What Is Trauma and Does My Experience Count?

In my 13 years as a therapist, I’ve heard iterations of two questions hundreds of times: "What even is trauma?" and "How do I know if mine 'counts?'"

I’ll never tire of answering these questions — whether for my therapy clients or here with you.

I’ll never tire of it because they were two dominant questions I wondered for years, too.

So I answer my clients and I share this information online because they’re the answers I would have so desperately wanted to hear when I was 15 years old.

Let’s begin with a high-level overview of what trauma is and isn’t. This may feel redundant and obvious, but I still want to ground us in this 30,000-foot view and reiterate what you may already know so that this information and everything else I share in this post is firmly cemented. The more you understand the basics of it — not to mention the more you know about relational trauma specifically — the more easily you can see yourself and your life story more clearly and be equipped to seek out the right kind of support.

So, again, what defines trauma?

Trauma is subjective

I want to share a quote from one of my favorite trauma clinicians, Karen Saakvitne: “Trauma is the unique individual experience of an event or enduring conditions in which the individual’s ability to integrate his/her emotional experience is overwhelmed and the individual experiences (either objectively or subjectively) a threat to his/her life, bodily integrity, or that of a caregiver or family” (Saakvitne, K. et al, 2000).

This guides my work with anyone who has experienced trauma, especially those who have experienced relational trauma.

Why is this quote and what it represents so important?

For so long, in my field and collectively by laypeople, trauma was imagined as something only soldiers endured in war, or those who'd experienced a single, terrible event like a car crash, violent attack, or a rape.

Of course, those are all potentially highly traumatic experiences. But in this current iteration of psychological traumatology, there has been an increasing (and much-needed) understanding of the neurobiology of trauma, including its subjectivity. In other words, contrary to popular belief, "trauma" isn’t limited to a discrete set of experiences or incidents like a car crash or military tours of duty. Instead, it has a more expansive definition.

Trauma can be an event, series of events, or prolonged circumstances that are subjectively experienced by the individual who goes through it as physically, mentally, and emotionally harmful and/or life-threatening — and that overwhelms the individual's ability to effectively cope with what they went through.

The key here is “subjective”: What may make something traumatic to me, may not to you. As a clinician, I gauge trauma by whether the client’s body is having a trauma response, not whether the precipitating incident was "objectively" traumatic.

If a trauma response is present, then trauma is present.

Again, we must understand that trauma is subjective so that we can answer that second question: “How do I know if mine counts?”

Simply put, if it felt traumatic to you, it counts.

Now, having grounded us in the realization that trauma is subjective and highly personal, there are still proverbial buckets of experiences we can categorize as traumatic events and circumstances, helping us answer the first part of that question: “What even is trauma?” These buckets of experiences, combined with the element of subjectivity, come into play when we talk about relational trauma — the focus of my clinical work — because you endure relational trauma as well as have traumatic experiences from any of these other types of trauma buckets, too, which can exacerbate the impacts of relational trauma.

Let's review these primary categories.

• Acute trauma. This refers to a single-incident, one-time event such as experiencing a wildfire, car crash, school shooting, terrorist event, or house fire. This is what so many people historically have thought of as “trauma.”
• Chronic trauma. This refers to a set of experiences that are repeated and take place over time, such as enduring racial microaggressions, middle-school bullying, poverty, exposure to violence in the community, or long-term medical challenges.
• Secondary trauma. Also known as vicarious trauma, this can affect people who help others cope with trauma, such as healthcare professionals, therapists, and first responders. It results from exposure to others’ traumatic experiences rather than direct personal experience.
• Complex trauma. Often called developmental or relational trauma. It’s the kind that takes place over time in the context of a caretaking relationship — usually between a parent and child — that fails to adequately support the child’s biopsychosocial development, such as in cases when ongoing neglect, sexual abuse, physical punishment, witnessing domestic violence, or being raised by a personality- or mood-disordered parent occurs.

Trauma Essential Reads

The Promise of MDMA-Assisted Therapy for Healing Trauma

Supporting the Mental Health of Paramedics

I’ll elaborate on how and why complex trauma is, in my personal and professional opinion, one of the most damaging kinds to endure in future posts. For now, I hope that by sharing this psychoeducation with you, you can help answer the questions I would have liked to answer when I was 15: What even *is* trauma? and How do I know if mine "counts"?

Finally, as you contemplate therapy to recover from your childhood trauma symptoms, I would strongly encourage you to work with a licensed mental health professional who is also trained in an evidence-based trauma modality like EMDR. The Psychology Today directory is a great place to start.