What is trauma

Trauma is not an event — it’s what happens inside us when life overwhelms our ability to stay whole.

• Overwhelm: Trauma is the flooding of experience we couldn’t process — fear, shame, grief, violation, helplessness.

• Disconnection: In that overwhelm, we split: from our body, from our feelings, from our sense of safety or from our sense of worth.

• Armour: To survive, we build protections — numbness, control, avoidance, ego. These keep us alive, but also keep us distant from life.

• Persistence: Long after the moment has passed, trauma lives on in the nervous system and psyche. It shows up in triggers, patterns, and the sense that the past is not really past.

• The wound beneath: At its heart, trauma is a wound of being unseen, unsafe, or unloved — a rupture in connection with self, others, or the world. 

So trauma is not just “what happened to you.” It’s the mark left inside you when life asked more than you could hold, and you had to turn away from yourself to survive.