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

A psychoeducational essay on what even is trauma? how do I know if mine “counts”?, drawn from more than a decade of practice with driven women in relational-trauma recovery.

Shannon sat on the far end of my couch with her coat still on, forty minutes into our first session, and told me she wasn’t sure she should be there. “Nobody hit me,” she said. “My mom just made everything about her. That’s not trauma. That’s a personality.”

I hear some version of this sentence almost every week in my practice. A woman sits across from me, apologizes for taking up a slot she’s convinced belongs to someone with a “real” story, and then describes a childhood spent scanning her mother’s face for the weather, a body that can’t fall asleep without checking the locks twice, a startle response so sharp her partner has learned to announce himself from the hallway. She’s not describing a personality quirk. She’s describing a nervous system that learned, early and thoroughly, that it wasn’t safe to stand down.

What I’ve come to think of as the “does mine count” question is really a question about definitions, and the definition most of us absorbed is far too narrow. Trauma isn’t measured by what happened to you. It’s measured by what happened inside you, and whether your body ever got the chance to finish the response it started. Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD, a psychiatrist, wrote in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry in 1994 that the body keeps the score, and I’ve watched that play out in women whose childhoods would never make the evening news but whose systems are still braced at 2 a.m. for a door that stopped slamming thirty years ago. If you’ve been circling this question, quietly comparing your story to someone else’s and finding yours wanting, I want to hand you a better yardstick, and it starts with what your body already knows.

Trauma isn’t the thing that happened: it’s what your body did to survive it.

When a woman sits across from me for the first time and says, “I don’t know if this is even trauma,” I’ve learned to hear that sentence as the actual presenting problem. Not the divorce, not the mother, not the thing that happened when she was nine. The not knowing whether she’s allowed to call it something is the injury still doing its work.

So here’s the definition I use in my office, in three layers. The clinical layer: trauma is any experience that overwhelmed your nervous system’s capacity to cope in the moment and left the system organized around threat afterward. Notice what isn’t in that sentence. No list of qualifying events. No minimum severity. The definition lives in the response, not the incident.

The analogy I reach for is a circuit breaker in an old house. A breaker doesn’t trip because the storm was objectively enormous. It trips because more current came through than that particular wiring could carry. Two houses on the same street, same storm, and one goes dark while the other keeps its lights on. Nobody stands in the dark kitchen and says the outage doesn’t count because the neighbors were fine.

And the layer you can check against your own Tuesday afternoon: trauma is what’s happening when a text from your sister lands at 4:15 and your stomach drops before you’ve read it. It’s your shoulders climbing toward your ears in a meeting where nothing is wrong. It’s being thirty-eight and competent and still unable to explain why you can’t sleep the night before you fly home for a holiday. The event may be decades back. The response is current.

I didn’t have language for that split between event and response until I read a 1994 paper by Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD, the psychiatrist who has spent his career on this, called “The body keeps the score: memory and the evolving psychobiology of posttraumatic stress.” What struck me wasn’t the title everyone now knows. It was his observation that traumatic memory doesn’t get filed the way ordinary memory does. It’s stored as sensation, as physical state, as fragments that fire without a timestamp. That’s why your body can react to something your mind insists is over.

Which brings me to the question in this post’s title, and I want to answer it plainly before we go further. If your body is still responding to something as though it’s happening, then something happened. The size of the event isn’t the measurement. The size of the response is. The rest of this post is about learning to read that response, because most of the women I work with were never taught to, and their shoulders are up right now.

Your nervous system has three gears, and trauma gets stuck in two of them.

I want to give you the map I draw for nearly every client in the first few weeks, because once you can see it, the question “does mine count” starts to answer itself in your body rather than your head.

The clinical term is autonomic nervous system, and the piece we care about is the vagus nerve, a long wandering bundle that runs from your brainstem down through your heart, lungs, and gut. Stephen W. Porges, PhD, the neuroscientist who developed polyvagal theory, laid out in a 2007 paper in Biological Psychology called “The polyvagal perspective” that this system doesn’t just have an on switch and an off switch. It has a hierarchy of states, and it moves between them based on whether it detects safety or threat, often before you’ve consciously registered anything at all. He called that automatic detection neuroception, and I think of it as your body’s smoke detector, reading the room before you’ve smelled anything.

Here’s the analogy. Picture a car with three gears. Top gear is connection: your face is mobile, your voice has range, you can hear the words under someone’s words, you digest your lunch. Middle gear is mobilization: heart rate up, muscles primed, attention narrowed to the exits. That’s fight or flight, and it’s brilliant when there’s an actual bear. Low gear is shutdown: everything drops, energy drains, you go flat and far away. That’s freeze, or collapse, and it’s what the body does when fighting and running both look impossible.

None of these gears is wrong. A healthy system shifts through all three in a normal day and comes back to top gear when the threat passes. The problem trauma creates isn’t that you go into middle or low gear. It’s that the transmission gets stuck. The threat passes, or the threat was thirty years ago, and the body doesn’t get the memo.

So what does a stuck transmission feel like on an ordinary Tuesday? Middle-gear stuck looks like a woman who can’t stop. She answers emails at 11pm, rehearses conversations in the shower, feels a low hum of dread on Sunday evenings, and calls it “just how I am.” Low-gear stuck looks like a woman who can’t start. She stares at the printout, scrolls without seeing, feels a heaviness she can’t name, and calls that “just how I am” too. Many of my clients swing between the two and call it a personality.

Neither is a personality. Both are a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do in an environment where staying in top gear wasn’t safe. When I say trauma is nervous system dysregulation, this is what I mean: not a set of memories, but a transmission that lost its confidence about coming home to connection. The good news, which I’ll come back to, is that transmissions can be retrained. Slowly. Which is where we’re going next.

Trauma moves fast, which is exactly why the repair has to move slowly.

If you take one thing from the neurobiology, let it be this: your trauma response is faster than your thinking. Not a little faster. Your smoke detector has fired, your gears have shifted, your jaw has clamped before the part of you that reads books has any idea a decision was made.

The clinical word is reflexivity, and it means a response that doesn’t route through deliberation. The analogy: touch a hot stove and your hand is gone before the word “hot” has formed. Nobody chooses that. Nobody could choose it slower. Trauma responses live in that same reflex circuitry, which is why every woman who’s ever told me “I know better, so why do I keep reacting this way” is asking exactly the right question with exactly the wrong expectation. Knowing better is a top-gear activity. The reaction happened two gears down and several hundred milliseconds earlier.

On a Tuesday, this is the phone lighting up with your father’s name and your voice going high and agreeable before you’ve said hello. It’s the flush of shame when a colleague says “can we talk” and you’ve already decided you’re being fired. It’s fast, it’s total, and afterward you feel foolish for it, which is its own small injury.

Here’s where I want to be direct about what this means for healing, because the culture sells you the opposite. Something that installed itself at reflex speed can’t be uninstalled at reflex speed. You can’t think your way out of a hot-stove reaction. You can’t read a book on Saturday and be different by Monday. The repair has to happen in the territory the injury lives in, which is the body, and at the pace the body can tolerate, which is slow. I’ve watched this frustrate nearly every driven woman I’ve worked with, and I’ve watched the slowness turn out to be the medicine.

One sentence I’ve kept taped inside the front cover of a notebook for years says this better than I can.

Read that again with your own body in mind. The instruction isn’t only to slow down. It’s to get curious about how your particular system connects and how it settles, because those are the two movements trauma interrupts. Peter A. Levine, PhD, the psychologist who developed Somatic Experiencing, published a 2015 paper in Frontiers in Psychology on using interoception and proprioception in trauma therapy that changed how I run sessions. Interoception is your sense of what’s happening inside you: the heartbeat, the tight gut, the warmth spreading after a long exhale. Learning to track it is how you catch the gear shift while it’s still shifting, instead of ten minutes after.

So when I ask a client to feel her feet on the floor for thirty seconds, I’m not being precious. I’m teaching her transmission where home is, one slow rep at a time. Thirty seconds, feet on the carpet, a coffee going cold on the side table. That’s the pace.

The trauma with no incident: growing up next to someone who genuinely couldn’t see you.

Most of the women who ask me whether their trauma counts aren’t asking about a car accident. They’re asking about a childhood that looked fine from the street. Two parents, a house, dinner on the table, and a low, constant experience of not being seen by the person whose job it was to see them.

Sierra is a composite drawn from readers who’ve written to me about this pattern. She isn’t a client; her name and identifying details have been changed. Her email arrived at nine on a weeknight, after two teenagers were settled, and she told me it had taken about a year of drafting before she hit send. She’s 44, an HR generalist of eighteen years, married nineteen. She investigates workplace grievances for a living, and she’d noticed something about the cases she found hardest.

“They’re not lying to me,” she wrote. “That’s what I keep running into. Somebody’s been described accurately by four separate colleagues and then they sit in front of me and they’re honestly baffled, and I can tell the difference between baffled and performing, I do it for a living. And my mother is baffled. Every single time. She has never once known what I was talking about, and I don’t believe for a second that she’s pretending. And that’s harder than if she were.”

My chest went tight at that last line. Harder than if she were. Sierra had spent eighteen years building a professional instrument for telling sincerity from performance, then pointed it at her own mother and gotten a reading she didn’t want.

There’s a clinical phrase for what she’s describing, impaired self-observation, and I’ll be honest that it does nothing at a kitchen table. So here’s the plain version. Some people can’t see the thing four other people can plainly see about them. The not-seeing isn’t a tactic. It’s a real limit, the way some ears can’t pick up a certain pitch. Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, a clinical psychologist, wrote about parents like this in her 2015 book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and reading it was the first time I understood why my clients with this kind of mother felt crazier than my clients with an openly cruel one. Cruelty you can name. Bewilderment leaves you nowhere to stand.

Why does this count as trauma? Go back to the gears. A child whose emotional signals never land, who reaches and gets a puzzled face, learns that reaching is pointless and her inner world is invisible or wrong. Her nervous system stops expecting to be met. That isn’t one overwhelming event. It’s thousands of small ones, each too minor to remember, all pointing the same direction.

What shifted for Sierra wasn’t forgiveness and it wasn’t a plan. She stopped trying to build the conversation that would finally make her mother understand, because she’d already run that investigation and knew the outcome. The drafting stopped, she said. Not the grief. Just the drafting.

Complex trauma is a different animal than a single terrible day.

Part of why so many women decide their trauma doesn’t count is that the only model they’ve been handed is the single-incident one. A soldier, a crash, an assault. One terrible day, followed by flashbacks of that day. If your experience doesn’t look like that, and for most of my clients it doesn’t, you conclude you’re just anxious, or sensitive, or difficult.

In 1992, Judith Lewis Herman, MD, a psychiatrist, published a paper in the Journal of Traumatic Stress proposing a different category. She called it complex PTSD, a syndrome in survivors of prolonged and repeated trauma, and when I first read it I had the unnerving experience of seeing a decade of clients described in a journal article. Her argument was that living under sustained threat you can’t escape, especially in childhood, especially at the hands of someone you depend on, produces a different injury than a single event does. Not worse, necessarily. Different in shape.

The clinical shape looks like this: trouble regulating emotion, a sense of self organized around shame or defectiveness, and relationships that repeat the original dynamic. Let me translate. Single-incident trauma is like a bomb going off in one room of a house. The room is wrecked, and everyone can point to it. Complex trauma is like a house built on ground that was never level. Nothing dramatic ever happened. There’s just a crack in every wall, a door that never quite closes, and a woman who’s spent her life thinking the problem is her housekeeping.

On a Tuesday, complex trauma is being exceptionally good at reading a room and exceptionally bad at knowing what you want for dinner. It’s a career built on anticipating other people’s needs and a marriage where you can’t ask for yours. It’s feeling most like yourself when you’re useful and most anxious when someone is simply kind to you. It’s a body that hasn’t once in your adult life been fully relaxed and doesn’t know that’s unusual.

The reason I’m spending a whole section here is that complex trauma is the kind most likely to be dismissed, both by the woman living it and by everyone around her. There’s no story to tell at a dinner party. “My mother was baffled by me” doesn’t land the way “my house burned down” does. So she decides it doesn’t count, and she keeps the crack in the wall, and she blames the housekeeping.

If you recognized yourself in the uneven house, sit with this for a second: the absence of one terrible day isn’t evidence of the absence of trauma. It’s often evidence that the trauma was the weather, not the storm. Weather is harder to point at. It’s also harder to leave.

Both/And: the letter can be genuinely good and genuinely too late.

One of the fastest ways to know your nervous system is running the show is to notice when it demands a verdict. Either she loved me or she didn’t. Either it was bad or I’m making it up. Either I’m grateful or I’m angry. The mind under threat wants one column, and it wants it now.

Shannon is a composite of several clients I’ve worked with; her name and identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality. She’s 44, schedules home health visits for an agency, partnered nine years, no children. She came into my office straight from work one evening, six o’clock, tomorrow’s routes on a printout she set face down on the couch beside her, a coffee she’d carried in and never touched. Her mother had died two years earlier and left her a letter. Four pages, warm, specific, apologetic. Shannon had read it eleven times.

“It’s a good letter,” she said. “Four pages, specific, she names things, and it’s the letter I wanted for about thirty years. And it arrived after she died, which means she wrote it and put it in a drawer and had the whole rest of her life to say any of it to my face and didn’t. And it’s still a good letter. Both of those. And people want me to be either grateful or angry and neither response fully fits; the letter had been read eleven times.”

The sentence holds the Both/And tension plainly: the letter can be meaningful and still arrive after a lifetime of silence. Neither truth cancels the other.

The clinical term is dialectical thinking, and I call it Both/And in my office because nobody wants a clinical term at six o’clock. The analogy is the difference between a scale and a table. A scale has two pans and one has to drop. A table has room for two objects that don’t cancel each other out. The letter is a good letter. The letter was withheld for the whole of a life. On a scale those fight. On a table they just sit there, both true, both heavy.

What it feels like on a Tuesday is exhausting at first. Every person Shannon tells wants her to put the letter on a scale so they know what to feel. Her partner wants her comforted by it. Her brother wants her furious. Both/And is what lets her decline both invitations. It’s also the exact thing her nervous system was never allowed to do growing up in a narcissistic family, where reality was whatever her mother needed it to be that day.

What shifted wasn’t a decision about the letter. She still hasn’t made one, and I’ve stopped thinking she needs to. What shifted was that she came in the following week and told me she’d read it a twelfth time, and this time she hadn’t tried to decide anything. She’d just read it. The printout stayed face down. The coffee, she said, she’d remembered to drink.

The Systemic Lens: The world keeps a ranking of suffering, and most of yours doesn’t make the list.

I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you believe the question “does mine count” came from inside you alone. It didn’t. You were handed a ranking system, and you’ve been running your experience against it for years.

Look at how the word trauma gets used in the world you live in. Emergency rooms have trauma bays, and they’re for gunshots and car wrecks. Insurance codes recognize a stressor when it was life-threatening. The news uses the word for wars and disasters. Everywhere you look, trauma is defined by the size of the visible event, and a childhood spent being invisible to your own mother has no visible event at all. So of course you conclude yours doesn’t qualify. The rubric was written for a different exam.

Then there’s the comparison reflex, a common way distress gets minimized. Somebody always has it worse. A friend’s father actually hit her. A cousin actually lost a parent young. You had food and a bedroom and a mother who mostly showed up, so what exactly are you complaining about? I hear some version of this in nearly every first session, and I want to name what it’s doing. It isn’t humility. It’s a nervous system that learned early that its distress was inconvenient, now enforcing that rule on itself so nobody else has to.

The third force is the one that catches driven women hardest: a culture that rewards the exact symptoms complex trauma produces. Hypervigilance gets called attention to detail. An inability to rest gets called work ethic. Reading every room before you enter it gets called emotional intelligence. Never asking for anything gets called low maintenance. The world doesn’t just fail to recognize your trauma response. It promotes you for it, then acts confused when you fall apart at 43.

There’s a clinical concept underneath all this, minimization, which means shrinking the significance of an experience until it’s manageable. The analogy I use is turning down the volume on a smoke detector because the noise is annoying, then wondering why the kitchen’s full of smoke. What it feels like on a Tuesday is telling your therapist a story that makes her set down her pen, and following it with “but honestly it wasn’t a big deal.”

I’m not asking you to go looking for outrage. I’m asking you to notice that the yardstick you’ve been using wasn’t yours. It was issued by hospitals, headlines, comparison, and a workplace that likes you tired. When you set it down, the question changes shape. It stops being “was my event big enough” and becomes “what is my body still doing, and would I like it to stop.”

Healing means finishing the cycle your body never got to complete.

Here’s the piece of the definition I saved for last, because it’s also the doorway out. Stress isn’t only a feeling. It’s a physiological cycle with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and trauma is very often a cycle that got started and never got to finish.

Think about what a stress response is for. Threat appears, the body floods with fuel to fight or run, you fight or run, the threat passes, and the body discharges the leftover charge: shaking, deep breaths, crying, the slump onto the kitchen floor. That last stage is the completion. It’s how a zebra that has just outrun a lion is grazing calmly twenty minutes later. The analogy I give clients is a sneeze. You can feel one building, and if you stifle it, the pressure doesn’t vanish. It sits behind your eyes and waits.

Now think about a child in a house where fighting wasn’t allowed and running wasn’t possible. Her body floods with fuel, over and over, and there’s nowhere for it to go. She learns to stifle the sneeze. Years later the threat is long gone and the pressure is still behind her eyes, and she calls it anxiety, or tension, or “I hold stress in my shoulders.” What she’s describing is an incomplete cycle. Dozens of them, stacked.

On a Tuesday this is the woman who gets through the brutal meeting flawlessly and then cries in her car at a red light for no reason she can name. The reason is that her body finally found a gap in the schedule to finish something. It’s the woman who feels inexplicably better after a hard run, or dancing in her kitchen, or sobbing at a commercial, and is a little embarrassed about all three.

I’d been circling this in sessions for years without a clean way to say it, and then I read Hillary L. McBride, PhD, a clinical psychologist and researcher, in her 2021 book The Wisdom of Your Body. She handed me the sentence I’d been missing.

That’s the whole reorientation, right there. Healing isn’t primarily understanding what happened. You may understand it perfectly and still cry at red lights. Healing is giving the body the ending it was denied, in doses it can handle. That’s why so much of what actually works looks almost embarrassingly physical: shaking out your hands after a hard phone call, an exhale that’s longer than the inhale, pushing your palms into a wall until your arms tremble, letting yourself cry the whole way through instead of pulling it back at the two-minute mark.

None of that is a trick, and none of it replaces the slow relational work we’ve talked about. It’s the other half. The nervous system learns it’s safe through connection, and it finishes what it started through movement. If you’ve been trying to think your way to calm and wondering why it won’t land, this may be why. The sneeze is still waiting.

How to hold the question from here: the House of Life and a different kind of yes.

So we’re back at the question you came in with. Does mine count. I hope by now you can feel how the question itself was built by a nervous system that learned to ask permission before feeling anything, and by a world that handed you a ruler made for other people’s wounds.

In my practice I use a framework I call the proverbial House of Life™. Picture your life as a house with a foundation, load-bearing walls, and the rooms you actually live in: work, relationships, health, money, meaning. The foundation is your early attachment experience and the nervous system it built. Most women come to me wanting to renovate a room. The career isn’t working, the marriage is strained, the body won’t sleep. And what we find, nearly every time, is that the room is fine and the floor underneath it isn’t level. The question “does my trauma count” is really the question “am I allowed to look at the foundation,” and the answer is that you’re the one who lives in the house.

The clinical word for what happens when you finally look is integration, which means the parts of your experience that were split off, the body’s knowledge and the mind’s story, begin to belong to the same person. The analogy is a house where the basement and the living room have finally been connected by a staircase, so you don’t have to pretend the basement isn’t there. What it feels like on a Tuesday is telling your sister you can’t come to the thing, feeling your stomach drop, and noticing the drop instead of obeying it.

Below this section I’ve laid out seven things I’d invite you to weigh before you decide what to do with any of this. They aren’t a diagnostic checklist, and you don’t need to score five out of seven. They’re orientation points, the kind of questions I’d ask if you were sitting across from me and we had an hour and a cold coffee between us. Some of them will feel irrelevant. One or two may land in your chest before your mind catches up, and that landing is data.

Whatever you decide, I’d like you to consider one small shift in the question. Not “does my trauma count,” which asks someone else for a verdict. Instead: “is my body still responding to something, and would I like help with that.” The second question doesn’t need anyone’s permission. It just needs you to notice your shoulders right now, this second, and see where they’ve climbed to.

Seven criteria to consider before you begin.

These criteria are orientation points, not a gatekeeping checklist. You don’t have to meet every one perfectly, and any missing piece can become part of the plan.