Trauma Isn’t What Happened, It’s the Wound That’s Left Behind
For a long time, psychology believed trauma was about events.
Big events.
Unusual events.
Extraordinary events.
Early on it was called shell shock. Later, PTSD. And baked into those early definitions, was the idea that trauma came from something outside normal human experience, such as war, disaster, catastrophe.
But that assumption didn’t really hold up (especially with the emergence of neuroscience).
War is a human experience. Loss is a human experience. Threat, abandonment, humiliation, danger, these are not modern inventions. Humans have been navigating these realities long before modern warfare, or modern diagnostic manuals.
What fundamentally changed was our understanding.
Trauma used to be defined by what happened. Now, it’s understood as what you remember, or actually, how your body remembers.
That’s why two people can go through something that looks identical on paper and walk away very differently.
For many people, a distressing event disrupts life for a while. Things feel shaken, raw, unsettled. But over time - often by three months - they recalibrate and start to move on. The experience becomes part of the past. Painful, yes. But filed away in the past (or we would say processed).
For others, the trauma stays alive and the wound doesn’t heal.
When psychologists talk about trauma in practical, lived terms, we’re not really looking at the arrow - the event itself - but at the wound left behind. We’re looking for how the past is still showing up in the present. Typically, that shows itself in a few core ways.
First, intrusions. These are recurrent, involuntary experiences where the past breaks into the present. That might be vivid flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive images, but just as often it’s emotional flashbacks - moments where you don’t consciously remember anything at all, yet your body suddenly feels panicked, ashamed, frozen, or overwhelmed. The key feature is that these memories don’t feel like memories. They feel like something happening now, rather than something that happened then.
Second, hypervigilance. This is a marked change in arousal and reactivity. The nervous system stays on high alert, scanning for threat even when there is none. People often describe being jumpy, easily startled, tense, unable to relax, or constantly “on edge.” Sleep can be poor. Rest doesn’t feel restorative. It’s as though the body has learned that safety is temporary, and it’s safer to stay prepared than to stand down.
Third, negative changes in beliefs and mood. Trauma leaves behind conclusions about the self, others, and the world. Beliefs such as “It was my fault,”, “I’m not safe,” “I can’t trust,” “I’m weak,” or “Something is wrong with me” take root. Alongside this, people may feel numb, disconnected, low in mood, irritable, or emotionally flat. It’s not simply sadness but a narrowing of emotional life, as though the world has lost some of its colour.
And finally, avoidance. This can look obvious - steering clear of certain places, people, conversations, or situations - but it’s often much subtler. Avoiding emotions. Avoiding rest. Avoiding closeness. Keeping busy, distracted, productive, or switched on at all times so nothing has space to surface. And over time, it also shrinks life.
The key difference between a distressing event and a traumatic response is this:
Trauma is when the past keeps showing up as now.
You’re don’t remember it.
You relive it.
And we now understand why, thanks to neuroscience.
Under overwhelming emotional intensity - fear, shame, helplessness, threat - the brain’s alarm system (the amygdala) goes into overdrive. When that happens, the part of the brain responsible for organising and storing memory (the hippocampus) can’t do its job.
I often describe it like this: every experience is meant to be filed away properly, as if you have a personal librarian checking in each moment and placing it on the shelves of your mind. That librarian stamps each memory twice - once with time and date, and once with place - so when you later recall it, your brain knows that happened then and there. It’s clearly marked in the folder labelled “that happened back then.” But when the alarm system is firing too hard, the librarian never gets to process the memory and finish the task. The memory doesn’t get filed and instead, when it’s recalled, it shows up as if it were happening now.
So when it’s triggered, it doesn’t feel like the past. It arrives with emotional intensity in the here and now - racing heart, tight chest, dread, shame, anger - even if the event itself happened years ago.
And importantly, the event itself doesn’t have to be dramatic. Trauma isn’t reserved for the most extreme experiences. A breakup, a moment of humiliation, a medical scare, being let go at work… if the emotional load was too much at the time, the system may not have been able to process it.
What we know now is this:
What makes something traumatic is not the arrow.
It’s the wound that that’s left behind.
EMDR and Reprocessing
The good news is that trauma is not permanent damage. It’s unfinished processing.
And this is where therapies like EMDR come in.
It is often assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal in therapy.
But EMDR shows us something quite different, that the mind can heal from psychological trauma in much the same way the body heals from physical injury.
If you cut your hand, your body immediately starts working to close the wound. But if something is lodged inside it, or the injury keeps getting re-irritated, the wound festers and stays painful. Once the blockage is removed, healing resumes naturally.
EMDR is built on the same principle. The brain has an inherent drive toward psychological health, but when a disturbing experience overwhelms the system, processing gets blocked. The emotional wound stays open. EMDR helps remove that block so the brain can do what it was always designed to do.
When EMDR is working well, two very specific things change.
First, the emotional intensity drops away. You can remember that something was painful, frightening, or distressing, but you remember it without your body reacting as if it’s happening again.
Second, the belief system linked to the memory shifts. Trauma always lays down beliefs in moments of overwhelm:
“It was my fault.”
“I’m not safe.”
“I’m out of control.”
“I can’t cope.”
As processing completes, those beliefs update and we finish EMDR when you state that you now believe these things with 100% conviction and without any associated distress or bodily discomfort, that:
“I did the best I could.”
“I’m safe right now.”
“I can handle this.”
… The counter belief to what blocked the wound from healing.
This is why EMDR is so powerful. The change doesn’t come from interpretation or persuasion, but from the brain’s own accelerated emotional and cognitive processing. The meaning of the event transforms at an emotional level.
People don’t just understand something differently, they feel it differently. The memory stays, but it no longer runs the present.
That combination - emotional calm and belief change - is the marker that the wound has healed.
The memory stays, but it no longer runs the present.
And that’s the real work of trauma therapy: not erasing the past, but freeing the present from it.
Matt
