Trauma is having a moment.

Trauma is having its moment right now. It’s basking in the limelight of everyday conversation. A solid contender for a drinking game every time the word is dropped. Akin to ‘coach’ and ‘coaching’ back in the day before it was used and abused by many, now left to those with the real embodied experience to salvage what’s left of its credibility. Trauma is now being dangled with as little understanding. 

The ubiquity of the word tells us much needed awareness is ramping up for something that concerns most of us, if not all of us (I’ll get to that a little later). The problem or concern is how that trickles down into trauma literacy and understanding. Not because trauma is this very serious matter as much as it is perhaps the greatest doorway into ourselves. Often framed as a grand misfortune, trauma in fact holds the most profound gift.  

Trauma is not the event. 

You’ve probably heard this before, and if you haven’t it’s perhaps the most important distinction when speaking of trauma. Trauma is not the event, it’s how the body responds to the event. Said another way; trauma is not what happened to you, it’s what happened (and continues to happen) inside of you in response. Too much of the conversation surrounding trauma is fraught with focus on the incident or the person involved when in fact it has little to do with the event and everything to do with our internal capacity to regulate in the face of external stress, big or small. 

When we say trauma is not the event, this isn’t a way to absolve the need to validate the experience that happened. It is however to understand that in the absence of safety, in the absence of somatic attunement to what is coming for us, in the absence of proper containment by a caregiver or self, the body holds on to the contraction. It fails to metabolize the event and thus lives with the incomplete response within. Sensations are given meaning and bucketed into binaries of good and bad, or perhaps bypassed altogether, and from there our responses start to shape our view and way of being in the world. What trauma does is essentially stripping us of the internal capacity for choice. 

This is why any trauma work that focuses on what happened without addressing the nervous system, without addressing the habituated trauma responses that live in the body, the somaticized symptoms, shapes, meaning and sensations we take on, is limited and fractional at best. 

More than that, instead of supporting the person, it further perpetuates the issue by placing them as a helpless victim in the face of a past event that is impossible to change. When we bring the body’s response into our comprehension of trauma, we now hold the key to alchemize the experience into our own growth and evolution. We are no longer victims or resilient survivors, we are now creators of our own experience. We are empowered with choice and agency to shape our lives. 

The gift inside trauma

This reframe in the understanding of trauma is where the opportunity lies. Once the event is given adequate recognition, we move deeper. The alchemical opportunity in meeting our internal experience with the tools to move through it to a more integrated version of ourselves. The work becomes less of digging into our past, and more about building capacity for our present. The magic lies in inviting more elasticity to our nervous system responses. To turn towards ourselves carrying the fear but proceeding anyway with curiosity because we now know that it is all possible from within. Our body is capable of healing, of change, of choice, of follow through when provided with the conditions and containment to soften and relax into its full experience without inhibition. It takes us away from the trauma response of limited choice, to one of boundless choices.

I say trauma is a gift because instead of pathalogizing as we often do with any new discovery, we can see that all of life (and the experiences they hold for us) are doorways into a version of ourselves that is capable of experiencing more life. More aliveness. More capacity for joy, pleasure, sadness, and pain. More connection. Instead of making trauma the new hot diagnosis, we refuse to fall into that trap all together. 

Yes trauma is worthy of a lot of attention. It carries with it jarring experiences that are arguably best not experienced, but trauma is not the end point, it’s the starting point. It offers us one of two choices metabolize it and evolve, or identify with it and remain.

Beyond semantics

If trauma isn’t the event, then the distinction of big T and little t that is often spoken of when addressing trauma is rather redundant. Two people can experience the same event and proceed to interpret it and live with it differently depending on their capacity for regulation with self, others, or environment. It also means that trauma follows no particular hierarchy in terms of quality of experiences, both require the same level of somatic attunment and safety to repair. 

Some might need more time, more tools, greater support, and an environment that doesn’t perpetuate the issue (a turbulent home environment or war-zone) but the outcome is the same. A learnt process of reestablishing connection, of sourcing safety and resilience from within. 

Maybe we’ll eventually find a better word for trauma, one that doesn’t carry a lot of charge and preconceived notions, but if trauma is anything, it is a learnt behaviour that lives in our body. Ways we’ve learnt to shutdown, fight, disassociate, please, hold in, resist in the face of an external stimuli. And that learnt behavior could have been born and nurtured in response to seemingly insignificant events, yet if there’s anything to take away from this is that any internal response is significant and worthy of attention.