Why Your Past Still Feels Present: What Psychological Trauma Really Is
When most people hear the word trauma, they think of the big stuff: war, assault, car accidents, natural disasters. And yes—those absolutely count. But trauma isn’t just about what happened. It’s about what happened inside of you when it did.
Psychological trauma isn’t defined by the event itself. It’s defined by how the event was experienced. That’s why something one person walks away from relatively unscathed might stay lodged in another person’s nervous system for years.
So let’s talk about what trauma actually is, how it impacts us, and why it’s not just reserved for “worst-case scenario” moments.
Trauma: It’s Not About the Event—It’s About the Impact
Psychological trauma happens when something overwhelms your system so completely that you can’t process or integrate it in the moment. It bypasses your usual coping mechanisms and gets stuck—like a loop your brain can’t complete.
Trauma tends to involve some combination of:
Feeling completely overwhelmed or helpless
Fear of physical or psychological harm (or death)
A sense that you had no control over what was happening
A loss of meaning or a major disruption in how you view yourself, others, or the world
What makes something traumatic isn’t how “big” or “objectively bad” it was—it’s how powerless and unsupported you felt, both during and after.
Big “T” Trauma vs. Little “t” Trauma
There’s a useful (if imperfect) distinction between Big “T” and little “t” trauma.
Big “T” trauma includes things like assault, combat, car accidents, natural disasters—events that most people would immediately recognize as dangerous and potentially life-threatening. It can also include witnessing something traumatic firsthand, like seeing someone get seriously hurt, or experiencing vicarious trauma through repeated exposure to others’ suffering, especially in caregiving or high-stress professions.
Little “t” trauma refers to experiences that might not look dramatic on the outside, but still deeply shake your sense of safety or worth. Things like:
Chronic emotional neglect or criticism
Losing a caregiver or going through a divorce
Being bullied or constantly humiliated
Living in a household with unpredictability, pressure, or conditional love
Little “t” traumas are often minimized—especially when they happen gradually or over time—but they can still have a serious psychological and physical impact. The cumulative effect of these experiences can quietly shape how you see yourself, your relationships, and the world around you. They matter just as much.
Trauma Is Undigested Experience in the Brain
One of the simplest ways to understand trauma is this: it’s undigested material in the brain and body.
When something traumatic happens, your body and brain are supposed to process it—break it down, learn from it, and file it away as a past event. But trauma interrupts this process. It overwhelms the system and doesn’t get “filed” properly.
That’s why trauma isn’t just a memory. It’s an active loop in your nervous system.
Your body continues reacting as if the threat is still happening, because from a survival perspective, it kind of is. The experience hasn’t been fully processed, so your brain can’t tell the difference between “that happened back then” and “this is happening now.” That’s why trauma can leave you stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or collapse mode—your body is trying to protect you from something it believes is still unfolding.
This is also why trauma can show up in very physical ways: chronic pain, hypervigilance, dissociation, panic attacks, or shutting down emotionally. Your nervous system is responding to unfinished business.
Therapy Helps Add Context to What Your Body Still Holds
Here’s something that often surprises people: a lot of therapy for trauma isn’t about retelling the story of what happened. It’s about making sense of what your body still remembers.
Trauma tends to leave behind residual energy—sensations, reactions, and patterns that live in the body long after the event is over. Therapy helps add context to those sensations. It helps your brain and nervous system learn that what happened is over—and that you are now safe.
There are many different approaches to doing this: EMDR, somatic therapies, internal family systems, mindfulness-based work, and more. Each has a different route, but the destination is the same: helping your system digest what was once too much to handle, and freeing up space to live in the present.
(You can read more about the kinds of therapies we use here—we break it down in plain language, no jargon necessary.)
Trauma Literally Changes the Brain and Nervous System
This isn’t just a metaphor. Trauma rewires the brain—especially the areas responsible for threat detection, memory processing, and emotional regulation.
In a safe or non-traumatic event, your brain’s hippocampus helps you store the experience as a coherent memory: beginning, middle, end. But in a traumatic moment, that system gets flooded and disrupted. The amygdala—your brain’s smoke alarm—goes into overdrive. Your thinking brain (the prefrontal cortex) goes offline. And your hippocampus, which normally helps you make meaning and understand time, gets shoved aside.
The result? Trauma memories get stored more like fragments—flashes of sensation, emotion, or images—rather than a narrative you can understand and resolve. So your system stays on guard, waiting for the danger to return.
Childhood Trauma Hits Harder
Children are especially vulnerable to trauma—not because they’re weak, but because they’re still developing their sense of self, safety, and how the world works. They depend completely on the adults around them to meet their emotional and physical needs, to protect them, and to help them make sense of what’s happening. When those needs are unmet, inconsistent, or unsafe, it can shape a child’s understanding of themselves and their place in the world—sometimes in ways that echo long into adulthood.
As a child, you don’t get to choose where you live, who takes care of you, or how safe your environment feels. You also don’t have the language, context, or power to make sense of adult behavior. So even things that might not look “traumatic” from the outside—like chronic stress, emotional absence, or ongoing tension—can have a deep and lasting impact if they make you feel unseen, unsafe, or powerless.
And the younger you are, the more deeply those early experiences are wired into the brain. When something overwhelming happens before you’ve developed the ability to process or respond to it, your brain adapts to prioritize survival. That can look like people-pleasing, perfectionism, dissociation, staying constantly on alert—or other patterns that once helped you get by, but may now be getting in your way.
Trauma Is Subjective, and It’s Real
You don’t need someone else to validate that what you experienced was traumatic. If your body and brain are still acting like you’re in danger—if you’re stuck in reactivity, anxiety, shutdown, or overfunctioning—that is trauma.
It doesn’t matter if someone else “had it worse.” That comparison isn’t helpful. What matters is how your system responded, and whether you had the chance to process it in a way that helped you feel safe again.
And here’s the thing: what trauma wires, it can also rewire. With support and time, it’s possible to complete those unfinished loops—to help your brain and body finally know: “That happened. It’s over. And I’m safe now.”
At Willow & Moss Counseling, we specialize in trauma-informed care that honors the complexity of your story—whether it’s rooted in a single event or years of quiet survival. Our team works with children, teens, and adults using approaches like EMDR, play therapy, and somatic awareness to support real healing, not just symptom management. You don’t have to figure it out alone—and you don’t have to keep pretending you’re fine. We’re here when you’re ready.
Willow & Moss Counseling – Trauma-Informed Care for Children, Teens, and Adults | Play Therapy & EMDR | Cherokee County, Serving Woodstock, Holly Springs, Canton, and Kennesaw
