine felt sense of safety.

That process involves more than telling someone to think positively or reminding them that the danger is over. The rational mind may already understand that. Trauma therapy helps the emotional brain, the nervous system, and the person’s underlying beliefs begin to incorporate that reality as well.

Understanding how that happens is the next part of the conversation, and it is something we will explore in the articles that follow.