Philosopher Michelle Panchuk says the word trauma is “multiply ambiguous.”(1) We use the word to mean what happened to us but also what happened to us because of the trauma— as well as a combination of the two. Increasingly, the word is colloquially and carelessly used to refer to experiences that are upsetting or unfortunate.
There are multiple clinical definitions of trauma. The most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders defines a traumatic experience as “exposure to an actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence.”
Such an event is directly experienced or witnessed by a person, happens to someone they love, or is repeatedly encountered, as in the case of first responders and therapists. (2) This description seems to capture some of what is encapsulated in trauma, but it misses the impact of the event.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in the United States defines trauma, in part, as the “lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well- being,” and also as “the experience that is too much to handle within the body’s normal coping mechanisms.”(3) Judith Herman says it is any event that overwhelms a person and removes their sense of control, connection, and meaning. (4) Bessel van der Kolk says it is the imprint of pain, horror, and fear that lives inside a person because of what happened to them. (5) Trauma expert Peter Levine describes it this way: “Trauma is about loss of connection— to ourselves, to our bodies, to our families, to others, and to the world around us. This loss of connection is often hard to recognize, because it doesn’t happen all at once. It can happen slowly, over time, and we adapt to these subtle changes sometimes without even noticing them.” (6)
While specific diagnostic categories and labels are useful, defining trauma in terms of only the symptoms or the biology misses the very core and experiential fragmentation and alteration of meaning, personhood, and interconnection at the center of one’s existence.
Trauma, in a word, is a kind of shattering. The word trauma is Greek in origin and means “wound.” This can help us re-engineer the definition. We can ask questions like What are the things that have wounded me? and
What kinds of things wounded me in a way that left a lasting impact? The things that wound us fall into two categories: the things that happened to us and the things that didn’t happen but should have. We are wounded by the bad things that happen to us but also, in the words of Gabor Mate, by the good things that didn’t happen to us. (7)
You might want to pause and think about your own wounds that came from both commission and omission. Or you might want to come back to them at another time, as this is where things start to get a little more complicated. Sometimes the strategies we use to hide our woundedness from ourselves are sophisticated. They are outside our conscious awareness. The defenses we have put in place are well- entrenched, practiced over a lifetime, and reinforced by those around us. Often, there are more wounds than we’re prepared to examine, especially if we have survived by pretending the wounds aren’t there.
We have strategies to keep ourselves from identifying what might be there if we just looked more closely. We stay busy, numb out, and avoid. We say to ourselves, “Just don’t think about it,” “Man up,” “It wasn’t that bad,” or “They really did love me.” As my mentor and colleague Saj Razvi once said, “People can build a beautiful life on top of a nightmare,” (8) or in the words of a beloved patient of mine, “Sometimes people turn a defense against pain into a denomination.”
If that sounds complicated or far- fetched, let me give you an example. I have lost track of the number of times a person has said to me in therapy, “I’m fine. I had a perfect childhood. But . . . can you help me with my alcohol abuse, or my rage at my partner, or the panic attacks I’m having at night? . . . But those are totally unrelated to my perfect childhood.” The issues that bring people to therapy don’t appear at random. But when we have never been supported to process what happened and how it impacted us then and lives in us still, we are forced to find ways to go on, protect ourselves, and exclude the painful memories and emotions from our narrative. We use defensive behaviors, thoughts, and processes to avoid facing what lives in the basement of our conscious awareness. We do that so much over time that these defenses become normative for us, and we become disconnected from the original injury. This process happens within our internal world, and it expands outward to the world around us. Our families, communities, and cultures— along with many of our traditions, practices, or lack thereof— are coated with the residue of trauma from this lifetime and times past.
This sounds bleak, and you might be thinking like many therapists do early on: trauma is EVERYWHERE! That’s true, but healing, hope, and resilience are everywhere too. The potential for remaking ourselves is woven into our humanity.
In a paradoxical way, trauma and healing are always woven together: the more we can begin to see the trauma in and around us, the more we can also begin to see healing, resilience, and beauty in and around us.
In sum, trauma is how what happened to us lingers in us. It is the big and little things that cause a fracture deep inside us and between us. It’s the things that leave us caught in a cycle of pain, avoidance, and numbing. Sometimes the wound is so accepted, hidden under our defensive strategies, that we don’t even know it is there, although some part of us senses something lurking in the shadows of our interior life. It’s a kind of haunting.
There is one thing we do know for sure about trauma across a continuum: our bodies always tell the truth. Even if we find a way to cover up trauma, the story always comes out— if not in our thoughts or in our relationships, then always in our bodies.
Content taken from Holy Hurt by Hillary McBride ©2025. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
