What Is Trauma?

Understanding trauma is the first step towards healing

In this foundational episode of our new series, Surviving and Thriving After Trauma, we explore what trauma truly is—and isn’t. As the term “trauma” becomes more prevalent in everyday culture, it’s essential to clarify its meaning, dispel myths, and offer tools for understanding and growth.

We live in a fallen, broken world where overwhelming, difficult, tragic, and traumatic things happen to people. But we are also created by God with the capacity to absorb, endure, heal, and thrive from those experiences as well.

When you listen to this trauma series, it could bring up situations that you’ve personally experienced, and the emotions that go with them. So pace yourself as you listen – take a break and come back when you’re ready - and find a friend or mentor or counselor to talk with as needed.

You may wonder whether or not the Bible has anything to say about trauma. The answer is an emphatic YES!, just using different words: suffering, hardship, distresses, trials, sorrow, and brokenness. Combining these biblical truths with psychological insight, John, Lynn, and Austin will answer the following questions:

• What is trauma?

• What is the impact of trauma?

• What are some myths about trauma?

• What does the Bible say about trauma?

What Is Trauma?

Therapist and author Aundi Kolber defines trauma this way: “A traumatic event includes anything that overwhelms a person’s nervous system and ability to cope.” Another helpful definition is from therapist Bonnie Badenoch: “Trauma arises more from our sense of being alone with pain and fear than from the event itself.”

Think of a tree and everything it needs to grow. A young sapling grows from a small seed into a tree, just like a human starts from an embryo and over time develops into an adult. A tree needs sunlight, water, and protection from the elements. Imagine what would happen if someone came and tied down its branches or took a sharp knife and carved away at it little by little as it was growing. Trauma is similar in that it can take many forms, and humanly speaking, it has the same result: our psychological and emotional development is greatly impacted by trauma.

Michael John Cusick uses this analogy of four ways to kill a tree as a way to distinguish levels of trauma. The first, most extreme way to kill a tree is to get a chainsaw and cut it down. If you use an ax, might take you a little longer, but you'll get that tree down. A less extreme way to kill a tree is with a pocketknife. It'll take a long time, but you can chip away over weeks and months and get that tree down. But the most benign way is to simply starve the tree: don’t give it sunlight, don’t give it nutrients, don’t give it water. And that tree will die. In the same way, as we develop in our personhood, different levels of trauma can create a lasting impact on us, even if it’s “just” being deprived of basic love and emotional safety.

Sometimes the word trauma can be overused, so another way we refer to something that overwhelms our system is threats. There are capital-T threats and lowercase-t threats. A lowercase-t threat might be a parent who never listens to you. It’s easy to brush that off as not very impactful, but over time, it can have a great impact. A capital-T threat could be when you are deprived of food, experience extreme neglect, or endure various forms of abuse. The impact of a capital-T threat can be easier to see.

What Is the Impact of Trauma?

We can’t explain every aspect of its impact in this episode, but we can highlight 3 primary impacts of trauma and 3 secondary impacts of trauma.

The 3 primary impacts:

1. The first primary impact is emotional dysregulation. In the face of trauma, you experience some level of distress. More specifically, you may experience: anxiety, sadness, depression, worry, dread, shame, or fear. These are just some of the emotions that come up because your body is reacting to the trauma. It’s upsetting, it’s distressing, it’s intense, and it doesn’t feel good.

2. When you feel emotionally dysregulated, the second primary impact is that you build a wall of self-protection around you to protect or prevent you from feeling those distressing feelings again. This is an automatic reaction used to ensure survival. If you feel threatened, you’re going to go into a survival mode to be able to defend yourself from that real or perceived threat.

3. The third primary impact takes place in order to protect the part of you that is hurt, called internal fragmentation. That’s a fancy term for how you may section off parts of your heart or mind and disassociate from them, in order to survive or continue to function. Another word for that is compartmentalize. As Diane Langberg says in her book, Suffering and the Heart of God: “Trauma divides the self and keeps it from being whole”.

So if you’ve experienced abuse at home from a parent, but then you have to go to school and put on a happy face, you learn how to manage the hurt from the abuse by tucking it away while you go be a student during the day. It’s a great feature of our brain to help us keep going in the face of a threat but it can cause many problems later on.

Depending on your age when the trauma happens, you can become “frozen in time”, meaning, there’s a part of you that stays “10” or “16” years old emotionally, because you get stuck in survival mode.

The 3 secondary impacts:

1. You become very adept at defense mechanisms in relationships because you don’t want to be hurt again. This usually shows up in relationships with loved ones, so you may blame-shift, project your negative/distressing feelings onto others, and try to control everything around you in order to feel safe or stable. The defense mechanisms usually operate outside of conscious awareness and happen automatically, and is what people mean when they say, “I got triggered”.

2. Another secondary impact is the development of coping mechanisms to feel better: jumping from one relationship to another, numbing emotions through drinking, drugs, sex - this is where the additive cycle can take root. Or you cope through trying to be ‘perfect’ and be really good at everything so no one will see that you have all of these intolerable feelings inside of you.

3. Slowly, over time, you lose touch with your body. Because you are stuffing down or minimizing or glossing over the impacts of trauma, your body “keeps the score”, so to speak. You hold the distressing thoughts and feelings in your body and may experience back pain, headaches, shoulder tension, autoimmune disorders, and even illnesses. This is the result of the trauma having nowhere else to go, so the stress of it comes out in bodily form.

What Are Some Myths About Trauma?

Myth #1: People who talk about trauma are weak. People who believe this myth likely believe that all this talk of “trauma” is overblown and is creating weaker, “softer” people. Instead, this person thinks, “People just need to suck it up and move on...like I have.”

First, even if someone means well by thinking that trauma should be avoided, they need to know that different situations impact people differently. People can be triggered by different things. Secondly, the healthier and more effective way to overcome these overwhelming situations in the present isn’t to ignore them and keep going. Instead, the trauma needs to be processed in order to ‘unburden’ what happened.

Myth #2: People are fragile and might be undone by the slightest amount of suffering. This mindset, which is on the opposite side of the spectrum as Myth #1, leads people to avoid any and all situations where they might feel hurt.

If you fall closer to this side of the spectrum, you’ve gone through a lot of hard things in your life on your own, and didn’t - and maybe don’t - have a place to process and share it with anyone. It may be hard to believe that you can overcome them. But the reality is that you CAN overcome them. There is a concept in academic literature called post traumatic growth and it refers to the ways that people can, and have, grown as a result of hardships.

Myth #3: Trauma affects everyone the same way. For example, people say, “That happened to me too and it didn’t bother me”. The problem with this view is that the impact of trauma is dependent upon various factors. Think of it this way: the event is when something happens to you that overwhelms your nervous system. The impact is when something happens within you.

Physician and trauma expert Gabor Mate says, “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” If someone is surrounded by caring people and has the ability to notice and name what is happening inside of them, then if they experience something difficult, they will be able to absorb the impact, metabolize the emotions, and stabilize. Another person who experiences the same event can get deeply wounded and stuck in their pain if they lack caring resources, and can’t ‘metabolize’ what is happening to them.

Myth #4: There’s an easy way to heal from trauma. WRONG! You may wish for an easy way to heal when something traumatic happens. A vitamin supplement, a prayer, a Bible verse, or the ‘strength’ to bury it in the past and move on. But there is no quick fix. There is some heavy-lifting that will need to take place in order for healing to occur. We are going to get into some of the ways healing happens in our next episode.

Recently on the show 60 Minutes, a Coast Guard rescue boat captain was explaining to the reporter that when smaller waves come, you can maneuver around them or come alongside them and stay upright. But when the BIGGEST waves/swells come, the only way to tackle those is to square up to the wave. In other words, you have to do something very counter-intuitive. You have to go into the threat. In the same way, we tell our clients: It’s not the distressing emotions that are going to hurt you, it’s the not processing the distressing emotions that is going to hurt you.

What Does the Bible Say About Trauma?

Chuck DeGroat, in his book, Healing Within, writes about what he calls the in-between section of the Bible. The first two chapters in Genesis describe a world of perfect delight. Everything's just the way it should be. And then at the end, in the last two chapters of Revelation, God brings us home, dwells with us, and we are finally complete, happy, and fulfilled.

But in between the bookends of the first two and last two chapters there is a lot of suffering and trauma. Immediately after Genesis 2, there is deceit, shame, blame-shifting, enmity, alienation, murder, adultery, rape, rivalry, genocide, heartache, betrayal, incest, and homelessness. And this upheaval continues for 1,185 chapters before Jesus returns to bring the events of Revelation 21 and 22.

Psalm 147:3 says, “The Lord heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds.” The Lord is the ultimate source of our healing; and although we often long for and need healing from literal wounds, our spiritual, emotional and relational wounds are where we need the deepest and most profound healing. These wounds are the result of what people long ago might have called ‘sufferings and hardships’ and what many today would call ‘trauma’.

Think about how often in the Bible we see and hear proclamations of God’s love; for example, Romans 8:38-39 says, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth nor any other created thing can separate us from the Love of God which is in Christ Jesus.” Paul finishes this long list of various sufferings by reminding us that no matter what happens, we cannot be separated from the love of the Father because of what Jesus the son has accomplished in his body on the cross.

These promises are important anchors because when the storms of life come, and you know they have and they will, you can turn to Jesus, “a man of sorrows”, who has entered into your sufferings, bears your shame, and declares you forgiven, cleansed, redeemed, and restored into fellowship with God the Father. There is no trauma too great that cannot be healed by the powerful and eternal love of God.

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