What is Trauma Anyway?

SAMHSA, the federal mental health and substance abuse agency, describes individual trauma as an event or circumstance causing physical, emotional, or life-threatening harm while, according to Google’s AI overview, trauma is an emotional response to intensely distressing events such as violence, abuse, and disasters.

Weird, but AI is, as far as I’m concerned, closer to the mark than the Feds. The Feds are saying that trauma is bad stuff that happens to us, outside events. I see trauma as our response to events. I’ve likened trauma to the koan experience, the red-hot musket ball, lodged in our throats, that we can’t swallow and can’t spit out.

Stuff happens. Life is suffering. It’s the Buddha’s First Noble Truth. We can’t keep stuff from happening. Praying that “stuff” doesn’t happen is fruitless, a waster of energy and worse. Sickness, old age, and death are life. Anger and disappointment in response to their arising only create unhappiness. Life is not the problem. It’s our response to life which creates suffering.

Notice that I’m using the same word, “suffering,” to denote two different things, the stuff that’s happening and our response to the stuff. The Canadian endocrinologist, Hans Selye, in his wonderful book, The Stress of Life, offers a terminological distinction. He uses “press” for the shit that happens, SAMHSA’s harming events, reserving “stress” for our emotional response.

The Buddha went on to point us toward a pathway to the end of suffering. Would it have been easier if he’d adopted Selye’s linguistic trick? He might have said first that life is press, but would anyone but Hans have known what he was talking about? Then the Buddha might have pointed to a pathway to end stress. Clearer perhaps, but we’re stuck talking about suffering. Because that’s English.

We’re all different, each bringing our unique ingredients to the events that crash upon us. Some waves knock me down, some don’t. It sometimes it depends often on how I’ve positioned myself in the surf. You can be standing right next to me. The same wave hits us both. One of us is knocked down, the other not. The chances are we’ve all been knocked down, and mostly we have picked ourselves up. We continue to love the beach. Sometimes, no. Sometimes we remember the wave. Sometimes we don’t. The wave will always be there, an ingredient of our lives.

The only thing that can change is our emotional response to the memory. When, with SAMHSA, we think of our traumas as external forces that have impacted our lives, we get stuck in “Why me?” What else can I do? When my trauma is my response, I’m empowered. It’s me. It’s mine. Shit happened. The wave hit me and I fell down. I was scared. I was embarrassed. It’s one of the ingredients of my life. I don’t have to change anything. I don’t have to swallow it. I don’t have to spit it out. The strange thing is that in that moment of oneness with my life, everything changes.