Trauma: What it Is, and What it Isn’t
"The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems … this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions. Healing requires a connection with the body."
-Bessel van der Kolk
This powerful quote from trauma researcher Dr. Bessel van der Kolk is where we begin - because if trauma lives in the body, then healing can’t be just about changing thoughts - it has to include the body too.
To truly understand the human condition, it's vital to understand the basics of trauma. What it is, and what it isn't. Trauma is more than what happened to you. It's about what you needed and didn't receive in the aftermath.
It’s easy to think of trauma as something rare or extreme, but trauma is not limited to war zones, assaults, or catastrophic accidents. It’s a widespread, often invisible force that shapes how we perceive the world, relate to others, and regulate our emotions. Trauma can result from personal loss, relational ruptures, cultural and systemic oppression, or the absence of safety and attunement during vulnerable moments.
Understanding trauma requires rethinking it not as a fixed event, but as a disruption to the nervous system's ability to return to balance. This disruption means your body struggles to reset after stress - it gets stuck in "fight, flight, or freeze" mode. That disruption is tied to our unmet attachment needs. When these needs go unmet after distress, the wound deepens and festers, and the nervous system becomes dysregulated. That's when trauma lingers.
How Trauma Distorts Attachment
Trauma distorts what feels safe and what feels threatening. It clouds perception and warps emotional responses.
Without safety, we live in hypervigilance.
Without acknowledgment, we feel unseen.
Without understanding, shame takes root.
Without clarity, we spin in confusion and self-doubt.
Without comfort, we struggle to self-soothe.
Without space, we either shut down or cling too tightly.
These disruptions in safety occur across all six levels of attachment. Let’s focus with a relational example here:
One client, a high-achieving professional, described feeling abandoned and furious when her partner forgot a small errand she explicitly asked for. The task itself was trivial, but her reaction wasn’t, the magnitude of her upset catching her partner by surprise. As we explored it, the moment tapped into a lifetime of suppressed needs for reliability, acknowledgment, and care. The blow-up wasn't really about the errand - it was about years of emotional labor and unmet needs suddenly erupting like a volcano.
This is what trauma does: it hijacks the present with the residue of the past.
Defining Trauma Accurately
There’s a difference between something that is painful and something that is traumatic.
Trauma is not watching a disturbing film or getting ghosted after a first date. Those are upsetting, but they rarely alter your nervous system’s long-term capacity for balance and regulation. Trauma, in contrast, leaves a lasting imprint. It’s marked by persistent dysregulation, a loss of felt safety, and lasting changes in emotional or relational functioning.
The symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), such as intrusive memories, avoidance, hyperarousal, or negative changes in mood, must not only be present, but must also disrupt a person’s ability to function in daily life. Examples include:
Difficulty maintaining close relationships
Inability to concentrate at work or school
Social withdrawal or isolation
Avoiding public places or activities once enjoyed
Frequent conflict with family or coworkers
Loss of interest in goals, hobbies, or self-care
Trauma is defined by how those symptoms disrupt daily life. To meet clinical criteria, a diagnosis is rendered by a licensed professional who determines that symptoms cause significant interference with a person’s ability to function, whether in relationships, at work, or in basic day-to-day tasks.
Clinically, we often distinguish between:
Big T trauma: major events like assaults, disasters, or war.
Commonly linked to PTSD
Little t trauma: relational trauma such as repeated emotional neglect, inconsistent caregiving, or chronic invalidation.
Linked to Complex PTSD, also known as cPTSD
While the main U.S. diagnostic manual (DSM-5-TR) doesn’t yet formally recognize Complex PTSD (cPTSD), it’s a vital concept. Often, people with complex trauma are misdiagnosed with other issues like anxiety or depression, missing the deeper problem of attachment wounds. However, the ICD-11, a global diagnostic system used by the World Health Organization, takes a more modern approach. It clearly names cPTSD as a distinct condition, shaped by long-lasting relational trauma.
This recognition is incredibly important because it affirms what many already know in their bones: recovering from long-term relational wounds is real and deserves specific care. Unlike PTSD, which often focuses on fear from a single event, cPTSD often involves a distorted self-concept, difficulty managing emotions, and ongoing trouble trusting or connecting with others.
Recognizing this distinction is essential. It reinforces our earlier point: trauma isn't merely about the event itself, but profoundly shaped by what was missing in its aftermath.
Take a moment to reflect: Have there been moments in your life that felt overwhelming not just because of what happened, but because no one was able to help or understand you afterward?
Trauma and the Nervous System
Today, we understand that trauma is nervous system dysregulation, deeply embedded in the body. It’s not in our heads. No one chooses their pain, and you can’t think your way out of it.
Recall that according to Polyvagal Theory, nervous systems respond to threat in three ways:
Ventral vagal (connection and calm)
Sympathetic (fight or flight)
Dorsal vagal (shutdown or freeze)
Trauma often locks people into a state of intense activation (like slamming on your body’s gas pedal, constantly in "fight or flight" mode) or complete shutdown (like yanking the emergency brake, going numb or "freezing"). These states are far outside their natural window of tolerance - the comfortable zone where your nervous system can handle life's ups and downs. They either overreact to minor stressors or go numb in the face of conflict. Regulation becomes difficult, and attachment needs feel unsafe to express or impossible to receive.
What Relational Trauma Feels Like
Think of relational trauma like trying to drive with a windshield that’s been smeared with dirt, cracked from impact, and fogged over. Even when the road is safe, it’s hard to see clearly. You strain, second-guess, and brace for danger that may not be there.
The experience of this is exhaustion, chronic anxiety, and feeling disconnected.
Many people normalize this state. They keep driving, adapting to a life where high alert is the default. Over time, there are high costs to their emotional, physical, and relational life. The difficulty in function is an opportunity cost, meaning missed chances to engage more fully in life. These costs might include avoiding social gatherings where they could make connections, declining a promotion at work, or not wanting to deepen a personal relationship because of shame. If the trauma didn’t exist, they’d have the bandwidth to engage more fully.
Trauma often masquerades as everyday struggles, but it’s much deeper.
Self: A high-achieving professional appears confident but lives in constant self-doubt, and obsessively checks their work. Their body holds chronic tension, their inner critic never rests, and receiving acknowledgement feels foreign.
Relationships: A partner freezes during conflict, not because they don’t care, but because their nervous system interprets disagreement as danger. They pull away just when comfort and clarity is most needed, leaving both people lonelier.
Community: A young adult from an immigrant family drifts from group to group, never quite feeling at home. Past rejection has taught them to hide their full self. They show up smiling, but inside yearn for acknowledgement, understanding, and safety.
Society: A woman of color hesitates to advocate for herself at work. Past experiences with discrimination taught her that speaking up risks backlash. Her body braces daily where others move with ease. She wants acknowledgement, clarity, and safety.
World: A climate-conscious man, whose early life was uprooted when the family farm was seized to build a highway, feels overwhelmed by news headlines. Even joyful moments are eclipsed by thoughts of collapse. Lacking clarity, comfort, and safety, he becomes depressed.
Spirit: She was raised to believe sex outside of marriage was sinful. Years later, even in a loving relationship, she feels a wave of shame and fear after intimacy. Her partner doesn’t respect her need for space and understanding, and she yearns for more clarity in her spiritual life.
Collective Trauma
Trauma's reach extends far beyond the individual, impacting entire groups and shaping our connections across all six levels of attachment. This is collective trauma: a shared wound affecting communities, cultures, and even humanity on a global scale.
We see this in the painful legacy of slavery and systemic racism for Black Americans, or the generational echoes of the Holocaust and displacement for Jewish people. Many other communities also carry inherited pain from events like colonization, forced migration, or even religious exile. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic left a global imprint on our sense of safety and trust.
Collective trauma forces entire groups into a state of survival. Even without directly experiencing the original event, its effects can be inherited biologically, emotionally, and relationally through a process called epigenetics (Yehuda & Bierer, 2009; Yehuda et al., 2016). This field of study reveals how environmental experiences - especially stress, deprivation, or danger - can "switch" genes on or off without altering the DNA itself. These epigenetic changes can then be passed down through generations, influencing stress responses, hormone regulation, and even immune function (Golubeva et al., 2024).
For example, research has shown these inherited imprints in descendants of Holocaust survivors (Yehuda et al., 2016), Indigenous communities impacted by colonization (Brave Heart, 2003; Gone & Trimble, 2012), and children of refugees or enslaved peoples. The trauma literally lives in both memory and physiology, affecting how easily individuals access states of calm or threat. Depending on your ancestral background, this might explain unexplained hypervigilance or struggles with safety, identity, or belonging that reflect not just your personal story, but a profound historical one.
As you think about your own story, does your family history or cultural background hold pain that feels alive in your body even now?
Reclaiming Safety: Healing from the Inside Out
While we can't always change society or our past, the incredible news is we can begin to heal and repair from the inside out. That starts with self-attunement: recognizing your triggers, listening to your body, and responding to unmet attachment needs with compassion rather than shame.
It also means understanding that trauma often fragments our inner world. It creates different "parts" of you: some that hold fear, others that bravely protect you, and still others that might make you shut down, try to please everyone, or do everything perfect. These parts aren't broken, weird, or wrong - they are incredible adaptations, smart survival strategies your system created to handle overwhelming stress.
These parts can be understood, comforted, and reintegrated. In the next blog, we’ll meet these inner protectors and exiles - and explore how to bring them comfort, clarity, and the sense of safety they’ve been waiting for.
“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” - Peter A. Levine
