Understanding Trauma Beyond Emotional Pain

It fascinates me to read the large number of questions about trauma that appear across mental health platforms. Questions like "What exactly makes an event traumatizing?" or "Why are some individuals able to experience traumatic events without getting traumatized?" reveal a widespread confusion about what trauma truly is. The more we label every emotional pain as "trauma," the more confused we become, the worse we perceive our mental health to be, and the fewer solutions we find effective.

Distinguishing Trauma from Emotional Wounds

I've come to realize that we've been conflating two distinct types of pain: the damage caused by the struggle for survival versus the pain of learning to adapt to our challenging world.

In physical medicine, we use specific terminology: A broken bone is a fracture, a brain injury might be a concussion, an invasion of bacteria is an infection. In general, it’s clear that a bruise is not trauma, and neither is a stomachache. Yet, when discussing mental health, we often call any emotional disturbance "trauma," even when no actual injury exists. Why?

Perhaps because emotional wounds trigger actual physical pain, and when we hurt, we assume damage has occurred. However, there's a crucial distinction between psychological trauma and emotional wounding:

• Trauma relates to survival.
• Emotional pain relates to growth and learning.

Life's journey inevitably includes challenges. We begin life experiencing intense pain when hungry, wet, cold, or tired.

Even with the most attentive caregiver, this pain cannot be entirely avoided—it's simply part of existence. Pain serves as an indicator that something is happening that needs attention.

In emotional terms, what's usually happening is our brain learning to better adjust to the people around us, our environment, and the circumstances that shape our character, skills, and ways of being. These pains might be comparable to teething discomfort or growing pains as bones elongate. Emotional pain is unavoidable, but it doesn’t mean we are damaged.

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Defining True Trauma

Emotional wounds deserve and require significant attention, but let me clarify the definition of trauma and what it means to be traumatized here. (I'll write more about emotional wounds soon, after publishing my coming book How Deep Is the Wound.)

Trauma, at its core, is about survival. It occurs when we activate our innate survival mechanisms to stay alive but fail to recognize that these efforts were sufficient to ensure the smooth and reliable continuation of our life functions. More descriptively, as I explain in my book, Traumatization and Its Aftermath:

"Psychological trauma is a neuro-bio-psycho-social phenomenon involving the nervous system's adaptive, anticipatory response to perceived danger or life-threatening events, designed to protect the individual from assumed imminent harm. Trauma manifests as a lasting disruption in neurobiological, psychological, and social functioning, due to unresolved responses to overwhelming experiences. These responses can persist long after the threat has passed, shaped by the person's perception and the meaning they assign to the experience."

Once we understand that something being traumatic—having the potential to put our life at risk—is not the same as being traumatizing, we can recognize that an experience becomes traumatizing when it has a lasting impact on our mental and physical health.

When Events Become Traumatizing

A traumatic event becomes "traumatizing" when it directly affects you by keeping you feeling in constant danger, whether in reality or through distortion in your perception, where the brain shifts to mix the past with the present in order to keep you alive.

This perceptual distortion—closely connected to a state of hypervigilance when it becomes your way of monitoring the world—is what makes an event traumatizing for one person but not for another. The subjective nature of trauma is influenced by various factors such as personal experiences, cultural background, emotional regulation abilities, and social support systems.

This means almost any event could potentially be traumatizing if it:

• Overwhelms your emotional stability
• Disrupts your ability to function normally
• Leaves you feeling constantly at risk
• Shifts your nervous system's operation to focus primarily on keeping you alive (survival mode)

Let me give you some examples of the subjectivity of trauma:

Trauma Essential Reads

The Terror of Being Hunted by a Buzzing Drone

How Trauma Affects Our Sense Of Time

• A child who witnesses their mother fainting could be traumatized because their survival depends on their mother's well-being. Without her, they might fear the end of their own life. Fainting in such a scenario is only traumatizing when it directly threatens this sense of security.
• For a father burdened by debt and low self-esteem, losing his job may feel as terrifying as facing death. He might believe his family won’t survive without his financial support or that his parents and friends will reject him, leaving him a pariah. Losing a job is certainly challenging, but it becomes truly traumatizing when it places the individual (or their loved ones) in perceived danger.
• Someone who has never experienced a severe accident but knows of someone who died in one might find a car crash deeply traumatizing. Even if no real harm occurred, they may react as though it did, potentially leaving lasting effects (though not always) on their emotional well-being.

As you can see, these experiences have the potential to be traumatizing, not because of what's actually happening but because the person's mental state can easily become one of defeat, making them feel they cannot overcome the situation.

Our Natural Resilience

Even in cases where an event is undoubtedly traumatic—genuinely dangerous and putting you at risk—it may not necessarily be traumatizing. This is because we possess many tools to:

• Assess risk levels
• Develop solution plans
• Access internal mechanisms to restore hope
• Find ways to help our system remain balanced and stable

That may sound simplistic, but avoiding becoming traumatized may be simple. We may have developed the belief that it's not true, that we are damned to be traumatized, but those beliefs may be influencing our defeat mentality. The reality is that we are naturally resilient because the brain prefers health over illness. Survival mode represents an inefficient operational state that our system typically avoids.

Therefore, "traumatizing" refers to the connection between a traumatic event or circumstance and an individual's perception of it as potentially life-threatening or harmful, and unsolvable—a distinction worth understanding as we navigate our emotional health.