What is Trauma and Why Does Talking About it Matter?

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • March 5, 2023

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Your nervous system is the complex communication network inside your body that regulates how you feel, think, and respond to everything around you — from stress to connection. It is not just a technical term or something that only doctors care about; it’s the living, breathing part of you that holds the imprint of your past experiences, including trauma. The nervous system is not a switch you can simply turn on or off, nor is it a sign of weakness when it struggles to regulate emotions or stress after trauma. For you, understanding your nervous system means recognizing why certain situations might trigger overwhelming feelings or shut-downs, and why healing feels less about ‘fixing’ and more about learning to live with both the wounds and your resilience. This knowledge is the foundation for why talking about trauma matters — because it’s the nervous system that carries the story you need to hear and attend to.

• You carry trauma not because of the event itself, but because your nervous system was overwhelmed in a way that disrupts how you manage stress, emotions, and relationships long after the fact.
• Trauma isn’t only about catastrophic incidents; it can be a pattern of relational wounds or prolonged experiences that exceeded your capacity to cope, leaving invisible imprints on your emotional and relational life.
• Talking about your trauma matters because it helps you untangle the lasting impact on your nervous system, making space for deeper understanding and healing that acknowledges the complexity of your unique experience.

Each and every week since I started practicing as a therapist well over a decade ago I get asked some iteration of the question:

“Is what I went through traumatic? Do I need trauma therapy?”

It’s a question I have endless compassion for. Given that it’s a question I asked very early on in my own relational trauma recovery journey, too.

And while trauma is much more elevated as a conversation than it was eight years ago (when I first began writing online), I still find myself doing a lot of psychoeducation in my clinical work about what it is, what impacts can look like, and why talking about it matters so much.

So today’s essay is a summary of some of the key psychoeducational points I like to make.

I hope that reading this post helps you understand it as a concept more. And that it possibly helps you see yourself and your story more clearly. 

1. First of all, what is trauma?
2. What kind of events and circumstances might lead to it?
3. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
4. What happens when something overwhelms our ability to cope?
5. What are some of the impacts and imprints of unresolved trauma?
6. Busting a very common trauma myth:
7. So why talk about trauma? What’s so important about this?

First of all, what is trauma?

Contrary to popular belief, trauma isn’t relegated to just a discrete set of experiences or incidents. (like a car crash or wartime conflict.)

Instead, it has a much more expansive definition.

It 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 this individual’s ability to effectively cope with what they went through. 

Related reading: What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?

What kind of events and circumstances might lead to it?

Despite the subjective nature of what defines trauma, there are still several discreet definitions of traumatic experiences that might be helpful to widen the lens of this conversation even further:

• Acute Trauma: Acute trauma refers to a single-incident event. Such as experiencing a wildfire, car crash, school shooting, terrorist event, or house fire.
• Chronic Trauma: Chronic trauma is a set of experiences that are repeated and take place over time, such as enduring vicarious trauma on the job, middle school bullying, poverty, exposure to violence in the community, or long-term medical challenges.
• Complex Trauma: Complex trauma, is often called developmental or relational trauma. It is the kind that takes place over time in the context of a caretaking relationship. Usually between a parent and child. It happens when they fail to adequately support the child’s biopsychosocial development. Like ongoing neglect, sexual abuse, physical punishment, witnessing domestic violence. Or being raised by a personality- or mood-disordered parent takes place.
• Historical/Racial Trauma: This refers to the experiences of racially-driven oppression, targeting, harassment, and discrimination that groups of individuals have experienced over time. Generations after them still suffer the effects of.

What happens when something overwhelms our ability to cope?

When we experience an event, series of events, or prolonged circumstances that overwhelm our ability to effectively cope, our body and brain are changed both temporarily and sometimes long-term.

How do our brain and body change?

When an event that feels life-threatening or deeply physically or emotionally unsafe occurs, our brain’s “reptilian” part (the limbic system, responsible for survival instincts and automatic bodily functions) takes over and the mammalian and neomammalian parts of our brain (responsible for emotional processing, cognitive processing, and decision making) go “offline” as we switch to pure survival mode.

We stay in this mode until the event or circumstance passes – which can certainly be helpful in surviving the moment!

Then, in some cases, after we move through scary situations, and even if our body and brain respond this way, we’re later able to properly “metabolize” and “digest” the experiences we went through cognitively, emotionally, and physically, leaving us with no maladaptive trauma symptoms.

But at other times, when we aren’t adequately supported (either internally or externally) to make sense of and process the hardship we went through, our brains and the cells of our bodies are left with an imprint and impact of the experiences we endured and we may be left with a host of biopsychosocial consequences that impede our ability to move effectively through our lives, post-trauma.

What are some of the impacts and imprints of unresolved trauma?

• Depression and/or anxiety (including generalized anxiety);
• Irritability and being very short-tempered, having a short fuse;
• Loss of interest in things that used to bring you pleasure, or in life itself;
• Numbing through substances and behaviors, repeatedly and compulsively;
• Trouble concentrating, focusing, and self-organizing;
• Insomnia and challenges sleeping (including nightmares);
• Feeling emotionally flooded and overwhelmed very easily;
• An inability to visualize a future (let alone a positive future);
• Hopelessness and a sense of despair;
• Shame, a sense that you’re worthless;
• Few or no memories, feeling like your childhood is a fog or a big blank;
• Hypervigilance, exaggerated startle response, and general mistrust;
• Body symptoms such as aches, pains, headaches, GI issues, muscle rigidity;
• Substance abuse and eating disorders;
• Self-harming or destructive behaviors such as cutting or burning;
• Feeling like you have no true self, like you don’t know who you really are.
• And more.

Busting a very common trauma myth:

Very importantly, you can have endured trauma and have unresolved trauma impacts playing out in your life and still be “high functioning” and academically, professionally, and financially accomplished.

It’s a common myth – alongside the myth that it is only what war veterans go through – that if you have unresolved trauma symptoms, you must be “low functioning” and barely able to hold down a job, make it through your days, and function well in life.

Related reading: Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections

Of course, sometimes that is true.

But what’s also true is that you can be a tech founder, a high-powered lawyer, an active mom, or a student in a top Ph.D. program and still have unresolved trauma symptoms.

You likely just feel like you’re building a house on quicksand and have found a range of ways to cope and adapt around your trauma impacts.

So why talk about trauma? What’s so important about this?

Because when we see a thing more clearly – in this case, a wider, subjective lens of trauma and examples of unresolved trauma impacts – we can perhaps see ourselves and our stories more clearly and therefore get the targeted, expert help we need to actually, truly resolve our trauma symptoms.

Because, yes, it’s possible to resolve trauma symptoms no matter how long-standing they are.

BUT, very importantly, this does require the right kind of support.

And in this case, those who endured trauma and who have unresolved trauma impacts at play in their own lives need trauma therapy – not just general talk therapy.

Trauma therapy that takes place with a licensed mental health professional who has had advanced training in evidence-based trauma treatment modalities such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) or Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) can effectively, efficiently, and skillfully resolve the maladaptive biopsychosocial impacts of your trauma.

Related reading: Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

Understanding Why Trauma Therapy Is Different

When unresolved trauma symptoms affect your daily life—whether through emotional flooding, chronic numbness, or that persistent feeling of building on quicksand—specialized trauma therapy offers what general talk therapy cannot: direct intervention at the neurobiological level where trauma lives.

A trauma-trained therapist understands that what even is trauma and how do I know if mine counts isn’t about comparing suffering but recognizing when experiences overwhelmed your nervous system’s capacity to cope. Through evidence-based approaches like EMDR, which uses bilateral stimulation to reprocess traumatic memories, or TF-CBT, which addresses trauma-related cognitions and behaviors, your therapist helps your brain finally metabolize what got stuck—sometimes decades ago—in pure survival mode.

The therapeutic process differs fundamentally from traditional therapy because trauma isn’t just a story you tell but an embodied experience stored in your limbic system, muscle memory, and cellular imprints. Your trauma therapist works simultaneously with your narrative (what happened), your nervous system (how your body still responds), and your belief systems (what you concluded about yourself and safety).

They understand that high-functioning clients—the successful lawyers, devoted parents, accomplished students—often need different approaches than those barely managing, recognizing that sophisticated coping mechanisms can actually make trauma harder to access and treat.

Most importantly, trauma therapy provides the internal and external support that was absent when the original overwhelming experiences occurred, allowing your brain to finally complete the interrupted processing.

This isn’t about endlessly talking about trauma but about systematically updating your nervous system’s outdated survival programming, proving through repeated therapeutic experiences that the danger has passed, that you survived, and that your symptoms—no matter how long-standing—can resolve when given the right specialized support your system has been waiting for.

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

Warmly,

Annie

Both/And: You Don’t Have to Choose Between Ambition and Authenticity

The driven women I work with often arrive in therapy with an unspoken fear: if they stop pushing, everything falls apart. If they let themselves feel what they’ve been outrunning, they’ll never get back up. So they frame the choice in binary terms — keep performing or collapse. In my clinical experience, neither option is necessary.

Maya is an executive at a major tech company who hadn’t taken a sick day in three years. When she finally came to therapy, it wasn’t because she decided to — it was because her body decided for her. Migraines, insomnia, a jaw so clenched her dentist flagged it. She told me, “I can’t afford to fall apart,” and I told her the truth: she was already falling apart. She just hadn’t given herself permission to notice. What Maya needed wasn’t to dismantle her drive. It was to stop treating her own pain as an inconvenience to her productivity.

Both/And means this: you can be the person who delivers exceptional results at work and the person who cries in the car afterward. You can be fiercely competent and quietly terrified. You can want more and still appreciate what you have. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the full truth of what it means to be a driven woman navigating a world that rewards your output but not your wholeness.

The Systemic Lens: Why Wellness Culture Fails Driven Women

When a driven woman is struggling — with her mental health, her relationships, her sense of self — the cultural prescription is almost always individual: meditate, journal, set boundaries, practice self-care. These interventions aren’t wrong, but they’re radically incomplete. They place the burden of repair on the woman who was harmed, without ever naming the systems that created the conditions for harm.

The expectation that women — particularly ambitious, driven women — should manage careers, households, relationships, caregiving, and their own mental health without structural support isn’t a personal failure. It’s a systemic design flaw. When corporations demand 60-hour weeks and then offer “wellness programs” instead of workload reduction, when healthcare is tied to employment, when childcare costs more than college tuition in many states — the “wellness gap” driven women experience isn’t a gap in their self-care routines. It’s a gap in the social contract.

In my work with clients, I find it essential to name these forces explicitly. Your exhaustion is not a character deficit. Your difficulty “balancing” work and life isn’t a skills gap. You are attempting to meet inhuman expectations with human resources, and the system that set those expectations has no interest in adjusting them. Understanding this doesn’t solve the problem — but it stops you from internalizing it.

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.

How Unresolved Trauma Shows Up in Driven Women

In my work with driven and ambitious women, trauma rarely announces itself with a capital T. It doesn’t usually look like what the movies show. More often, it looks like the client who describes herself as “fine” while her body holds a decade of unprocessed grief. It looks like the woman who has read every self-help book, done every productivity optimization, and still feels a persistent flatness she can’t explain.

Camille is a 38-year-old product director at a tech company. She came to therapy initially because of “stress.” What emerged over our first few sessions was a childhood marked by a parent with untreated depression — a household where the emotional atmosphere was always unpredictable, where she learned early that monitoring others’ moods was how she stayed safe. “I became really good at reading rooms,” she told me. “I just thought that was a skill. I didn’t realize it was survival.” What Camille had labeled professional intuition was, in part, a hypervigilant nervous system doing what it had always done: scanning for threat.

This is one of the central paradoxes of trauma in driven women: the very adaptations that helped them survive difficult early environments often look, from the outside, like exceptional competence. The hypervigilance reads as keen attention to detail. The emotional suppression reads as professionalism. The relentless productivity reads as ambition. These aren’t false — they are genuinely useful qualities. But they’re built on a foundation of unresolved pain, and eventually that foundation demands attention.

The body keeps a ledger. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has documented extensively that unresolved trauma is stored somatically — in the nervous system, in the musculature, in the body’s chronic state of alert. For driven women who have spent years prioritizing cognitive performance over bodily awareness, this can mean that the first sign of trouble isn’t an emotional breakdown but a physical one: chronic illness, autoimmune conditions, persistent exhaustion that no amount of sleep resolves. The body finds a way to speak, even when the mind has learned to stay quiet.

Why Talking About Trauma Matters — And What Happens When We Don’t

There is a myth that trauma is best left in the past — that the way to heal is to move forward without looking back. This myth is not only wrong; it’s actively harmful, particularly for women who’ve spent years using achievement as a strategy for leaving their history behind. The problem is that trauma doesn’t stay in the past. It lives in the present, in the nervous system, in the patterns of relationship and self-regard that shape every day.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery, first articulated what clinical research has since confirmed: that healing from trauma requires acknowledgment, not avoidance. The path through is not around. When we speak about what happened — in the right relational context, with a skilled therapist, in a body that has been helped to feel safe — something in the nervous system begins to reorganize. The story that was fragmented into sensation and reactivity starts to become a narrative. And a narrative can be integrated in a way that raw, unsorted experience cannot.

Talking about trauma also matters because isolation is one of its primary wounds. Many driven women carry their histories in complete secrecy — performing wellness in every professional context, managing others’ perceptions of their lives with as much precision as they manage their careers. The experience of being witnessed, of speaking and being heard without judgment, is itself part of what heals. This is why individual therapy can be so powerful: not just because of the techniques or frameworks a therapist offers, but because of the experience of not being alone with your own story.

Both/And: You Don’t Have to Choose Between Strength and Struggle

One of the most healing reframes I offer in my work with driven women is what I call the Both/And perspective. Culture loves a clean narrative: you’re either doing well or you’re struggling, either thriving or drowning, either grateful or in pain. But human experience — especially for women navigating trauma and healing — rarely works that way.

The truth I see in my clinical work every week is this: you can be genuinely accomplished and genuinely exhausted. You can love your work and feel depleted by it. You can have built something impressive and still feel like something is missing underneath. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the texture of a complex life.

Nadia is a 38-year-old pediatrician at a major hospital system. She came to therapy because she couldn’t understand why, after finally getting help, she said she wasn’t sure she deserved it — that her trauma wasn’t ‘bad enough’ to warrant taking up a therapist’s time, she still felt hollow. “I have everything I said I wanted,” she told me. “Why isn’t it enough?” The answer wasn’t that something was wrong with her ambition. It was that she’d never been given permission to want something else at the same time — rest, softness, connection that didn’t require her to perform. She didn’t need to choose between her drive and her wellbeing. She needed to hold both.

When you release the binary, something shifts. You stop needing to prove that your life is good in order to justify your pain. You stop needing to hide your success in order to justify your exhaustion. You get to be the full, contradictory, complicated person you actually are — and that is where real relational trauma recovery begins.

The Systemic Lens: The Weight You Carry Isn’t All Yours

When a driven woman is struggling — with her boundaries, her nervous system, her sense of self — the cultural prescription is almost always individual: meditate, set better limits, practice self-care, work with a therapist. These aren’t wrong suggestions. But they’re radically incomplete without the acknowledgment that many of the burdens driven women carry were placed there by systems, not by personal shortcomings.

The conditions that shape unresolved trauma don’t arise in a vacuum. Women — particularly ambitious, driven women — are navigating workplaces that were never designed with their full humanity in mind. They’re managing domestic and caregiving labor that remains invisible in professional spaces. They’re expected to perform equanimity, manage others’ emotional temperatures, and present as unruffled while handling workloads that would visibly crack open anyone who tried to carry them.

In my work with clients, I find it essential to name these forces explicitly. When systems place the full burden of psychological repair on the individual — without acknowledging the relational, cultural, and institutional forces that created the conditions for harm — they’re asking you to fix what isn’t entirely yours to fix. Your exhaustion is not a character deficit. Your difficulty “balancing” everything isn’t a skills gap. You are attempting to meet genuinely inhuman expectations with human resources — and the system that set those expectations has no interest in adjusting them to accommodate your wellbeing.

Understanding the systemic dimension of your struggle doesn’t solve it — the systems are real, and they don’t change because you’ve named them. But the naming matters, because it stops you from internalizing what belongs to the system. When you know the weight isn’t all yours, you stop punishing yourself for buckling under it. And from that more honest place, you can begin making choices about what you’re willing to carry, what you can set down, and where you need support rather than more individual effort.

This is the work I hold space for in executive coaching and therapy — not just the personal, but the structural. Not just what’s happening in your nervous system, but what created the conditions for it to happen in the first place.

How to Begin: Taking Your Trauma Seriously Enough to Talk About It

In my work with clients across many years of clinical practice, one of the most consistent things I’ve seen is how long it takes people to apply the word “trauma” to their own experience — even when it clearly fits. There’s an internal hierarchy most people carry, where “real trauma” happened to someone else, in circumstances more dramatic than their own. If this post has been starting to chip at that hierarchy for you, I want to encourage you to let it. Naming what you’re carrying accurately isn’t a theatrical act. It’s the first concrete step toward getting the right help.

Talking about trauma — the act of putting it into words with a trained witness — matters for reasons that are neurobiological, not just psychological. When traumatic experience is unspoken and unstoried, it tends to live in the nervous system as raw sensation and implicit memory: the sudden tightening in your chest during a certain kind of conversation, the inexplicable dread before a meeting that resembles a childhood dynamic, the emotional flashback that seems to come from nowhere. Language helps the left hemisphere of the brain integrate what the right hemisphere has been storing in fragments. It literally changes how trauma is encoded and accessed.

That said, talking alone often isn’t sufficient — especially for trauma that’s been held for a long time. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a modality specifically designed to process traumatic memories that have gotten stuck in the nervous system’s filing system. Rather than just narrating what happened, EMDR uses bilateral stimulation — typically eye movements — to help the brain complete the processing it couldn’t finish at the time of the original experience. It’s one of the most well-researched trauma treatments available, and many clients describe feeling the weight of a memory actually lighten after targeted EMDR work. Therapy with Annie incorporates EMDR as one of several tools available depending on what you’re carrying and what your nervous system needs.

Somatic Experiencing, developed by Dr. Peter Levine, is another approach worth knowing about — particularly if you notice that your trauma response is primarily physical rather than thought-based. SE works with the body’s incomplete defensive responses: the impulse to run or freeze or fight that never got to complete itself, and that may still be cycling in your system years later. Rather than pushing you to relive or narrate the traumatic event, SE tracks physical sensation and gently helps your nervous system discharge what’s been held. For many people, this feels like the first intervention that finally reaches the layer of experience that everything else was circling.

A practical starting point: before your first session with a trauma-informed therapist, spend a few days simply noticing — not analyzing — your nervous system responses. When do you feel that familiar tightening? What situations or interactions tend to leave you depleted or flooded? Where in your body do you feel it? This isn’t self-diagnosis; it’s gathering the sensory data that will help you and your therapist understand what you’re working with. You don’t need to arrive with a fully formed story. You can arrive with just what your body has been trying to tell you.

If you’re not sure where to start or whether what you’re experiencing qualifies for clinical attention, our short quiz can help you begin to locate yourself. Many people who take it find it’s the first time they’ve seen their experience reflected back in language that actually fits. And that recognition alone — seeing it named accurately — can be the moment things begin to shift.

You don’t have to have language for everything before you start. You don’t have to have the “right” level of trauma or meet some imaginary threshold of suffering before you’re allowed to seek help. What you’re carrying is real, it’s affecting you, and there are people trained to help you move through it. The conversation can start wherever you are — and if you’re ready to have it, we’re here through our connect page whenever you want to reach out.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer