It’s Time We Talk About Trauma

Not the dramatic kind. The kind most of us are carrying without a name for it.

It was 2013, and I was in another rut.

I had already been coaching for four years — after taking the slow and risky leap from running a digital marketing firm to living into my purpose. I believed what all the hype and platitudes told me: do what you love, live your passions, be the change, and you will not only love your life but be rewarded greatly for it.

I was doing what I loved. I was being the change. And somehow, my anxiety was through the roof and I fell into a deep depression. Again.

WTF?

What dulled some of the suffering during that time was my obsessive pursuit of trying to figure out what was actually wrong with me. I can see now that the obsessive studying and learning was one of my survival strategies — and I can also see how strongly I held the belief that I was just fundamentally flawed. Wrong. Inadequate. Invalid.

Was it my absolutely ruthless inner critic? Was it genetic? And why so much pain? It wasn’t enough that I suffered emotionally, mentally, and spiritually — my body was screaming from within. Conditions I kept quiet from almost everyone. Hiding. That’s another survival strategy I’m good at.

I wanted to list all the troubling and painful issues that burdened me over the years — but I’m too embarrassed to share the full list. I could go through the alphabet: allergies, anemia, ankylosing spondylitis, anxiety, asthma — I’ll stop at the A’s and spare us both.

While researching and studying everything I could find, something kept surfacing. From anxiety to pain to depression — it could all be traced back to one root. But I resisted it for years. Until I read these words in 2014:

“Life events can generate at least as many PTSD symptoms as traumatic events.”
~ Saskia S Mol et al (2005)

It was a lightbulb moment. A momentary floodlight, actually — though it took me years to let it fully sink in.

Could it really be trauma?

It took several more years of study and practice, and eventually therapy, to accept that indeed it was. It is.

And once I did — once I stopped dismissing my own experience as insufficient evidence — everything began to make a different kind of sense. Not a comfortable sense. But a true one.

And truth, even when it’s hard, is relieving in a way that nothing else quite is.

Maybe You Recognize Some of This

Perhaps you haven’t thought of your experience as trauma. Most people don’t. The word carries a weight that feels like it belongs to someone else — someone who survived something more dramatic, more obvious, more catastrophic than what you went through.

But what if the threshold is lower than you think? What if the chronic stress, the relentless pressure, the unresolved pain, the sense of never quite being enough — what if all of that has been doing something to you, quietly, over time? Reshaping how you see yourself, how you relate to others, how safe you feel in your own skin?

What if you’ve been carrying something you never had a name for — and that absence of a name has made it harder to take seriously, harder to address, harder to heal?

This is what I want to talk about. Not to pathologize your experience or add another diagnosis to the pile — but to offer something that I wish someone had offered me much earlier: language, understanding, and the quiet relief of being seen accurately.

“Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.“

What Trauma Actually Is

Most people think of trauma as an overwhelming event — a violent act, an accident, a war, a disaster. Something dramatic. Something that would clearly qualify.

But trauma isn’t the event. It’s a dynamic, unfolding process that happens within a person — one that alters them, often without their awareness, and has far-reaching effects on how they experience themselves, others, and life.

You can live through something that wouldn’t register as catastrophic by any external measure and still be profoundly changed by it. And you can carry that change for decades, assuming it’s just who you are.

This field has been studied seriously and rigorously by some of the most important minds in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine. Their work matters — not as academic apparatus, but as validation. As proof that what you’ve been experiencing has been seen, named, and understood by people who dedicated their lives to understanding it.

Gabor Maté

“Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. It induces fear, and now you’re acting out of fear. It’s the scarring that makes you less flexible, more rigid, less feeling, and more defended.”

Bessel van der Kolk

“Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then. It’s the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.”

Hilary Jacobs Hendel

“We all have some degree of small-t trauma — caused by repeated, sometimes inconsequential events that build up over time. And we all have the capacity to heal from it.”

And here is how I understand it, after more than a decade of study, practice, and my own lived experience:

Trauma is not the event itself, but the lasting imprint of overwhelming experiences on the body, mind, emotions, and meaning-making systems of a person.

It is the ongoing process by which a person’s physiology, perception, self-concept, emotions, and relational capacities are reshaped — often without conscious awareness — around the strategies formed to survive, protect, or make sense of what was too much to hold alone.

Notice what’s not in that definition: a specific kind of event. A minimum threshold of suffering. A requirement that it be dramatic enough to count.

What matters is not what happened. What matters is what it did inside you — and whether you ever had the safety, support, and resources to process it and find your way back to yourself.

It’s All on a Spectrum

Researchers distinguish between what they call Big-T trauma — single, overwhelming events that clearly exceed a person’s capacity to cope — and small-t trauma — the accumulated weight of repeated experiences that, individually, might seem too minor to matter. The chronic criticism. The emotional unavailability of a parent. The environment where love felt conditional on performance. The workplace that slowly ground you down. The grief you never fully allowed yourself to feel.

Here’s what attachment and developmental research keeps showing us: it’s often the inappropriately labeled small things that do more harm than we allow ourselves to acknowledge. The things we dismiss as insufficient evidence of our own pain. The things we tell ourselves we shouldn’t still be affected by.

But the nervous system doesn’t make those distinctions. It responds to what it experienced — not to what we’ve decided should count.

Trauma exists on a spectrum. From a very slight alteration in how you move through the world, to a profound and painful disconnect from your own essential nature. From a background hum of unease that you’ve always assumed was just you, to a life organized almost entirely around protection, survival, and the management of pain you can’t quite name.

Many of us are somewhere on that spectrum without realizing it. We just think that’s life. We think that’s who we are.

It isn’t. Or rather — it doesn’t have to stay that way.

What It Does to You

Trauma changes things. Not all at once, and not always visibly — but over time, in ways that touch everything. The way you hold your body. The speed at which you assume the worst. The difficulty resting without guilt. The relationships that feel perpetually slightly out of reach. The sense that no matter what you accomplish, something essential is still missing.

It lives in the nervous system. After prolonged exposure to stress without adequate recovery or resolution, the body learns to stay on alert — even when the original threat is long gone. What was once an adaptive response becomes a permanent setting. The fight-or-flight system stays engaged. Or the system collapses into shutdown. Either way, the capacity to feel genuinely safe — in your body, in your relationships, in your own mind — becomes compromised.

FIGHT / FLIGHT

Hypervigilance, anxiety, irritability, overwork, perfectionism, restlessness, difficulty settling

FREEZE / FAWN

Fatigue, brain fog, numbness, people-pleasing, disconnection, going through the motions

And perhaps most painfully: it disconnects you from yourself. From the part of you that knows what you feel, what you need, what you value, what you want. From the natural confidence and clarity and warmth that is actually your essential nature — not something you need to build or earn, but something you’ve lost consistent access to.

This is why burnout is more than overwork. Why impostor syndrome is more than a confidence problem. Why the inner critic won’t quiet down no matter how much evidence you accumulate. Why you can be extraordinarily functional in certain areas of life and still feel, underneath it all, like something fundamental is off. (Read more: Burnout Is Not a Badge of Honor · Reframing Impostor Syndrome · Transform Your Incorrigible Inner Critic)

These aren’t separate problems with separate solutions. They are, very often, different expressions of the same underlying disconnection.

It can seem invisible. But it’s there — within us, and between us.

This Is the Human Condition

I want to say something clearly, because it matters: this is not about pathologizing ordinary human experience. It is about taking it seriously.

Trauma — in its many forms, across its full spectrum — is not rare. It is not limited to people who have survived obvious catastrophes. It is part of the human condition under chronic stress, adversity, and intense experiences held alone without resolution. Which is to say: it is far more common than any of us are comfortable admitting.

From everything I’ve learned — and new research is emerging constantly — I’m convinced that trauma and its constellation of effects are at the root of nearly every chronic mental, emotional, and physical issue that so many of us live with and around. And it reaches beyond individuals into the fabric of our relationships, our organizations, and our culture.

We are remarkably skilled at ignoring it. We adapt. We develop strategies. We find ways to keep functioning. And we pay an extraordinary cost for that adaptation — in our health, our relationships, our capacity for joy, our sense of being at home in ourselves.

The tragedy is not that trauma exists. The tragedy is that it goes unnamed, unacknowledged, and untreated — while the people carrying it quietly assume they are the problem.

You are not the problem. You are a person who has been shaped by experiences that exceeded your capacity to process and integrate. That is not a character flaw. That is a human response to an inhuman amount to carry.

Why Understanding This Helps

There is something quietly powerful about finding accurate language for your experience. Not a diagnosis — a description. A framework that says: yes, this is real, this is understood, this is not your fault, and there is a way back.

The researchers and clinicians who have dedicated their lives to this field — Felitti, van der Kolk, Maté, Levine, Shapiro, Scaer, Jacobs-Hendel and many others — have given us something invaluable: proof that what so many of us carry has been seen, studied, and taken seriously. Their work is not just academic. It is, for many people, the first time their internal experience has been accurately reflected back to them. And that reflection — that sense of oh, this is what’s been happening — is itself part of the healing.

Understanding what trauma does to the nervous system helps you stop pathologizing your reactions. Understanding how protective patterns develop helps you meet yourself with curiosity instead of contempt. Understanding that the disconnect from Self is not permanent — that access to who you really are can be restored — gives you something that chronic stress and unresolved pain tend to erode most completely: hope.

The path back is not about reliving the past or excavating every wound. It is about creating the conditions — internally and relationally — in which the nervous system can begin to feel safe again. In which the parts of you that learned to protect can begin to trust that they don’t need to run everything anymore. In which you can return, gradually and repeatedly, to your own essential nature. (Read more: The Heart of Resilience · Expanding Your Window of Tolerance · On Self Leadership)

A Note on Getting Support

One of the reasons I’m so committed to talking about this — and one of the reasons I was angry for a long time that it wasn’t being talked about more — is that people seeking support often don’t get the kind they actually need.

Whether that’s coaching, therapy, or any other form of guided growth work: the quality of support changes dramatically when the person offering it understands trauma. Not because every conversation needs to become a trauma-processing session (and with coaches it definitely shoulnd’t) — but because without that understanding, it’s easy to inadvertently push someone harder in the direction that’s already exhausting them, to mistake survival strategies for strengths that simply need refining, to miss what’s actually driving the patterns beneath the goals.

Trauma-informed support doesn’t pathologize. It doesn’t dig for wounds. It creates safety — because safety is what was missing in the first place. And from safety, everything else becomes possible. (Read more: Coaching with Anxiety & Depression · Self Leadership Coaching)

It’s Time

I wrote this piece because I needed it to exist. Because I spent years suffering from something I didn’t have a name for, dismissing my own experience as insufficient, and assuming the problem was fundamentally me.

It wasn’t. And if any part of this has resonated — if you’ve recognized something here that you’ve been carrying quietly, something you’ve been telling yourself doesn’t really count — I want you to hear this clearly:

It counts. You count. And the disconnect you feel from yourself — from your own steadiness, clarity, confidence, and capacity for genuine ease — is not a permanent condition. It is a response. And responses, unlike character, can change.

The work of coming back to yourself is some of the most important work a person can do. Not because there’s something wrong with you that needs fixing — but because there’s something real in you that’s been waiting to lead.

That’s what this work is for. And it’s available to you.

For Further Understanding

These are some of the voices and books that shaped my understanding — and that may help you make sense of your own experience.

Van der Kolk — The Body Keeps the Score — Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma

Gabor Maté — The Myth of Normal — Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Also: When the Body Says No

Peter Levine — Waking the Tiger — Healing trauma through the body’s own wisdom

Hilary Jacobs-Hendel — It’s Not Always Depression — The Change Triangle and connecting to your Authentic Self

Pete Walker — Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

Robert Scaer — The Trauma Spectrum — Hidden wounds and human resiliency

Mark Wolynn — It Didn’t Start with You — Inherited family trauma and how to end the cycle

Vincent Felitti’s landmark ACEs Study — the Adverse Childhood Experiences research — is among the most important public health findings you may never have heard of. It’s worth your time. See the video below.

Continue the conversation

These pieces go deeper into what trauma does — and what the path back looks like.

• Burnout Is Not a Badge of Honor
• The Heart of Resilience
• Range of Resilience
• Building Resilience You Can Trust
• On Self Leadership
• Reframing Impostor Syndrome
• From Cringe to Compassion: Your Shadow
• Silence Your Inner Critic?
• Trauma-Responsive Considerations
• Self Leadership Coaching

 

In most of the books I’ve read that addressed trauma, one person kept coming up, Vincent Felitti as the head of the largest public health study you never heard of. See one of his profound presentations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX7bX4ie-qM about the ACEs Study – the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and the effects of adversity, stress and trauma on our health and wellbeing, individually and collectively.

Gabor Mate, discusses ACEs, Trauma, and the Disconnect from Self in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tef5_HK5Zlc.