What is Trauma?

Trauma is not the event. It is what happens inside a person when an experience exceeds what the nervous system can process at the time. The memory does not file itself away. It stays active — raw, unintegrated, continuing to behave as though the danger is still present.

Big T and small t

Big T trauma is identifiable and acute: a single event that overwhelmed the person’s capacity to cope. An accident. A violent assault. A medical emergency. The kind of experience that leaves a clear before and after.

Small t trauma is subtler and often more pervasive. Repeated experience over time — chronic criticism, emotional unavailability, a household where safety was never reliable, years of being told you were too much or not enough. No single event to point to. But a nervous system shaped just as profoundly.

“The small t traumas — repeated messages, day after day, across many years — are often more difficult to work with than a single acute event. There is no moment to locate. It is the water the person was swimming in.” — Philippe Jacquet

Why trauma persists

The brain processes ordinary experience through a system that files memories away, connects them to meaning, and allows them to recede. Traumatic experience disrupts this process. The memory is stored differently — fragmented, sensory, without narrative — and continues to be triggered by stimuli that share any element with the original event.

This is not weakness. It is the nervous system doing precisely what it is designed to do: keeping the person alert to what once caused harm.

The difficulty is that the response continues long after the danger has passed.

Treatment

EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing — is one of the most evidence-based treatments for trauma. It works by activating the brain’s natural processing system while the person holds the traumatic memory, allowing the nervous system to complete what it could not finish at the time.

Integrative psychotherapy and Jungian analysis offer a different route: understanding what the traumatic experience installed, how it shaped the person’s relationship to themselves and others, and what a different way of inhabiting that history might look like.

Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet — EMDR therapist and psychotherapist, London.