What is trauma: not the event, but what stays in the body

“It wasn’t anything serious. The car just skidded a bit on the motorway, nobody was hurt. But since then I can’t drive in the overtaking lane. And when I hear brakes, my heart jumps into my throat, even though I know I’m safe.”

When people describe something like this, they almost always add an apology. “Other people have been through much worse.” “I honestly don’t know why it threw me so much.” As if an event had to be terrible enough before you were allowed to admit it had marked you. What they overlook is something important: the body doesn’t measure events the way someone looking in from outside would. It measures them by how much, and for how long, you were alone, frightened and without a way out.

In this post I’d like to explain what professionals mean when they say trauma, why it is more accurate to talk about what remains than about what happened, and when it is wise to look for someone who is specifically trained to work with trauma.

Trauma is not just an event

In everyday language we use the word “trauma” very loosely. The exam was traumatic, the house move was traumatic, Monday was traumatic. This looseness has a good side and a bad side. The good side is that we talk about difficult experiences more openly than we did twenty years ago. The bad side is that the word empties out — and that people who have lived through genuinely shattering things feel, when they use it, as if they were exaggerating.

Professionals are more precise, but interestingly, even the profession stopped looking only at the event a long time ago. If trauma were a property of the event, everyone who survived the same accident would have the same after-effects. They don’t. Two people can be in the same car: one is driving normally again after a few weeks, the other avoids the motorway for years. The difference isn’t in what happened, but in how the nervous system experienced it, what support the person had before and afterwards, and what was left unprocessed.

That’s why I often say that trauma is less a story about what happened to you and more a story about what happened inside you — and what of it remained once the danger had passed.

What the professional definitions say

The American diagnostic manual DSM-5 requires, for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, that a person was exposed to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence. You may have experienced it yourself, witnessed it, learned that it happened to someone close to you, or been exposed again and again to its harrowing details at work — like paramedics or police officers. It is a narrow, deliberately strict definition, because it serves a diagnosis.

A broader description, and one more useful for everyday life, was published in 2014 by the American mental health agency SAMHSA. It describes trauma in three parts, known in English as the “three Es”: an event (or set of circumstances), the experience of that event as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening, and lasting effects on how the person functions and how they feel in their body, in relationships and in the world. All three parts at once. An event without lasting effects isn’t trauma in this sense of the word — it was a hard experience that the person has processed.

This three-part view has a very practical consequence. When someone says “it wasn’t anything serious”, they usually have only the first part in mind. But it is the second and third parts that decide whether something stays.

How often it happens

More often than we think — and, at the same time, it leaves lasting effects less often than we fear. When Corina Benjet and colleagues analysed World Health Organization survey data from 24 countries, more than 70 per cent of adults reported having lived through at least one event that meets the strict professional definition of a traumatic event. Often more than one.

Most of these people, however, did not develop post-traumatic stress disorder. The psychologist George Bonanno and his colleagues showed in a number of studies that the most common response to a terrible event is resilience: a few weeks of poorer sleep, more anxiety, intrusive memories, and then a gradual settling. That doesn’t mean these people felt nothing. It means they had enough support, inner and outer, for the body to finish what it had started.

I think this is important to say at the outset. If something terrible happened to you recently and you are still shaking, that does not yet mean something is permanently wrong. The body needs time. I would pay closer attention if, after several weeks or months, it isn’t settling — or if it settles only by making your life smaller and smaller.

Why it stays in the body

In danger the brain doesn’t work the way it does at rest. The part that detects threat takes over, and the part that arranges events into a story with a time and a place steps back. That is why a traumatic memory is often stored not as an ordinary story with a beginning and an end, but as fragments: the sound of brakes, a smell, a light, a feeling in the stomach. And because it isn’t stored with a time stamp saying “that was then”, the body experiences it, when something similar comes along, as if it were happening now.

This leads to what people most often describe: a constant readiness we call hypervigilance, jumping at loud noises, poor sleep, or the opposite — numbness, a sense of living behind glass. I have written in more detail about how the body carries these traces and how it can gradually let them go in How trauma stays written in the body, so here just the essentials.

So working with trauma isn’t about erasing a memory. It’s about it becoming a memory you have, rather than a state it throws you into.

Big trauma and small trauma — and why comparing does harm

In popular writing you often come across a distinction between “big T” (accidents, violence, war, death) and “little t” (humiliation at school, rejections, years of criticism at home). The distinction was born of good intentions: to tell people that less dramatic experiences can leave a mark too. But it isn’t a professional category, and it has one trap: it invites comparison.

With trauma, comparison almost always ends the same way. You set your experience beside a worse one, someone else’s, and conclude that yours doesn’t count. That conclusion brings no relief, but it does bring shame — the feeling that you are weak because something that “wasn’t that bad” has marked you. I have written about how shame works in Shame: the emotion that whispers “there’s something wrong with me”.

Equally mistaken is the opposite conclusion — that every hard experience must “make you stronger”. People who have been through terrible things and come across as strong are often simply very good at not feeling. I explained why the old saying misleads here in “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” — why that isn’t true of trauma.

How it can show up in everyday life

Trauma rarely shows itself the way films portray it — with dramatic flashbacks. More often it is quiet and hides in things a person doesn’t link with anything from the past. A few examples people describe:

• Avoidance that spreads. First one road, then all driving, then visits that require a drive.
• A body on guard. Sitting with your back to the wall, checking the exits, trouble falling asleep, tension that doesn’t ease even on holiday.
• Reactions too big for the moment. A sharp word from a colleague sets off panic or anger you don’t understand yourself.
• Numbness. The sense of living from a distance, of not being glad or sad the way you’d expect to be.
• A changed picture of yourself and the world. “The world isn’t safe.” “I can’t trust anyone.” “Something is wrong with me.”

None of these signs means trauma on its own. People who are exhausted, depressed or anxious for other reasons can have them too. What matters is whether you recognise them in yourself from a particular moment onwards — and whether they are narrowing your life.

When the body remembers and the mind forgets

People sometimes ask me whether it is possible to have the after-effects of something you barely remember. The answer is often yes — the body reacts before we remember why. A conversation might sound something like this (a composite, not a real person):

“I don’t know why I nearly fainted in the dentist’s waiting room. I’m not a child.”
“What happened in your body just before you started feeling unwell?”
“I heard the drill. Then I went hot and it was as if I wasn’t there.”
“Did anyone ever have to hold you down at the doctor’s when you were small?”
“… Mum says that when I was four they stitched a cut on my head without anaesthetic. I thought I didn’t remember it.”

She may genuinely not remember the story. But the body remembered the sound, the lying down, the helplessness. Once this is put into words, the reaction doesn’t vanish overnight, but it becomes understandable — and what is understandable is less frightening. This very shift, from “something is wrong with me” to “this is a meaningful response to something that happened”, is often the first step of recovery.

What helps: about the methods and who practises them

For post-traumatic stress disorder we now have well-researched forms of help. The 2018 guidelines from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommend trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy and EMDR as first choices. Both are about processing an unprocessed memory safely, in doses — so that it gets a story and an end.

EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) was developed by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s. Within a controlled framework, the person returns to the memory while the therapist guides alternating bilateral stimulation, most often eye movements. I explain how it works and who it suits in EMDR therapy: how it works and who it is for.

Somatic methods, such as Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing or Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy, work through bodily sensations — paying attention to what is happening in the body now and gradually widening what the body can tolerate. The research base for them is thinner than for the first two methods, but it is growing quickly.

I want to be clear here about myself. I am not a trauma specialist and I don’t practise EMDR or somatic methods; each requires specific training. As a therapist in training under supervision in relational family therapy, I work with how past experiences show up in present relationships — in a partnership, in the family, in whom you trust and whom you don’t. For many people this is an important part of recovery, but it is not a substitute for trauma-focused treatment when that is needed. When I notice that more is needed, I help find the right professional.

Whatever the method, one thing holds: the first step is almost always safety and stability, and only then processing. The psychiatrist Judith Herman described recovery back in 1992 in three stages — establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection with people and with life. This order has been kept in most modern approaches. What it looks like when trauma repeats for years rather than happening once, I describe in Complex trauma: when it didn’t happen once, but for years.

Exercise: where did I just come back from?

This exercise isn’t meant for processing a memory — don’t try that on your own. It is meant to help you learn to notice when you’ve been carried away, and to come back to the present. You can do it today, the next time something unsettles you.

1. Name that something has happened. Say quietly: “Something just threw me.” You don’t need to know what.
2. Look around and name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you are touching. The knowledge base describes this as grounding 5–4–3–2–1.
3. Lengthen your out-breath. Breathe in normally a few times and breathe out more slowly than you breathed in.
4. Tell yourself the date and place. “It’s Thursday, I’m in the kitchen, I’m 38 years old.” It sounds simple, but it tells the body that it is now.
5. Later, write down one line: what happened just before the thing that threw you. Over time these lines reveal a pattern you can bring to a professional.

If you only come back partly, that is a success too. This exercise is practice, not a test.

Where this explanation falls short

The idea that trauma is “what remains” is useful, but it has limits that are only fair to name.

Not everything that hurts is trauma. Grief after a loss, disappointment, stress at work — these can be very hard experiences that don’t call for trauma work, but for time, support and sometimes a different kind of help. If we call every pain trauma, we can overlook what a person actually needs.

Not everyone needs therapy. As I mentioned, most people gradually recover after a terrible event with the support of those close to them. Research on early intervention after disasters even suggests that pushing people to talk through every detail straight after the event doesn’t help some of them. Sometimes the best help is warm, present closeness and nothing more.

An explanation is not a diagnosis. If you recognise yourself in this post, that doesn’t mean you have post-traumatic stress disorder. A diagnosis can be made by a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist, and it matters because it opens the way to appropriate treatment — including medication when it is needed.

When not to wait. If you are thinking about harming yourself, if someone is threatening you, or if you can no longer look after yourself, seek help straight away. In Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline (Zaupni telefon Samarijan) on 116 123 (24 hours a day). For violence, there is the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence on 080 11 55 in Slovenia, and in an emergency 112 or the police on 113. You can also turn to your GP.

What to remember

• Trauma isn’t just an event, but an event, the experience of that event and the effects that remain — all three parts at once.
• Most people live through at least one terrible event in their lives, but for most the body settles over time.
• An unprocessed memory often stays in fragments with no time stamp, so the body lives it as if it were now.
• Comparing yourself with “worse” stories doesn’t help — it only brings shame.
• There are well-researched methods for post-traumatic stress disorder; look for a professional trained in them.