From a broken life to a broken nail, ‘trauma’ has been bleached by overuse. But it names something real – and must be reclaimed

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is a British writer and academic. She is the author of the novel Shadowing the Sun (2008) and the memoir Sins of My Father: A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling (2022), co-editor of A Wild and Precious Life: A Recovery Anthology (2020), and her essays have appeared in Granta. Her latest book is Into Being: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (2025). She lives in the UK.

Edited byMarina Benjamin

Last autumn, my mother was in a near-fatal car crash, when a massive electric BMW veered across the centre line and hit her head-on. After getting the call, I rushed to the trauma hospital and waited for the helicopter that was bringing her in. In a small, cube-shaped room I sat stunned for what felt like hours, staring at the door’s hinges. When the nurse brought me a cup of tea and handed me my mum’s mobile phone and her bag, the strap cut in half, fear suddenly caught up with me.

After I was led into the resuscitation area, time condensed, and I entered a vortex of panic watching doctors and nurses trying to stabilise my mother. She was hyperventilating and half her face was covered with gauze; her head was in a neck brace. I had no idea how bad the injuries were. Holding her hand, I became fixated by the blood on her teeth, with a distant thought that she might have internal bleeding. But she appeared to hear me as I calmly repeated that she must try to slow down her breathing.

There is a lot I don’t remember about the hours following, but I do remember my brother’s protective presence. He took over because I couldn’t bear to see them stitch together our mother’s split face. I remember his arm around me; the nurses passing me our mother’s jewellery; staring at the clog-like shoes moving about on the floor. I had forgotten where I’d parked my car, and once I started shivering, I could not stop.

It was useful when everyone around us used the word trauma. We were in a trauma hospital; her body had sustained multiple traumas, with breakages to eight ribs, her breastbone, lumbar spine, pelvis and shoulder as well as a trauma impact to her head. The language of the doctors and nurses was validating. After 10 days in the intensive care unit, our mother spent three weeks in the trauma ward with women who had broken bones from falling. According to many of the nurses, it was a miracle she was alive.

But as part of the Baby Boomer generation, my mother didn’t have ‘trauma’ in her lexicon. At times, my brother and I were astounded by how relentlessly positive she was. Despite not being able to move or sit up, let alone walk, she smiled and chatted away, making friends with all the staff. She’d say: ‘I have a lot of be grateful for. Imagine if we were in Gaza!’

It didn’t occur to me and my brother that we might be suffering from secondary post-traumatic stress disorder as we pushed through the crisis and tried to fix everything, until we both hit a wall and started to cry randomly, exhausted and overwhelmed. And yet I felt confronted by the younger generation’s easy use of this concept. I am a university lecturer and had to transfer my workshops online. I worked from my mother’s bedside, feeding her homemade smoothies from a straw while receiving emails from students saying they were not able to come to class because of the ‘trauma’ of their anxiety, or a bad day for their mental health. Increasingly, I was irritated.

I became abruptly aware of how my generation, Gen X, is caught at the centre of two extremes, with a parent who takes pride in her resilience and Gen Z students so reactive to potential difficulty as to consider everyday challenges triggering. One day I shouted: ‘I will no longer tolerate someone claiming it’s traumatic to break their acrylic nail!’ Then I felt guilty. How could I continue to mentor and teach younger generations with acceptance and empathy? To not slip into the propensity of our culture to see trauma in terms of hierarchy: to say my mother’s trauma is far worse than yours. Was my mother in denial, or does Gen Z need to get real by spending a month in a trauma ward?

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The word trauma derives from the Greek word for ‘wound’, defined in pathological terms as early as 1684 in relation to a wound from an external cause. Despite the term expanding in the late 19th century to include psychic injury caused by emotional shock, its original definition stuck for most of the next century. But in a paper published in 2020, the psychology researchers Nick Haslam and Melanie J McGrath note that ‘the broadest sense of trauma has become a great deal broader since then.’ The concept, in short, is creeping.

As a writer and teacher of memoir, I’m often grasping at ways to find form and story from traumatic memory, and so this rising and expanded use of the term is central to my interest. In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud’s theory of hysteria as a manifestation of repressed sexual trauma from early childhood helped to shift our understanding. A few decades earlier, the French psychologist Pierre Janet had pioneered the idea of dissociation in the context of ‘severely upsetting events [that] could generate pathological reactions not by physically damaging the body but by injuring the psyche,’ as Haslam and McGrath put it. By the late 1970s, the word trauma came to be used more colloquially in newspaper reports, to refer to damage or hurt rather than life-altering harm (the ‘trauma’ of strike action, for instance, in The Daily Telegraph in 1981).

The dilution of harm-related terms reduces them to cliché and, at worst, renders them meaningless

Haslam and McGrath note that harm-related moral language shows a striking uptick from the 1980s onwards, reflecting ‘a growing cultural concern with harm and vulnerability’. Much of this concern followed the first inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III, 1980), and it led to the steepest increase in the designation of trauma, understood as a psychic wound, appearing in texts throughout the 1990s. Still, the emphasis was on the severity of external events, like rape, assault and car accidents, whereas later revisions of the DSM foregrounded the person’s subjective experience of distress in response to the trauma as opposed to its ‘objective’ severity. Trauma shifted from what is done to a person to how they respond to it.

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