Why Your Past Still Feels Present: What Psychological Trauma Really Is

When most people hear the word trauma, they tend to think of the big, catastrophic events, things like war, physical assault, car accidents, or natural disasters. And yes, those experiences absolutely qualify. They can be life-altering in ways that are immediate and unmistakable.

But trauma is not solely about what happened. It is also, and often more importantly, about what happened inside of you as it was happening.

Psychological trauma is not defined by the event itself. It is defined by the way the experience was processed, stored, and carried. That is why something one person walks away from relatively unshaken might live on inside someone else’s nervous system in the form of fear, confusion, or overwhelm.

So let’s slow down and take a closer look at what trauma actually is, how it can shape us, and why it shows up in places many people don’t expect.

Trauma: It’s Not About the Event—It’s About the Impact

Psychological trauma occurs when something overwhelms your system so completely that you can’t fully process or integrate it in the moment. It bypasses your usual coping mechanisms and remains unresolved, like a loop that keeps repeating because it was never allowed to complete.

Trauma often involves some combination of the following:

• Feeling completely overwhelmed or helpless

• Experiencing a threat to your physical or emotional safety

• Sensing a complete loss of control

• Losing meaning, or having your view of yourself or the world profoundly shaken

What defines an experience as traumatic is not how objectively severe it looks on paper. It is whether or not you felt powerless and unsupported in the aftermath.

Big “T” Trauma vs. Little “t” Trauma

There’s a commonly used framework that distinguishes between Big “T” trauma and little “t” trauma. While not perfect, it helps create language for a wide range of human experiences.

Big “T” trauma refers to incidents that most people immediately identify as dangerous or life-altering:

• Physical or sexual assault

• Combat or war-related experiences

• Major car accidents or natural disasters

• Witnessing harm or death, or being repeatedly exposed to trauma through caregiving or frontline work

Little “t” trauma may be less dramatic to the outside world but still deeply destabilizing inside the body and mind:

• Ongoing criticism, neglect, or emotional dismissal

• The loss of a caregiver, or growing up amid separation or divorce

• Constant belittling, bullying, or exclusion

• Living in environments with unpredictability, conditional love, or high pressure

Little “t” traumas often get overlooked because they happen quietly or gradually. But their impact adds up over time. The nervous system doesn’t necessarily distinguish between one big storm and many small ones. Either can erode your sense of safety, and both matter.

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.

Your system is designed to process life as it happens. But when something traumatic occurs, the brain often short-circuits. What should be stored as a memory instead becomes frozen. The experience gets stuck without the usual markers of beginning, middle, and end.

That’s why trauma isn’t just a memory. It’s an active loop in your nervous system.

You might notice it in:

• Chronic pain, illness, or tension

• Hypervigilance or sudden panic

• Emotional numbness or difficulty connecting

• A sense of being flooded, shut down, or “not here”

These aren’t overreactions. They are your body responding to an unresolved story. Until that story is metabolized, the nervous system will continue to respond as if it is still happening.

Therapy Helps Add Context to What Your Body Still Holds

What surprises many people is that healing trauma is not always about recounting every detail of what happened. Sometimes, it is about making sense of what your body is still holding.

Trauma leaves imprints. Not just memories, but felt experiences. Sensations, flashbacks, protective behaviors. These responses linger until the system receives new information—specifically, that it is no longer in danger.

Therapy offers a safe container for that update to occur. The process might include:

• EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)

• Somatic or body-based approaches

• Internal Family Systems (IFS)

• Mindfulness, grounding, and nervous system regulation

Each path looks different, but the goal is the same: to help your brain and body integrate what happened, and finally release what no longer serves you.

If you’re curious about our methods, we’ve written more here about the therapies we offer in plain language.)

Trauma Literally Changes the Brain and Nervous System

This isn’t just poetic language. It is neurobiology. Traumatic experiences reshape the way your brain functions—especially the parts involved in memory, threat detection, and regulation.

Here’s what often happens during trauma:

• The hippocampus, which normally stores coherent memories, becomes overwhelmed

• The amygdala, your internal alarm system, becomes overactive

• The prefrontal cortex, responsible for logic and decision-making, may go offline

The result is that trauma memories get filed as sensory fragments instead of linear stories. You may be flooded by a sound, smell, or image that makes no logical sense in the moment but still feels terrifying. The brain is responding to a flash of danger that never got filed under “past.”

Childhood Trauma Hits Harder

Children are especially vulnerable, not because they are fragile, but because their sense of self and safety is still under construction. A child is entirely dependent on their caregivers to provide emotional regulation, meaning-making, and protection.

When that foundation is shaky—or entirely missing—the child adapts. They find ways to survive. But those adaptations often come at a cost.

You might notice patterns like:

• People-pleasing or over-functioning

• Emotional shutdown or perfectionism

• Hyper-awareness of others’ moods

• Difficulty asking for help or setting boundaries

These aren’t random habits. They are survival strategies from a time when you had few options and limited power. The younger you were when you adapted, the more deeply ingrained the patterns tend to be.

Trauma Is Subjective, and It’s RealIf your body is still bracing, still reacting, still trying to survive—that tells us everything we need to know.

Trauma is not about comparison. It is not about proving whose experience was worse. It is about the imprint left behind, and the impact it continues to have.

And here’s the truth: what trauma has wired into the nervous system can, over time, be unwired. That doesn’t mean it vanishes. But it can soften. It can lose its grip.

You can teach your system a new story.

You are not too broken. You are not too late. You are not alone.

When you’re ready, we’re here.