Is It Trauma? Or Did It Just Suck?

As a trauma therapist in Oakland, CA, I get this question a lot: did I really experience trauma? Trauma is an emotional and physical response to a major stressor (or series of stressors), typically where one feels powerless.

Something stressful, annoying, sad, scary, and even triggering is not traumatizing *unless* there are lasting psychological and/or psychobiological impacts. It is important to distinguish so people with trauma get the care they need. Don't get me wrong--when things suck, that matters, too, but you may need a different level of care, processing, and treatment.

Trauma is the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event. Experiencing a traumatic event can harm a person’s sense of safety, sense of self, and ability to regulate emotions and navigate relationships. Long after the traumatic event occurs, people with trauma can often feel shame, helplessness, powerlessness and intense fear.

According to Dr. Gabor Mate, it is not trauma if:

• It does not limit you, constrict you, diminish your capacity to feel or think, or to trust or assert yourself, to experience suffering, without succumbing, to despair, or to witness it with compassion.
• It does not keep you from holding your pain and sorrow in fear, without being overwhelmed, and without having to escape habitually into work, or compulsive, self, soothing, or self stimulating by whatever means.
• You are not left, compelled, either to aggrandize yourself, or to face yourself, for the sake of getting acceptance, or to justify your existence.
• It does not impair your capacity to experience gratitude for the beauty and wonder of life.

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What is trauma, really?