“Trauma is now treated as a personal possession: something to be owned, narrated, and curated by the individual,” writes Katherine Rowland in The Guardian, in an article aptly titled “They’re selling everything as trauma.” With striking clarity, she describes how trauma has been commodified—packaged, marketed, and circulated—often with little effort to explain what trauma actually is.

In this rush to sell trauma, many authors make it sound as though trauma is the event itself, or the memory of what happened, or something lodged in the body, or a reaction that never shuts off and inevitably derails our lives and relationships. What they are describing is not trauma, but fragments of it—individual angles, partial expressions, isolated consequences.

They are capturing slices of a much larger phenomenon while missing the very elements that would do justice to what truly happens to us. Ironically, this narrowed lens mirrors one of trauma’s own effects at its worst: the exaggeration and distortion of reality.

Trauma is not the event.
It is not the memory of the event.
It is not the initial reaction, the shock, or the surge of emotion that mobilizes our responses.
And trauma is certainly not something “stuck” in the body.

Trauma is a phenomenon—a complex condition that emerges when a wound does not heal as it should.

By “phenomenon,” I do not mean a metaphor, a theory, or a story we can tell ourselves at will. I mean something real: observable, measurable, describable. Trauma is as real as bleeding. It follows identifiable patterns, involves specific processes, and unfolds according........

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