Series: Therapy Speak, Decoded
Trauma is everywhere right now.
We talk about childhood trauma, collective trauma, generational trauma. We describe difficult experiences as traumatizing. We say I have trauma the way we might say I have a bad knee — as a fixed, defining feature of who we are.
And yet, for a word that gets used this much, it’s surprisingly hard to pin down what we actually mean by it.
I want to try to be more precise — not to minimize anyone’s experience, but because I think vague language can sometimes work against us. When we don’t quite understand what trauma is, we can end up either dismissing our own experiences (that wasn’t bad enough to count) or feeling like we’re permanently defined by them (this will never not be part of me).
Neither of those is quite right. And both can get in the way of healing.
Difficult Things Happen — They Always Have
Let’s start here: humans have been experiencing difficult, frightening, and devastating things since the beginning of time. Loss, violence, illness, betrayal, war, death — none of this is new. And most people, across history, have found ways to survive and continue living, loving, and making meaning.
That’s not a reason to minimize what happened to you. It’s actually a reason to take it seriously — because if difficulty alone were enough to cause lasting harm, none of us would have made it this far.
So what makes the difference?
It’s Not Just What Happened — It’s What Happened After
One of the most important shifts in how we understand trauma is this: it’s not only about the event itself. It’s about what happened in the aftermath.
Were you left alone with the experience? Was there someone to comfort you, help you make sense of it, help you feel safe again? Or were you left to sit with it by yourself — trying to understand something that was genuinely too much to understand alone?
This is especially significant for children, whose nervous systems and cognitive capacities are still developing. A child who experiences something frightening and then has a safe, regulated adult to turn to — someone who says that was scary, and you’re safe now, and I’m here — has a very different outcome than a child who experiences the same thing and is left alone with it, or told not to talk about it, or not believed.
But it matters for adults too. We are not as self-sufficient as we like to think. We are wired for connection, and we process difficult experiences better when we don’t have to process them alone.
The Conclusions We Draw
Here’s where I think the real work of trauma often lives: in the meaning we make of what happened.
When something overwhelming occurs — especially when we’re young, especially when we’re alone with it — we try to make sense of it. And the conclusions we reach can be lasting:
There’s something wrong with me. I can’t protect myself. People aren’t safe. The world is dangerous. I’m too much, or not enough.
These aren’t irrational. In the moment, they were the best explanation available. A child who is hurt by someone they depend on can’t afford to conclude that the person is unsafe — they need that person to survive. So they conclude instead that they must be the problem. It’s a protective adaptation that made sense then and causes harm now.
Trauma, in this sense, is less about what happened and more about what it meant — and what we’ve been carrying ever since.
What the Word Can Do to Us
I want to say something careful here, because I think it matters.
When we say I have trauma, there can be an implicit message underneath it: this is just how I am now. This is permanent. This is out of my control.
And I understand why the language lands that way. When you’ve been living with the effects of something for years — the hypervigilance, the avoidance, the way certain things still knock you sideways — it can genuinely feel like a fixed feature of who you are.
But trauma is not an identity. It’s an experience that happened, that had an impact, that lives in your nervous system and your beliefs about yourself and the world — and that can be worked with.
That doesn’t mean it’s simple. It doesn’t mean you can think your way out of it, or that wanting to heal is enough. It means that the conclusions you drew — I’m not safe, I’m broken, I can’t trust — are not permanent truths. They’re old adaptations that no longer serve you. And they can change.
What Therapy Actually Does With Trauma
When I work with clients around trauma, I’m not primarily interested in going back over the past for its own sake. I’m interested in two things: what happened, and what it meant to you — and whether that meaning is still serving you now.
Sometimes that means talking. Sometimes it means noticing what happens in your body when certain memories surface. Sometimes it means working slowly with the nervous system’s response — the way it learned to protect you and now fires when there’s no actual threat.
One approach I use is EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It can sound strange from the outside, but what it’s doing at its core is helping the brain process experiences that got stuck — experiences that didn’t get filed away as past because they were too overwhelming at the time. EMDR doesn’t erase memories. It changes the charge they carry, so they can finally settle into the past where they belong.
A More Useful Way to Think About It
If I were to offer a working definition of trauma — one that I find more useful than just a bad thing that happened — it might be something like this:
Trauma is an experience that overwhelmed your capacity to cope at the time, that you were left to carry alone or make sense of without adequate support, and that led to conclusions about yourself, others, or the world that continue to shape how you move through life.
That definition keeps the focus where it’s useful: not on the event as a fixed category, but on the experience, the aloneness, the meaning, and — crucially — the possibility of something different.
If This Is Landing Close to Home
If you’re reading this and recognizing something — in your history, in the way you respond to things, in conclusions you’ve long held about yourself — therapy can be a place to look at that carefully and with support.
I work with trauma and PTSD in my counselling practice, in person in Squamish and online across BC. If you’re a therapist supporting clients through trauma, I also offer clinical supervision for counsellors in BC and beyond.
And if you’re just starting to get curious about what’s happening inside you, my free course You Gotta Name It to Tame It is a gentle place to begin.
This post is part of Therapy Speak, Decoded — a series unpacking the words that show up constantly in therapy contexts and don’t always get explained. Because language that creates distance is the opposite of what therapy is for.
Jill Koehler, MA, RCC-ACS is a Registered Clinical Counsellor and Approved Clinical Supervisor based in Squamish, BC, with a focus on trauma, anxiety, and relationships.
