The Relativity of Trauma
I came into this work with a deep reverence for people’s stories. I’ve always been fascinated by what shapes a person into who they are. Perhaps it’s my own way of grasping for safety and certainty in an uncertain world.
This fascination—read: hyperfixation—led me to pursue not only becoming a licensed therapist but a certification in complex clinical trauma. I believe that so much of the pain people carry stems from just that: trauma. It’s often the underlying reason people seek therapy—to heal, to make sense of what’s happened, and to understand how they relate to themselves and the world around them.
Research from the National Institute of Mental Health claims that approximately 70–90% of people will experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. While some individuals recover without lasting effects, others may go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or experience trauma-related symptoms that do not meet the full diagnostic criteria for PTSD (van der Kolk, 2000).
Psychotherapist and trauma expert, Janina Fisher, refers to these lingering effects as a “living legacy” of trauma. This legacy can show up as a range of symptoms: depression, anxiety, addiction or compulsive behaviors, dissociation, estrangement from family, loss of identity, social withdrawal, emotional numbness, difficulty concentrating, insomnia, disordered eating, shame, self-loathing, or a pervasive sense of hopelessness, among others.
Too often, the mental health field focuses first on just the symptoms—diagnosing and treating what we can see or what we’re told. "This person is reporting depressive symptoms, so they must be depressed," we think. Well, yes—and also, what’s driving the depression? What’s fueling the addiction? Medication is frequently the first line of defense: antidepressants, benzodiazepines, mood stabilizers, stimulants. While these can be incredibly helpful, they’re often just a band-aid. True healing requires us to dig deeper—to address the root causes beneath the surface.
The challenge with trauma—especially for the person who has experienced it—is that it’s not always easy to connect the dots between symptom and event, especially if we’re not asking the right questions. Trauma can shape a person’s identity and worldview so deeply that it becomes hard to distinguish the wound from the self. We normalize our behavior patterns because they’re all we’ve ever known: “I’m not safe anywhere.” “I can’t trust anyone.” “I’m just an angry person.” “I don’t like people.” “I’m a loser—I’m worthless.” (Fisher, 2017).
This shaping process is what psychiatrist, educator and researcher, Dan Siegel describes as a kind of internal "plateau"—a subconscious filter through which we interpret our external experience of the world, often without conscious awareness. Traumatic memories are typically stored as fragmented sensations and emotions rather than as coherent stories. What remains is a “felt” memory—raw emotion and bodily sensation—that silently shapes our sense of self, our relationships, and our well-being.
However you choose to interpret your past, one thing is certain: it has left a mark—whether you can clearly identify it or not. And if we are to move toward healing, we must start by understanding trauma itself.
Trauma is an emotional response to an event, a series of events, or enduring conditions that involve a real or perceived threat to life, bodily integrity, or emotional safety. These experiences often evoke feelings of fear, helplessness, and powerlessness, and can have long-lasting negative effects on the psyche (American Psychological Association, 2025).
Trauma is a big, heavy word. When we hear it, we often think of the extremes: physical or sexual abuse, war, terrorism, serious accidents, or natural disasters. These are what many in the mental health field refer to as “big T” traumas—clear, dramatic, and often easier to recognize and validate. But there are also less obvious experiences—moments we might not immediately identify as traumatic—that are often referred to as “little t” traumas. These can include emotional neglect, bullying, exclusion, humiliation, the loss of a relationship, divorce, chronic illness, death or grief. While these experiences may be more common and widely shared, they can still leave emotional scars that run just as deep.
Depending on your perspective, you could argue that all trauma has the potential to be a “big T”—and I would agree. Ultimately, trauma is relative. Its impact depends on timing, vulnerability, and a host of other factors. For instance, imagine an infant being left alone for five hours. This experience would not only be traumatic but also life-threatening, as an infant is entirely dependent on others to meet its basic needs. In contrast, a 5-year-old left alone for the same amount of time would still experience significant distress, but the situation may not be life-threatening. At that age, a child might be able to meet some of their own needs, such as finding food or using the bathroom, which reduces their level of vulnerability. Development, environment, and culture all influence how trauma is perceived and processed.
Fisher (2017) explains that because children rely so heavily on their caregivers for safety, they are especially vulnerable to trauma resulting from frightening or neglectful parenting, separation, abandonment, exposure to violence, or witnessing abuse. Even when children don’t directly experience trauma themselves, they can still inherit its emotional residue—particularly in families affected by parental PTSD. This phenomenon is known in the research as intergenerational transmission (Norrholm et al., 2009). For example, studies of adult children of Holocaust survivors with PTSD found that they exhibited lower baseline cortisol levels and greater cortisol suppression compared to children of survivors without PTSD. Similar patterns emerged in studies of pregnant women exposed to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These disruptions in stress hormone regulation can be passed down biologically, shaping the next generation’s sensitivity to stress and trauma. Lower cortisol levels impair the body’s ability to regulate stress, increasing vulnerability to PTSD. In such cases, our neural circuitry is shaped by experience—and trauma becomes a legacy (Fisher, 2017).
Trauma can also impact brain structures—particularly the hippocampus, which plays a key role in memory consolidation, and gray matter, which supports various functions including cognition, emotional regulation, and decision-making. In people with PTSD, the hippocampus often shrinks. Animal studies show that reduced hippocampal activity makes the brain more likely to misinterpret neutral stimuli as threats, triggering the fight-or-flight response (Van der Kolk, 2000). Van der Kolk (2000) suggests the same may be true for humans, where altered brain functioning contributes to dissociation, misreading social cues, and reacting with aggression or withdrawal—often in ways shaped by personality and coping patterns.
There have been moments throughout my career when a client walks into my office and confidently says they have no trauma—that their childhood was perfect. And while that may be true for some, it’s not the norm. Often, those same individuals struggle to access their emotions or to understand how or why they feel a certain way. For them, expressing emotions likely wasn’t safe in childhood. This is why I believe we need to move away from categorizing experiences as “big” or “little” trauma. Trauma is trauma. If an experience has had a lasting negative impact on your psyche, then it matters. Dismissing something as “small” only adds shame. It sends the message that what hurt you isn’t valid—or worthy of healing.
Dr. Francine Shapiro put it best: “Just because an event doesn’t meet the criteria of being ‘horrendous’ to an adult doesn’t matter. If you think back to that childhood humiliation, you’ll realize it’s a common event—everyone has them—and yet for many, it has a lasting negative effect. That’s because, even though it may seem small from an adult perspective, to a child, it was not small.”
One of the most important things to understand about trauma is that it’s not just about what happened. It’s about what didn’t happen—the safety we should have felt but didn’t, the attunement and care we needed but lacked, the moments of connection we were denied. It’s about the childhood we should’ve had but will never get back. Grief then becomes twofold: grieving both the events that hurt us and the losses that were never even given a name.
I’m not here to normalize trauma or to say that what you endured is “just a part of life.” What I am here to do is normalize the lasting impact of it. Symptoms of trauma may not always look like depression, addiction, or social withdrawal. They also look like getting stuck in the same unhealthy relationships over and over, feeling like you’re a prisoner of your own mind, difficulty emotionally connecting with others, no sense of agency or ability to trust yourself, or repetitive self-sabotage. But what if I told you it didn’t have to be this way? What if I told you that you could unshackle yourself and engage with life on your terms? Healing is possible, but it begins with curiosity—curiosity about our internal world: our thoughts, emotions, and body sensations, and how those filter through to our external world. This is one of the most courageous acts we can offer ourselves. It is the gateway to our freedom.
References:
American Psychological Association. (2025). https://www.apa.org/topics/trauma.
Bessel van der Kolk (2000) Posttraumatic stress disorder and the nature of trauma, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 2:1, 7-22, DOI: 10.31887/DCNS.2000.2.1/bvdkolk
Fisher, J. (2017). Working with the Neurobiological Legacy of Trauma, Certified Clinical Trauma Professional Training.
Norrholm, S. D., & Ressler, K. J. (2009). Genetics of anxiety and trauma-related disorders. Neuroscience, 164(1), 272-287.
Shapiro, F. (2012) Getting past your past: Take control of our life with self- help techniques from EMDR therapy. New York: Rodale Press.
