Trauma is the most misunderstood word in the wellness world. Trauma is not the event. It is what happened inside your nervous system as a result of the event.
That distinction sounds academic for about 10 seconds and then it changes everything, so it is worth sitting with.
If trauma were the event, the size of the event would decide the size of the damage. A car crash would always outrank a sentence said at a kitchen table. In practice it does not, and anybody who has worked with this for any length of time has watched a small thing leave a long mark and a large thing leave almost none.
This is why 2 people can go through the same experience and one is traumatised and one is not. Not because one is weaker or more sensitive, but because their nervous systems processed the experience differently.
What decides it is not character. It is whether there was anywhere for the thing to go at the time. Whether you could move, speak, leave, cry, be held, finish the sentence. A body that was able to complete its response tends to be able to put the thing down. A body that had to hold still and carry on never gets to.
And here's what happens when something comes in that you can't handle: you push it away. But energy doesn't stop. It has to go somewhere. And so it goes round and round. Not leaving. Not resolving. Just forever circling.
The circling is the part people recognise before they recognise anything else. It is why the same 4 memories arrive at 3am in the same order.
And because it is circling rather than filed, it has no date on it. That is the mechanism in one line. A filed thing has a date. A circling thing is always now.
The present moment standing there going: 'Hello? This is just a slightly awkward email?' And 1994 going: 'I recognise this feeling. Code red.'
Which is also why the reaction never matches the trigger, and why you cannot talk yourself out of it while it is happening. You are not arguing with your opinion of the email. You are arguing with a system that has already decided, using a comparison you did not authorise.
It also explains why it does not fade with time the way an ordinary memory does. An ordinary memory gets further away from you. A circling one is on the same lap it was on last year.
How it shows up in an ordinary week is much duller than the word trauma suggests.
A tone of voice on a phone call and then an afternoon that will not come back. Reading an email 6 times. Rehearsing a conversation in the car that nobody is ever going to have. Being completely fine and then flattened by something you could not point to afterwards.
None of that looks like a crisis. Which is exactly why people decide it is a personality problem and get on with it.
What people try first is thinking. You read about it. You work out the origin. You can explain, in order and with dates, precisely why you are like this.
And it helps, up to a point, and then it stops helping, because understanding happens in a part of you that was never the part doing the circling. You can know the history perfectly and still have the body go to code red at an email.
The second thing people try is telling the story again. Which is useful once, with the right person, and then becomes its own loop. Telling it does not always discharge it. Sometimes it just runs the circuit one more time.
The third thing is avoiding the trigger, which works beautifully and shrinks your life.
There is a fourth, and it is the most respectable of the lot, which is being very busy. A full diary is an excellent way of making sure the 90 seconds never finds a quiet minute to arrive in.
What tends to shift it is working at the level it is stored on, which is the body, not the account of it.
That is the whole reason I trained in the things I trained in. TRE, Brainspotting, IFS and breathwork each have a different starting point, and the one thing they share is that they treat the response as something physical that needs to finish rather than something logical that needs correcting.
The feeling itself moves through in 90 seconds if you let it. 9 years of running from 90 seconds of feeling is an extraordinary amount of cardio for something that takes a minute and a half.
The letting is the hard part, and it is worth being honest about why. Letting a feeling finish means not managing it, and managing it is the thing you are best at. It is the skill that got you here.
So what to notice is small. Where it sits. Whether it is in the chest or the throat or the stomach. Whether your jaw is involved. What happens if you stop narrating it for 30 seconds and let it be a sensation with a location.
You are not trying to make it go. You are finding out that it moves on its own if nobody interferes with it.
It also helps to know that nothing has to be remembered for this to be worth doing. You do not need the story. The body is not holding a narrative, it is holding a posture, and a posture can be put down without being explained first.
And the thing to notice over weeks rather than minutes is the gap. Not that the feeling stops arriving. That the distance between the trigger and the coming back gets shorter, and sometimes the afternoon is not lost after all.
More like this.
Nervous system 101, everything you weren't taught that explains everything.
Trauma and the body, why what happened is still happening and how to change that.
TRE, Brainspotting and Flash EMDR, what they actually are, in plain language.
If you recognise your own 1994 in that, the one to ones run on Tuesdays, 10am to 1.30pm. We start with whatever is going on for you. Write to me at anna@annalouoflondon.com or message me on https://wa.me/447738470156.