What We Mean When We Say Trauma

What Constitutes Trauma?

What constitutes a trauma? Are we a country obsessed with labeling our experiences as traumatic, or are we just naturally rebelling against a long period of time where our experiences were greatly dismissed, minimized, and simply not talked about?

Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

Stored in the randomness of my Notes app is a collection of working definitions that attempt to describe the phenomenon in question here. Many are from renowned clinicians in the field whose work I’ve followed and greatly admired. Others are from colleagues who I’ve heard phrase it in a particularly nuanced way. I’ve collected them over the years, perhaps because despite specializing in trauma, I still find myself interested in the fact that there is no single definition that quite captures all of it.

One of my favorites comes from Dr. Peter Levine, who argues that trauma can simply be described as “anything that is too much, too soon, or too fast for our nervous system to handle, especially if we can’t reach a successful resolution.” I’ve always appreciated how expansive this definition is, particularly because of its emphasis on something being too much. Our minds and bodies are incredibly adaptive, but they are not built to endlessly absorb overwhelming experiences at a pace that exceeds our capacity to process them.

Another definition I love comes from renowned trauma specialist Dr. Judith Herman, who describes trauma as “any event that overwhelms the ordinary human adaptations to life. The event leaves us powerless or helpless with losses of control, dignity, connection, sense of belonging or meaning.” Here, Herman names the deeper things that can get disrupted in the aftermath: our sense of agency, our dignity, our relationships, our belonging, and the meaning we make of our lives. I appreciate how it asks, “what did this experience take from me?”

Trauma expert Dr. Janina Fisher has similarly emphasized that trauma is defined not only by the event itself, but by the way an individual experiences and processes said event or events.

And somewhere along the way, I saved another definition whose original source I unfortunately failed to record: We experience trauma when we experience something that shouldn’t have happened, as well as when we DON’T experience things that SHOULD have happened.

That last one has always stayed with me. I think in part, it’s because when most people hear the word trauma, they understandably think about the things that did happened, e.g., the assault, the accident, the disaster, the death, etc. Of course, these experiences can be profoundly traumatic. But our growing understanding of trauma also asks us to consider what didn’t happen, e.g., the comfort, protection, attunement, or consistency we needed but never received. Maybe that looked like a parent who never comforted you when you were scared, or a childhood where you were praised for being “so independent,” when really you just learned from an early age that needing other people was unreliable.

A word on the type of trauma I work with…

I think this last definition is what drew me so deeply toward the work I specialize in, which is relational trauma. As someone who grew up with a pervasive sense of being misunderstood, I have always found myself naturally gravitating toward people, experiences, and ideas that too, seem to be, well… misunderstood. There is something uniquely difficult about the quieter, harder-to-name forms of trauma - the kinds that don’t necessarily come with a clean narrative or something dramatic enough for others to immediately recognize as harmful. These experiences often live in ambiguity, making them harder to identify and explain because the injury may have unfolded slowly or taken shape through what was consistently missing rather than what was overtly done.

There may not be one singular event you can point toward. Sometimes, that is precisely what makes these experiences so difficult to understand. Nothing “happened.” And yet, something happened.

But Are We Calling Everything Trauma Now?

This is usually where the conversation gets a little complicated, because I get it. I understand the concern. Not every uncomfortable experience is traumatic. Not every breakup is trauma. Not every disappointing childhood interaction is trauma. Not every conflict, rejection, embarrassment, or moment of distress requires a clinical label.

And I actually think it does people a disservice when we flatten the language so much that an upsetting interaction and severe interpersonal violence are treated as though they are interchangeable experiences. News flash: they aren’t. But recognizing that there are degrees of trauma does not make the more severe forms of it any less significant.

Perhaps what we are witnessing culturally is less an obsession with trauma and more of a correction. For generations, the threshold for what people were permitted to be affected by was extraordinarily high. People survived wars and violence and enormous losses and rarely had language for what their minds and bodies were doing afterward. And now here we are, in 2026, where we are developing language for experiences that previous generations were often required to endure silently. 

Sure, sometimes a new language gets overextended. Humans have a tendency to do that when we discover a framework that suddenly explains something we have struggled to articulate. But I'd rather have the conversation about how to use this language thoughtfully than return to a time when people needed to prove that something was “bad enough” before they were allowed to acknowledge that it hurt them.