My Trauma is Trauma-ing

Why can a bit of constructive feedback from your boss leave you suddenly feeling like you just misspelled onomatopoeia at your 5th-grade spelling bee?

Why does a tone of voice, a smell, or a glance make your stomach drop—even though nothing particularly “bad” is happening?

What is it about traumatic experiences—whether capital “T” trauma or lowercase “t” trauma—that allows them to linger so powerfully?

Trauma and the Brain’s Natural Wiring

Our brains are brilliant. Under normal conditions, they’re built to process, store, and file away experiences with incredible efficiency. We’re constantly forming neural networks—pathways that help us interpret the world using familiar patterns. This is how you can drive home on autopilot or finish someone’s sentence without thinking too hard. Your brain is always scanning, predicting, and filing.

But trauma complicates this process.

When something overwhelming or distressing happens, especially when we feel helpless, scared, or unsafe, the brain can misfile the experience. The memory doesn’t always get processed completely. Instead, it may get stored with extra “baggage”—body sensations, emotions, distorted beliefs (“I’m not safe,” “I’m not good enough”), and images that don’t fully fade with time.

This is especially true if the trauma happened during a developmental stage (like childhood) or if it was repeated or prolonged.

Triggers: When the Past Hijacks the Present

When something in our current environment resembles a past traumatic event—whether it’s a smell, sound, facial expression, or tone of voice—our brain’s alarm system lights up.

This is what we call a trigger.

The tricky thing about triggers is that they often bypass logic. You might know your boss is offering helpful feedback, but your nervous system responds as if you’re being criticized, shamed, or abandoned. The trigger pulls you into a familiar emotional state, even if the situation doesn’t objectively call for it.

This is not a sign of weakness. It’s your brain doing what it thinks it needs to do to keep you safe.

Flashbacks Aren’t Always What You Think

Many people think of flashbacks as dramatic, movie-style relivings of trauma. Sometimes they are. But often, they’re much more subtle. You might suddenly feel anxious, dissociated, numb, or intensely emotional without fully knowing why. You might “lose time” or feel like you’re watching your life from a distance.

These experiences are all ways your brain is trying to process unhealed memories. In a way, it’s a request for your attention: Hey, something from the past still needs care.

“Big T” vs “Little t” Trauma

Not all trauma looks the same. What overwhelms one person may not affect another in the same way. Mental health professionals often differentiate between:

• Big T trauma: Events that are life-threatening or severely distressing (e.g. abuse, assault, natural disasters, accidents).

• Little t trauma: More subtle or chronic experiences that still impact our sense of safety or identity (e.g. ongoing criticism, childhood neglect, emotional invalidation, microaggressions).

Both kinds of trauma matter. Both can shape how we respond to the world. And both are worthy of attention and healing.

How Do We Heal?

The good news is: your brain’s neuroplasticity means that healing is not only possible, it’s expected, when given the right support.

Healing often involves:

• Making the implicit explicit. Understanding what happened and how it shaped your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

• Working with the body. Trauma isn’t just stored in your mind, it lives in your nervous system. This is especially true for men, who are often taught to suppress rather than process what they feel. Somatic practices, EMDR, mindfulness, and grounding techniques can help.

• Learning to regulate. Therapy can help you identify what activates your stress response and give you tools to self-soothe and feel more present.

• Cultivating self-compassion. Shifting from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What happened to me—and how can I care for that part of me now?”

• Psychedelics as a Support. Emerging research and clinical practice suggest that psychedelic-assisted therapies, such as Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP), can help the brain access and process experiences that traditional talk therapy may struggle to reach. By temporarily shifting perspective and enhancing neuroplasticity, these approaches can open new pathways to healing.

Healing is not about erasing the past. It’s about reclaiming the present.

Final Thoughts

Your past informs your future. Or—if it’s unresolved—it contaminates it.

Trauma doesn’t have to define you, but understanding how it shows up in your life is an important part of reclaiming your agency. When you notice triggers or intense reactions, it’s not a sign that you’re broken. It’s a sign that your brain is asking for healing.

You are not too sensitive. You are not overreacting. You are responding to a lived experience that left an imprint—and that can be softened, understood, and cared for.

Cheers,

Becca