WTF is Trauma?

27 minutes into the Zoom call I felt tears come down my cheek.

I remember thinking “wow this was a great investment, I didn’t know anything was here!”

My eyes were closed as I was working with a coach going through inner child work.

I didn’t really seek this out, but I’m so glad I found it. A friend brought a coach to speak to our men’s group, who then offered a free intro call, which led me to my first paid session.

I don’t know about you, but there are a few words when I hear them, my brain wants to immediately dismiss them. Words such as, “trauma”, “healing”, “mastermind”, “coaching”, etc. But it turns out, at least some of these words are worth understanding.

Specifically trauma. I just recently started to understand it and was blown away by how interconnected it is with our lives into adulthood.

I’ll leave out the specifics here, but in a not-so-roundabout way, learning about trauma and emotions led me to my first Ayahuasca ceremony which was nothing short of transformational. (You can read that full post here.)

I realized I was looking at “trauma” all wrong. Mainly because I wasn’t looking at it at all.

I thought, childhood trauma? I’m good. There are kids who are homeless or experience abuse, death, genocide, etc. My childhood was great!

But then I was able to peel back the onion. It’s not a matter of good vs bad. As adaptive species, we form stimulus-response relationships to our environments over time. So why would we not explore these to understand our own behavior patterns?

If we burn our hand on a hot stove we quickly learn not to put our hand there again. But we maybe neglect to learn what caused the stove to be so hot in the first place.

I sure did.

I also was blown away by how often this stuff shows up across other aspects of our life. And (most importantly) how we can learn and start to adjust it.

I poured countless hours into learning this feelings stuff. But this 7-minute video “exercise” was a huge aha moment for my understanding.

Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician and author with expertise on trauma, addiction, stress, and childhood development. This is him talking Tim Ferriss through a little exercise. It’s maybe the most insightful 7 minutes I’ve seen on the internet.

It made me realize the power of our perception.

“We don’t respond to what happens. We respond to our PERCEPTION of what happens.”

Further, as much as we like to point the finger at others, we are the ones in charge of ourselves:

“Every time you’re pointing a finger at someone, keep in mind there are 3 more pointing back at you.”

How we show up in the world really just comes down to our basic emotions. The more we understand these, the better we can problem solve. I’ve struggled to define and properly bucket these emotions, so it’s helpful to have this wheel to understand what is what.

I practice by answering the slippery question I have set as a daily reminder on my phone asking, “How do you feel?”

A few more definitions to simply this stuff.

Trauma comes from the Greek word for “wound.” It’s a mental wound that leaves a scar in our nervous system and shows up later on in unhelpful ways. Trauma could be: bad things that did happen that should not have. Or good things that did not happen that should have.

All trauma is stressful, but not all stress is traumatic.

Health internationally means wholeness.

If trauma wounds or disconnects us from our emotions and true self, healing reconnects us to come whole again.

Healing is the integrity of a person, not the absence of an illness. Therefore it’s not the same as being “cured.”

By understanding these definitions and tools we have, the better we can understand ourselves.

Thinking of trauma as a “wound” and healing as “reconnecting” somehow feels easier for me to grasp and work with. Hope it’s the same for you. Happy reconnecting.