Before you decide this one isn’t for you, stay with me. I know what happens when people hear the word trauma. Their mind goes straight to war, sexual assault, physical abuse, a natural disaster, a horrific accident. Something catastrophic. Something with a headline attached to it. And all of those things absolutely can be traumatic. I am never going to dismiss that. But those images have also quietly shaped what most of us believe trauma is. So when none of them apply, we close the door. I guess this isn’t about me. Nothing that bad ever happened. I had a good childhood. My parents loved me. We didn’t want for anything. Other people have had it so much worse. I hear those sentences constantly. And very often, the same people saying them are the ones sitting across from me describing anxiety, people pleasing, perfectionism, difficulty trusting, difficulty setting boundaries, relationship struggles, burnout, panic attacks, or that persistent hum of not being good enough. Not worthy. Not deserving of good things. So I keep asking the same question. Could there be a connection we were simply never taught to see? A wound is not defined only by what caused it The American Psychological Association calls trauma an emotional response to a terrible event. Merriam-Webster calls it a disordered psychological or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress. Both are useful. Neither one changed my life. The one that did came from Dr. Gabor Maté. Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. The first time I heard that, something shifted. Because suddenly trauma wasn’t only about the event. It was about the aftermath. The impact. The injury. The wound. Which makes sense, because the word trauma comes from the Greek word for wound. And I love that, because every single one of us understands what a wound is. Here is the part we skip. A wound is not defined only by what caused it. It is also shaped by what happens after. Was it noticed? Was it cleaned? Was it protected from further injury? Was it given what it needed to heal? Or was it ignored? Two people can go through remarkably similar experiences and come out the other side completely differently. The event matters. It is just not the whole story. What was available afterward matters. The support matters. The relationships around it matter. Feeling seen matters. Feeling believed matters. Feeling safe matters. Having someone help you make sense of what happened matters enormously. That is why I don’t think the most important question is only what happened to you. I think we also have to ask what happened inside you as a result. And maybe more importantly, what happened after it happened. Who was there? Who listened? Who helped your nervous system find its way back to safety? The cut on your hand Imagine you are working in the yard. Trimming a bush, clearing branches, doing some project in the garage. You slip and cut your hand. Not a paper cut. A deep one. The kind that gets your attention immediately. You know exactly what to do. Clean it. Stop the bleeding. Maybe stitches. Cover it. Protect it. Give it time. And while it heals, you naturally change how you move. You stop using that hand the same way. You avoid bumping it. If someone reaches toward it, you pull back without thinking. Not because you are weak. Not because you are irrational or too emotional or too sensitive. Because that is exactly what a healthy body does. It protects a wound. Now imagine the same cut, but nobody notices. Nobody cleans it. Nobody bandages it. Nobody tells you it is going to be okay. You are expected to keep working. Keep carrying things. Keep pretending it doesn’t hurt. And maybe somebody says, you’re fine, stop being dramatic, it’s not that bad, other people have it worse. The wound does not disappear because it was minimized. It does not heal because someone denied it. If anything it gets more vulnerable. Maybe it gets infected. Maybe it heals wrong. Maybe every single time it gets bumped, it hurts exactly as much as it did on day one. So what do you do? You protect it more. You compensate. You get careful. And without ever deciding to, you begin organizing your entire life around never letting that wound get touched again. Eventually those protective movements stop feeling like protection. They just become how you move through the world. And then we call them our personality This is the part that gets me. Those adaptations become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as adaptations. We start calling them who we are. I’ve always just been an anxious person. I’m just a people pleaser. I’m just a perfectionist. I’m type A. I’ve never trusted anyone. That’s just me. Nobody is born that way. What if those aren’t personality traits? What if they are protective strategies? What if they are the emotional equivalent of guarding an injured hand? That question changes the whole conversation. Because instead of asking what is wrong with me, you get to ask something far more useful. What has my nervous system been working so hard to protect me from? To be clear, this does not mean every behavior comes from trauma. And it certainly does not mean harmful behavior gets excused. Understanding a behavior is never the same as excusing it. We are all still responsible for our choices and accountable for how we treat people. But understanding gives us something judgment never will. It gives us context. And context changes everything. What my own shift looked like I drowned in anxiety for thirty years. For most of that time I believed with everything in me that anxiety was the worst thing that ever happened to me. A problem. An enemy. Something to manage, control, quiet, get rid of. I was convinced that if I could finally beat it, my life would start. Then, after hitting bottom more than once, I asked a different question. What if anxiety is not the problem? What if anxiety is protecting the problem? That question changed the direction of my healing. I stopped fighting my nervous system and started trying to understand it. And the dots were not hard to connect once I actually looked. Here is what I want you to sit with. I was in therapy from age fifteen to age forty. Nobody ever asked me what happened. Nobody asked me what didn’t happen. Nobody asked what wound I might still be protecting. I got a diagnosis in my thirties. Generalized anxiety disorder. What I never got was a question. What the adaptations actually look like As you read this, please do not diagnose yourself. Please do not diagnose someone you love. Just get curious and ask one thing. What if it makes sense? Anxiety. Often a nervous system asking am I safe, over and over. If your early experiences taught you that life was unpredictable, that conflict could erupt without warning, that love felt uncertain, that criticism could arrive out of nowhere, wouldn’t it make sense to stay one step ahead? To scan constantly? To rehearse conversations before they happen? That is not a broken brain. That is an intelligent nervous system making sure you never get blindsided again. People pleasing. I’m too nice. I care too much. I hate conflict. I’m an empath. Maybe. Or maybe your nervous system learned that connection depended on keeping other people happy. That no wasn’t emotionally safe. That keeping the peace protected something important. If that is true, people pleasing isn’t a weakness. It’s a strategy that once worked. Perfectionism. We assume perfectionists are trying to impress. Sometimes. But very often perfectionism is fear wrapped in a pretty bow. Fear of criticism, rejection, abandonment, failure, disappointing someone. If mistakes once carried real emotional consequences, perfection makes sense. Hyper-independence. I don’t need anyone. It’s easier to do it myself. Maybe. Or maybe depending on people went sideways. Maybe your needs weren’t consistently met. Maybe asking for help wasn’t safe, and you learned that if you only rely on yourself, you don’t get hurt. Overthinking. When someone tells me they think too much, I usually don’t think they’re thinking too much. I think they’re protecting too much. Overthinking is often an attempt to predict, prepare, and prevent pain before it can arrive. Shutting down in conflict. Someone raises their voice and your mind goes blank. You freeze. People judge themselves hard for this. But if conflict once meant danger or disconnection, your nervous system isn’t choosing to shut down. It’s remembering. Anger. Sometimes anger was the only emotion that felt safe to express. Sometimes it was the only way to create enough distance to feel protected. Sometimes anger is the only power a child has. Every adaptation has a story. Every protective layer has a purpose. Every nervous system has reasons for responding the way it does. One of the real tragedies in how we approach mental health is that people spend years asking how do I get rid of this, before anyone ever asks where it began. What surprised me in the HURRT results I built the HURRT assessment for exactly this reason. HURRT stands for Healing Unresolved Roots of Trauma. It is not a diagnostic tool and I have no authority to diagnose anyone. I built it to help people start asking different questions. Recently I went back and reviewed the first ninety completed assessments. This is not a scientific study. These are people who found my work and chose to answer. I am only telling you what I observed. Most people assume the highest responses would cluster around obvious trauma. Abuse. Violence. Something catastrophic. What stood out most was what was missing. Nearly two out of three said they lacked consistent emotional support growing up. More than sixty percent said they often felt not good enough. More than half said they didn’t have anyone they could truly talk to about what they were going through. Only abo
