What we get wrong about trauma
The science behind reactions we mistake for personality
I feel somewhat embarrassed to admit that last December I finally picked up The Body Keeps the Score once and for all, one of the bibles for anyone who loves psychology. One of its core insights is that trauma is way more complex and pervasive than we think. The author, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, sums it up quite nicely in the following passage:
When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present. But because their left brain is not working very well, they may not be aware that they are reexperiencing and reenacting the past—they are just furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen. After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame for it. They behaved the way they did because you were ten minutes late, or because you burned the potatoes, or because you “never listen to me.” Of course, most of us have done this from time to time, but when we cool down, we hopefully can admit our mistake. Trauma interferes with this kind of awareness, and, over time, our research demonstrated why.
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
The catastrophe misconception
Most people associate trauma with catastrophic situations. War veterans, victims of sexual abuse, extreme accidents, and utterly unspeakable experiences. However, as van der Kolk argues, trauma isn’t clinically defined by the magnitude of the event but by how the nervous system encodes it. In the late 90s, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study (Felitti et al., 1998, American Journal of Preventive Medicine) surveyed over 17,000 adults and found that adverse childhood experiences (such as emotional neglect, household dysfunction, and witnessing violence) were far more prevalent than expected, and their health effects were cumulative and dose-dependent.
Van der Kolk draws heavily on this study in his book, and the numbers are striking:
Only one-third of respondents reported zero adverse childhood experiences.
Two-thirds had at least one, and of those who reported one ACE, 87% reported at least one additional one.
People who reported four or more adverse childhood experiences were between 4 and 12 times more likely to develop depression, substance abuse, or attempt suicide than those who reported none.
It’s interesting to see that the participants were mostly middle-class, well-educated adults with good health insurance, which is perhaps not the first population most people picture when they hear the word ‘trauma’.
Before we continue, it’s worth noting that the book was published in 2014, so it’s over a decade old now. Its relationship with the scientific data is complicated. The epidemiological data it presents, particularly from the ACE Study, have been widely replicated and reinforced; the prevalence argument is solid. But some of the book’s claims have faced serious scrutiny: the left/right brain dichotomy van der Kolk uses (including in the passage above) is considered an oversimplification by some neuroscientists; and the book’s strong endorsement of specific body-based treatments has been criticized for outpacing the evidence, among other criticisms. None of this means the book is to be ignored: van der Kolk is one of the most influential voices in trauma literature, and the book remains a must-read. Still, for a general reader, it offers an extremely valuable reframe.
What having “small” trauma actually looks like
Not all trauma is dramatic. Much of it is small and lives deep in our minds and bodies. Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery, 1992) introduced the concept of complex trauma: not a single overwhelming event, but repeated relational harm, like chronic invalidation, emotional neglect, unpredictable caregiving, parentification (children assuming adult roles and responsibilities), being the mediator in parental conflict, and constant comparison to siblings. Van der Kolk builds on this, arguing that relational and developmental trauma is often more damaging long-term than acute incidents precisely because it’s invisible; there’s no single event to point to, so the person never frames their experience as trauma at all. Nobody teaches us this at school, most parents don’t know about it, and yet we carry it more than we think in one way or another.
There’s a related concept that takes this even further: microtrauma. Margaret Crastnopol, a psychoanalyst and psychologist, coined the term to describe the cumulative psychic injury that builds from repeated, seemingly insignificant emotional wounds, the kind that don’t qualify as abuse by any formal standard but that erode self-worth imperceptibly over time. Being consistently dismissed in conversation, a parent who connects warmly only to devalue the other parent, a partner whose subtle withdrawals never cross a clear line but leave you chronically uncertain... Individually, each incident is easy to rationalize or forget, but when accumulated over months and years, they have the potential to reshape how a person relates to others and to themselves. The ACE data also supports this architecture of harm: if you experienced one form of adversity, there was an 87% chance you experienced at least one more. Trauma clusters, and the smaller the individual incidents, the less likely anyone (including the person living through them) is to call it what it is and receive proper support.
Just like in van der Kolk’s burned potatoes example, when someone snaps over a minor frustration, the reaction often isn’t about the present moment. This doesn’t immediately point to a major trauma, but it’s probably the nervous system responding from a pattern shaped by hundreds of small injuries that were never named as harm. The problem is, precisely because these injuries are rarely ever named, they can get silently absorbed into identity. That’s the most insidious thing about unrecognized trauma: it disguises itself as personality, and we think that’s just how we are and will always be.
How trauma camouflages in plain sight (body and mind)
So, trauma and its symptoms can live invisibly. But what does unrecognized trauma actually look like in daily life? Pete Walker (Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving) describes four survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These map onto everyday patterns that people rarely question. Fight manifests as irritability, confrontation, or the need to control. Flight shows up as overworking, restlessness, or compulsive busyness. Freeze looks like emotional shutdown, dissociation, or chronic indecisiveness. Fawn is chronic people-pleasing, difficulty saying ‘no’, and the erasure of one’s own needs to keep others comfortable. Most people may recognize one of these as predominant in themselves, and have never considered that it might be a learned survival strategy rather than ‘just who they are’. Underneath all four, there’s one common thing: a nervous system interpreting safety or threat below awareness, driving automatic reactions.
Most importantly, these patterns don’t just manifest in behavior. Our nervous system also speaks through the body. In fact, van der Kolk’s central argument is that trauma lives in the body, not just in memory, and that somatic symptoms often appear without medical explanation (chronic tension, digestive issues, unexplained pain). This is all well-documented in the literature on somatization and trauma, and connects back to the opening passage: if the brain isn’t registering what’s happening, the body becomes the primary record. You might not remember why you tense up in certain conversations, but you still do it and probably white-knuckle your way through.
So, what now?
Unlike what most of us think, trauma doesn’t necessarily equal a catastrophic experience that scarred us for life, leaving a clear before and after. It can accumulate silently through repeated small injuries that no one, including the person living through them, ever identifies as harm. Once embedded, it shapes how we react, how we relate, and how we feel in our own bodies. And because it operates below conscious awareness, it often gets mistaken for personality. The person who can never relax, the one who apologizes for everything, the one who shuts down in conflict; these might not be character traits. They might be echoes of an unconceptualized past, untreated wounds, or even invisible scars.
In a practical sense, and much like every other psychology article I write, the research suggests that physical self-awareness is the first step toward breaking damaging cycles. In psychology, the ability to sense internal body states like heartbeat, tension, and breathing is known as interoceptive awareness, and has been linked to better emotional processing and regulation (Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017, Current Opinion in Psychology). Practices like mindfulness, yoga, and body-based therapies aren’t just trendy; they’re interventions with growing evidence bases for trauma recovery, even if the specific mechanisms are still debated. But even before any of that, simply considering that a reaction might be about an unresolved past is already an important realization. Pausing before interpreting your own behavior as fixed and asking, with genuine curiosity, whether something older might be driving the response.
The title of van der Kolk’s book is worth sitting with. Your body remembers, whether or not your mind is paying attention.
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