Trauma is at the Root of Stress

Yes, you read that correctly. Trauma is at the root of stress - big trauma or small trauma, trauma we can remember and trauma that we can’t. We all have an internal store of it, and it contributes to how we respond to stress.

You may be wondering, “But, I haven’t had any big traumatic experiences. Why do I still feel so much stress?” It’s because you’ve experienced a lifetime of stressful experiences that you weren’t able to process sufficiently. Those experiences are called everyday trauma.

In its simplest form, trauma is a psychological injury from any difficult event or ongoing situation that inhibits our ability to move forward and live life well.

Everyday trauma can be significant or seemingly irrelevant, but it can still have an impact. It looks like tripping over your words in front of someone you want to impress, seeing a person glance at you and whisper to someone else, getting a bad grade on a test or being left out of an important meeting at work. There are literally thousands of difficult experiences that qualify as everyday traumas and can leave a mark on your psyche.

Sometimes it’s easy to write them off and move on with your day. Other times they linger and cause a bit of uneasiness. Either way, you likely dismiss them as trivial and don’t take the time to truly understand the experiences, process them fully, and prevent them from leaving those marks. You may have even thought that they were just “life” and you should get over it.

Unfortunately, the marks that are left from those myriad of difficult experiences add up. These everyday traumas, as well as the big ones, create programs that your subconscious then uses to determine how to react to stressful situations. This is why we work to resolve stress at its root. Anything else is just a bandage.