Trauma: What It Actually Is and Why It Stays

Trauma is a word that has found its way to the centre of the cultural lexicon. It is regularly spoken as part of our contemporary psychological vocabulary, and as a result, in certain contexts has become a ‘catch-all’ for any difficult experience. This has had an unintended effect of making people reluctant to use it for experiences that genuinely warrant it.

There is a tendency to disqualify one’s own experience: it was ‘not that bad’, others have ‘had it worse’, what happened ‘does not count’ as trauma.

 

What trauma actually is

Trauma is not defined by the event itself but by the impact of the event on our nervous systems. An experience becomes traumatic when it overwhelms our ordinary capacity to cope and integrate the experience. When what happens is too much, too fast, or too unexpected, the mind and body are unable to fully process what has happened in the moment. What is left after an experience is not a memory in the ordinary sense but something more like an unprocessed fragment: a piece of experience that has not quite been integrated into our narrative or bodily experience of the self. As a result, events and experiences remain active in the mind and body, rather than being processed and filed into the past.

This is why trauma symptoms (intrusive memories, hypervigilance, avoidance, emotional numbing) are not signs of weakness or irrational. They are our nervous system’s attempts to protect us against a threat that it has not yet registered as being over. The body does not realise that the event has ended and it continues to respond as if it is ongoing.

 

Big T and small t trauma

Clinical literature distinguishes between what is sometimes called big T trauma (a single, overwhelming event such as physical or sexual assault, an accident, disaster, or witnessed violence) and small t trauma. So called ‘Small t traumas’ refer to experiences that individually may be perceived as ‘less dramatic’ but cumulatively become extraordinarily significant. For example, chronic emotional neglect, persistent criticism, repeated experiences of humiliation or powerlessness, or growing up in an environment of chronic unpredictability or threat.

Small t trauma is often harder for people to identify in their lives because there is no single event to point to. You may not recognise your experience as traumatic at all. For you, it was perhaps ‘simply how things were’. But the impact on the nervous system, and on the patterns that develop in response (in childhood, through adolescence and into adulthood) can be as significant as any single traumatic event.

 

Why it stays

Trauma persists because the usual processes of memory consolidation (the way that our brains file and integrate experiences) are disrupted by overwhelming levels of stress. Traumatic experiences are stored differently to ordinary memories: they are more fragmented, more sensory, more easily activated by cues that remind us of the trauma situations. A smell, a tone of voice, or a physical sensation can all activate a traumatic memory in the present, with an immediacy that makes it feel as real as the day(s) it originally occured.

Avoidance of our trauma triggers tends to maintain rather than resolve our traumas. Our natural response to painful material is to stay away from it, but this prevents the brain's processing that would allow the traumatic events or experiences to become genuinely past rather than perpetually present.

 

What therapy can offer

Therapeutic approaches to trauma have developed significantly in recent decades, and there are now a variety of evidence-based methods for working with traumatic material in ways that are both effective and carefully paced. Good trauma therapy does not require revisiting the most painful material in graphic detail. It requires creating the conditions in which the nervous system can gradually process what it was not able to process at the time.

If you are carrying something that feels as present as it did when it first happened, whether it is a specific event or a longer history, and you would like to explore whether therapy might help, you are welcome to get in touch.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.