What even *is* trauma? How do I know if mine “counts”?

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What even *is* trauma? How do I know if mine "counts"?

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • August 4, 2024

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

Nervous system dysregulation happens when your body’s natural alarm system either fires too often or not enough in response to stress, leaving you feeling either constantly on edge or emotionally shut down. This experience is not just occasional stress or normal anxiety, this is a pattern where your body’s reactions don’t match what your mind knows to be true. This matters to you because if your nervous system is stuck in hypervigilance or shutdown, it means your early experiences have rewired how you respond to everyday life, making it harder to feel safe, calm, or connected even when you want to. Understanding this helps you see that your struggles aren’t about weakness or lack of willpower, they’re biological responses to overwhelming relational wounds.

• You’ve likely questioned whether your experience ‘counts’ as trauma because it wasn’t a dramatic event or you’ve been told others had it worse. But trauma isn’t about comparison, it’s about how your nervous system and sense of safety were affected.
• Trauma is nervous system dysregulation: when your body’s alarm system either stays stuck on high alert or shuts down, causing persistent anxiety, numbness, or disconnection, even if your mind understands the original event is over.
• Understanding trauma means recognizing that healing starts when you honor how these nervous system patterns impact your daily life and sense of self, rather than trying to dismiss or minimize what you endured as ‘not enough’ to matter.

“Trauma is any experience that leaves a person feeling hopeless, helpless, or profoundly unsafe.”

Summary

One of the most common barriers to getting support for childhood suffering is the belief that your experience doesn’t ‘count’ as trauma, that it wasn’t bad enough, that others had it worse, that you should be over it by now. This post directly addresses those doubts, offers a clear working definition of trauma, and makes the case that if your nervous system was affected, it counts.

Nervous System Dysregulation

Your nervous system is the body’s threat-detection apparatus. When it’s been shaped by relational trauma, it can get stuck in patterns of hypervigilance (always scanning for danger) or hypoarousal (shutting down to cope). Nervous system dysregulation means your body’s alarm system fires too easily, too often, or not at all. Regardless of what your conscious mind knows to be true.

, Janina Fisher, PhD (PMID: 16530597)

Trauma

Trauma, in its most clinically accurate and widely accepted definition, is not about what happened to you, it’s about the impact of what happened on your nervous system and sense of self. The American Psychological Association defines trauma as an emotional response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event, but contemporary trauma researchers emphasize that trauma is less about the event itself and more about whether the person had sufficient resources to process the experience at the time. If you didn’t, the experience leaves traces.

In the course of my thirteen years as a therapist, I’ve heard some iteration of these two questions hundreds of times:

“What even *is* trauma?” and “How do I know if mine “counts”?”

I’ll never get tired of answering these questions. Whether it’s for my individual therapy clients or here on the internet with you.

I’ll never get tired of answering these questions because they were two of the dominant questions I wondered about for years, too.

So I answer my clients and I share this information widely online because they’re the answers I would have so desperately wanted to know when I was 15 or 20 years old.

So, with the hopes that this will feel helpful to you, let me share some psychoeducation with you.

1. What is trauma?
2. Trauma is subjective.
3. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
4. And OF COURSE these are all potentially very traumatic experiences.
5. What kind of events and circumstances might lead to trauma?
6. Recognizing Your Trauma Through Professional Support
7. This. Complex trauma. Is the focus of my entire body of clinical work in the world.
8. References

What is trauma?

“Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.” 

, Judith Herman, MD

Let’s begin with a broad, high-level overview of what trauma is and isn’t. 

This may feel redundant and obvious to you but I still want to ground us into this 30,000 foot view and reiterate what you may already know so that this information and everything else I share in this essay is firmly cemented. 

I believe psychoeducation for those of us who come from relational trauma histories is critical.

The more you really understand the basics of it. Not to mention the more you know about it 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, we ask the question: what defines trauma?

Is trauma subjective. Does it look different for everyone?

I want to share a quote with you from one of my favorite trauma clinicians , Karen Saakvitne, Ph.D.

“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.”

It guides my work with anyone who has experienced it. Especially those who have experienced relational trauma and I hope it feels helpful for you to hear.

Why is this quote and what it represents so important?

For so long, in my field and collectively by lay people, trauma was imagined as something only soldiers endured in war.

Or as a single, terrible event like a car crash or a rape.

Are all painful experiences potentially traumatic, even if they seem ‘smaller’?

But in this current iteration of psychological traumatology. There has been an increasing (and much needed) understanding of the neurobiology of trauma, including the subjectivity of it.

In other words, contrary to popular belief, it isn’t relegated to just a discrete set of experiences or incidents (like a car crash or wartime conflict).

Instead, it now has a much 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 the word “subjective”. What may make something traumatic to me, may not to you, and so forth.

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, I want you to understand that it 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.

What kind of events and circumstances might lead to trauma?

“Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”

, Bessel van der Kolk, MD (PMID: 9384857)

Now, having grounded us in the realization that it is subjective and highly personal, there are still proverbial buckets of experiences we can categorize traumatic events and circumstances into that help 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 body of 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.

I’ll be writing more on this. The compounding of various forms of trauma. In future essays but, for now, let’s just quickly review these primary buckets.

• 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 and stereotypically think 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 type 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 from 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.) It 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.

How can professional support help you recognize and validate your trauma?

When you’ve spent years questioning whether your experiences “count” as trauma, working with a trauma-informed therapist can provide the validation and framework you’ve been seeking.

A skilled therapist understands that trauma isn’t measured by comparing your story to others’ but by recognizing how your unique nervous system responded to overwhelming experiences. In the therapeutic space, you don’t need to justify why your trauma is “bad enough”,the focus is on how these experiences affected you subjectively and continue to impact your life today.

This validation alone can be profoundly healing for those who’ve minimized their suffering or been told they’re “too sensitive” or “overreacting.” For those beginning to recognize patterns of impact from their past, understanding the signs that your childhood negatively affected you can help connect current struggles to their origins.

The therapeutic relationship provides what may have been missing, someone who believes your subjective reality matters, who doesn’t require your trauma to fit specific criteria, and who helps you understand that healing begins with honoring the truth of your experience, not proving it was “traumatic enough.”

What is complex trauma, and why does it deserve its own focus in therapy?

I’ll be elaborating on how and why this particular kind of trauma is, in my personal and professional opinion, one of the most damaging kinds to endure in my next essay.

But, for now, hopefully by sharing this high quality psychoeducation with you in today’s essay, you can help answer the questions I would have liked to answer when I was fifteen or twenty years old:

“What even *is* trauma?” and “How do I know if mine “counts”?”

And now I’d love to hear from you in the comments:

Did this information help answer one or both of those questions for you? How does realizing this support you and your healing work?

If you feel so inclined, please leave a message. Our community of 30,000 blog readers can benefit from your share and wisdom.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Both/And: Your Trauma Is Real Even If Others Had It Worse

One of the most common. And most corrosive. Responses to the question “does my experience count as trauma?” is the comparative diminishment: “But other people have been through so much worse. What happened to me wasn’t that bad.” This is the internalized version of a message that many of my clients received explicitly from the environments that shaped them: your pain is only valid if it can be measured against a sufficiently extreme external standard.

The Both/And I want to offer here dismantles this logic completely: someone else’s greater suffering does not reduce the validity of yours. These things don’t exist on a single scale where one person’s pain cancels another’s. Trauma is not a competition. The nervous system that was dysregulated in childhood wasn’t measuring its experiences against a global scale of human suffering. It was simply responding to what it lived through. And what it lived through was real, and it mattered.

This matters practically, not just philosophically. When women minimize their own experiences. When they insist that what happened to them “wasn’t that bad,” that they “should be over it by now,” that they’re being dramatic by taking it seriously. They prevent themselves from accessing the support and the healing that would genuinely help them. The minimization is itself a symptom of the wound. The inability to say “what happened to me matters” is often one of the most direct expressions of the very relational injury being examined.

Erin, a partner at a consulting firm, came to therapy describing herself as someone who “had a pretty normal childhood”. One she consistently compared favorably to “real trauma” she’d read about or seen in others. Over many months, she began to name what had actually been present: a mother whose emotional unpredictability had meant Erin never knew which version of her would greet her when she came home from school. A father who, though present, had communicated in a thousand small ways that her emotional experiences were inconvenient. These were not dramatic events. These responses were the texture of her everyday experience, over years, during the period when her nervous system was forming. This dynamic is what relational trauma is. And it counts.

Both/And: someone else’s suffering is real and significant, and so is yours. The size of your pain is not determined by comparison. It is determined by impact. And the impact is real.

The Systemic Lens: Trauma Doesn’t Always Announce Itself

One of the reasons so many driven women struggle to recognize their experiences as traumatic is that our cultural narrative of trauma is dramatically skewed toward the dramatic. Trauma, in the popular imagination, is an acute, identifiable event: the accident, the assault, the disaster. What the culture has been much slower to name. And what the clinical literature is increasingly clear about. Is that chronic relational trauma, the kind that accumulates through years of relational environments that couldn’t provide adequate safety, attunement, and repair, is equally real and equally consequential. It simply doesn’t look the way we expect trauma to look.

This cultural blind spot is not accidental. The dominant trauma narrative has historically been shaped by the study of combat veterans and disaster survivors. Populations that are disproportionately male, whose traumas are external, acute, and socially legible. The relational traumas that affect a disproportionate number of women. The chronic emotional neglect, the conditional love, the parentified childhood, the environments of low-level emotional unpredictability. Have been slower to achieve the same cultural recognition. The DSM’s own history of trauma classification reflects this: it took decades for the field to begin adequately accounting for complex, relational, developmental trauma as distinct from single-incident PTSD.

The result is that many women who carry genuine relational wounds have been living within a cultural framework that couldn’t validate their experience. They look at the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Flashbacks, hyperarousal, avoidance of the specific event. And their experience doesn’t fit. They conclude, as the culture has trained them to conclude, that they must not have trauma. They must simply be too sensitive, too dramatic, insufficiently resilient.

This is a systemic failure, not a personal one. The framework was inadequate, not the experience. And the growing clinical recognition of developmental trauma, complex PTSD, and relational trauma is not an invention of a therapeutic culture looking for pathology where none exists. It is a long-overdue expansion of the frame to include the experiences of people. Disproportionately women, disproportionately those from marginalized backgrounds. Whose wounds didn’t fit the existing template.

If you’ve been asking “does my trauma count?”. The systemic lens offers a different question: “Was the framework I was given adequate to recognize what I went through?” Often, the answer is no. And that’s not a personal failing. That’s a gap in the systems that were supposed to help you understand your own experience.

Finding Words for What You’ve Carried: The Healing Power of Recognition

One of the most significant moments in the work of understanding and healing trauma is often remarkably quiet: the moment when someone finds language for an experience that has, until that point, existed only as a felt sense. A persistent anxiety, a recurring relational pattern, a background hum of unworthiness that has always been present but never been named.

The naming matters. Not as a diagnostic exercise or a way of labeling yourself, but because language creates the capacity for reflection, for communication, and. Crucially. For the narrative coherence that the brain needs to process and integrate difficult experiences. What was formless becomes, with language, something that can be approached, examined, worked with. The wordless, body-held weight of “something is wrong with me” becomes, through language, “I experienced relational trauma in childhood, and my nervous system adapted in specific ways, and those adaptations are changeable.” This is not a small shift. It is the difference between being haunted by something you can’t see and being able to finally turn and face it.

In my work with clients, I often observe that the simple act of validation. Of hearing “yes, what you described is real, and it has a name, and it’s very common among people with histories like yours”. Produces a physical response. A kind of release. The shoulders drop. The breath deepens. Something that has been held very tightly, for a very long time, loosens slightly. Not because the healing is complete. But because the person has finally stopped arguing, at some deep level, with their own reality.

If you’ve been asking “does my trauma count?”. This question is itself a symptom of the wound. The trauma you experienced taught you, in one form or another, that your experiences were not important, your perceptions were not reliable, your needs were not legitimate. The question “does it count?” is that lesson, still operating. And the answer, offered without qualification: yes. It counts. You experienced what you experienced. Your nervous system responded to what was real. And you deserve the same quality of care, attention, and healing that any person carrying significant relational history deserves. Regardless of whether your experiences would impress anyone on a scale of dramatic events.

Nicole, a physician who came to therapy in her late thirties, described her experience with characteristic precision: “I can diagnose complex conditions in my patients. I can hold tremendous uncertainty in clinical practice. But when it comes to what I carry. I can’t seem to name it, let alone treat it.” What emerged over time was a history of early relational experiences that had shaped her nervous system in ways she’d never connected to her adult presentation: the hypervigilance she mistook for conscientiousness, the difficulty resting she’d always attributed to ambition, the sense of never quite belonging even in rooms she’d earned her way into. Naming these experiences as trauma. Not to pathologize herself, but to understand herself. Changed the entire frame of her work in therapy.

This pattern is what happens when we stop asking “is my trauma bad enough to count?” and start asking, instead: “what am I carrying, and what would it mean to set it down?” That question is always worth asking. And the answer is always: yes, it counts. You deserve care.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

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How to Begin Healing: What to Do Once You Know Your Experience Counts

In my work with clients who have spent years questioning whether what they’ve been through is “really” trauma, there’s a particular quality to the moment of recognition. It’s rarely triumphant. It’s usually quiet, and often complicated. A mix of relief that there’s a framework for what they’ve experienced, grief for how long they’ve been minimizing it, and sometimes a very understandable anger at having been taught to dismiss it in the first place. If you’ve arrived at the recognition that yes, your experience counts. That what happened to you meets any reasonable clinical definition of traumatic. I want to start there: with acknowledgment. Your experience is real. And naming it accurately is the first intervention.

What comes after naming it is where most people need genuine guidance, because the cultural messaging around trauma is often unhelpful. There’s the “push through it” narrative on one side, and the “you’re broken and fragile” narrative on the other. And neither serves you. The actual path of trauma healing is neither of those things. It’s slow, specific, body-based, relational work that respects the fact that trauma isn’t just a story. It’s a physiological event that lives in your nervous system and shapes how you perceive and respond to the world until the underlying activation is resolved. That resolution is possible. But it requires the right tools, not just the right understanding.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one of the most extensively researched and effective modalities for trauma processing. Developed by Francine Shapiro, EMDR helps the brain reprocess traumatic memories that are stored in an unprocessed, fragmented form. With the emotional charge of the original event still attached. Through bilateral stimulation (typically eye movements), EMDR helps the brain metabolize these memories so they become part of the past rather than the perpetually-active present. For clients who’ve questioned whether their trauma “counts,” EMDR often provides a powerful direct experience: the memory shifts, the charge lessens, and the body’s response confirms what the mind has been debating.

Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Dr. Peter Levine, is another modality I rely on heavily, particularly for clients whose trauma is held somatically. In chronic tension, hypervigilance, numbness, or bodily symptoms that don’t have a clear medical cause. SE works by tracking the body’s responses carefully and helping the nervous system complete stress cycles that were interrupted at the time of the original experience. This approach doesn’t require you to have a dramatic or clearly defined traumatic event. It works with the nervous system’s actual experience, which is often more diffuse and complex than a single incident.

Parts work. Specifically IFS (Internal Family Systems). Is also central to my trauma work. Trauma tends to fragment the self into protective parts: the part that’s always on alert, the part that shuts everything down, the part that’s convinced something is fundamentally wrong with you. IFS gives each of those parts a voice and a context, and helps the client’s core Self develop a compassionate relationship with them rather than an adversarial one. The goal isn’t to get rid of the parts. It’s to help them relax, because the Self is now able to lead in the way the trauma prevented.

One thing I want to name specifically for driven women: the internalized belief that “your trauma doesn’t count” is often reinforced by your own capacity to function well. “But I’ve been successful. But I’ve built a good life. But other people have it so much worse.” High functioning is not evidence that you weren’t traumatized. It’s often evidence of exceptional coping capacity. And sometimes of the very dissociation and self-abandonment that trauma produces. Your ability to hold it together doesn’t disqualify your experience. It makes the healing, when it finally comes, all the more significant.

If you’re ready to begin doing this work in earnest, I’d love to support you. You can learn more about working with me in therapy, where trauma-informed, body-based work is central to what I do. And if you’re trying to identify the right starting point, the quiz on my site can help orient you. Your trauma counts. That was always true. And now the work of healing it can actually begin.

Medical Disclaimer