Daniel Maté

In many children—and I was certainly one—early reactions like these become embedded in the nervous system, mind, and body, playing havoc with future relationships.

The home becomes a place where we unwittingly re-create, as I did, scenarios reminiscent of those that wounded us when we were small.

most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones hardest to see and talk about.

Because we think in a fragmentary way, we see fragments. And this way of seeing leads us to make actual fragments of the world.

—Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones

The meaning of the word “trauma,” in its Greek origin, is “wound.”

“I was so hurt when you abandoned me,” says the young child’s mind, “that I will not reconnect with you. I don’t dare open myself to that pain again.”

As I use the word, “trauma” is an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events. By this definition, trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them; it is not the events themselves. “Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you” is how I formulate it.

Likewise, trauma is a psychic injury, lodged in our nervous system, mind, and body, lasting long past the originating incident(s), triggerable at any moment. It is a constellation of hardships, composed of the wound itself and the residual burdens that our woundedness imposes on our bodies and souls: the unresolved emotions they visit upon us; the coping dynamics they dictate; the tragic or melodramatic or neurotic scripts we unwittingly but inexorably live out; and, not least, the toll these take on our bodies.

As an open sore, it is an ongoing source of pain and a place where we can be hurt over and
over again by even the slightest stimulus. It compels us to be ever vigilant—always nursing our wounds, as it were—and leaves us limited in our capacity to move flexibly and act confidently lest we be harmed again.

Trauma, until we work it through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moment’s riches, limiting who we can be.