I'm Changing My Mind about Trauma

A revisioning of trauma models and an invitation to reconsider trauma as a societal, cultural, physiological, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual problem.

I am what some might call a trauma specialist–I have hundreds of hours of training, practice, and supervision in trauma treatment primarily via Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (a somatic method created by Pat Ogden) and other smaller, individual trainings offered by the lead experts in this field through IFS, trauma-sensitive mindfulness, Polyvagal Theory, Peter Levine, Janina Fisher etc. I’ve also read through a variety of the books on the subject from both a somatic, psychological, and archetypal perspective. And I’m a trainee psychotherapist.

Trauma fascinates me.

And yet, I’ve been doubting for a while the way trauma is currently portrayed.

As someone who has eagerly spent so much of their time and resources on deepening their understanding of trauma, I became curious about what possessed me to pursue this path so fervently; why, for the first two years of my psychotherapy training, I was so sure that everything “wrong” about a person was due to childhood trauma.

Cancer? Trauma. Intimacy issues? Trauma. Pepsi over Coca-Cola? Definitely trauma (I kid, but seriously, even Pepsi doesn’t like Pepsi).

Sometime last year, my evangelical allegiance to “healing trauma” as the main focus of therapy shifted. Perhaps it was a maturing in my own training and practise; perhaps it was a personal maturation; perhaps both.

But for months, I struggled to articulate it–most often I felt a discomfort at the increasing number of TikTok dances or Instagram Reels where a (typically white, conventionally attractive young woman) would tell me that various parts of my personality were a trauma response and that I should try shaking it off or tapping it away. It felt ignorant, offensive, and uncomfortably exhibitionistic. It felt shameful because I used to think like that too. And, most of all, it felt incredibly disrespectful towards the trauma I was actually encountering in my practise.

It wasn’t until I read Brian James’ recent brilliant essay on psychedelic therapy’s obsession with trauma healing that some of my own thoughts began to crystallise.

Since writing and teaching help me make sense of my thoughts, I’ll attempt to share my own evolving understanding of trauma here; why I think it’s such a big phenomenon outside the therapy room today; why our understanding of it feels incomplete; and how I consider trauma work as part of my own transpersonal, integrative, somatic practice.