You don't need a big trauma
to be carrying a lot of damage.

The reframe

Trauma got given to the big stuff. Most of what hurts you isn't big.

When people say trauma, they usually mean an event. A car crash. An attack. A divorce. The kind of thing you'd unambiguously call traumatic if it happened to a friend. Those are real, and for most people they're few and far between.

What nobody calls trauma is the persistent stuff. The small hurts that kept happening. The moments that were never dramatic enough to earn the word, and did the damage anyway.

Professionals have a term for those. Micro-traumas. It's a good term and it almost never leaves the clinic, which means most people go looking for one big event, find nothing, and conclude they've got no reason to feel the way they feel.

Look at complex PTSD and you can see the problem clearly. Plenty of people have every symptom on the list and no single event to point at. What they've got is years of small ones stacked up. Which is another way of saying wounds.

Why I say wound

The rosebush and the knife.

Say you've got a cut on your arm. It could have come from reaching into a rosebush. It could have come from somebody holding a knife. A forensics team could probably tell you which, and what kind of blade. Anyone else looks at your arm and sees one big scratch.

And the nurse cleaning it up isn't that interested in what made it. She wants to know how deep it goes and how to help it close.

That's the perspective I work from. What caused it isn't irrelevant. It's just not where the work is. The work is what got left behind, and what we're going to do about it.

So I say wound rather than trauma, because wound is the bigger word. It holds the traumas. It also holds everything that was never traumatic and is still costing you.

It lets me work by theme, too. Rejection. Abandonment. Humiliation. Injustice. You don't have to identify the event that made the wound in order to heal the wound, which is a relief for anyone who's spent years digging for a memory that would explain them to themselves.

Straight with you

I stayed out of this conversation for years.

I didn't go near the word trauma for a long time. I'd absorbed what everybody says about it: don't touch trauma unless you're trained, it's delicate, it takes years, handle with enormous care. So when I built my methodology I called it wound healing and quietly stayed out of a room I didn't think I was allowed in.

Then clients started turning up who'd been in therapy for years. They'd say some version of the same thing. I know my traumas really well by now. I've still got them.

And the work let them put them down.

So I'm back in the room, with two things to say about it. You do want somebody who knows what they're doing. And it does not have to take years.