On reclaiming a word that has been stretched beyond its meaning
There is a word that has been borrowed, stretched and applied so broadly that it risks losing its most important meaning.
Trauma.
We use it to describe difficult conversations, frustrating experiences, uncomfortable films. And while the intention behind that usage is often to normalise emotional difficulty — which matters — it has created a problem. When everything is trauma, nothing is. And the people genuinely living with its consequences can find themselves unseen in the noise.
As a medical doctor working in neuro-somatic medicine in Johannesburg, I think this distinction is worth making carefully and compassionately.
Gabor Maté puts it plainly: every stressful event is not traumatic. But every traumatic event is stressful.
It is not the event. It is what happens inside you because of it.
The word trauma comes from the Greek for wound. And like a physical wound — what matters is not only what caused it but whether it was able to heal. An experience you move through and recover from, however painful, is not trauma in the clinical sense. Trauma is what happens when the wound cannot close. When the nervous system becomes stuck in its response to the original threat — long after the threat itself has passed.
Four Characteristics That Distinguish Trauma From Difficult Experience
1. The nervous system gets stuck
A healthy stress response arises and resolves. Trauma is what happens when it cannot. The activation freezes in place. The body remains in a state of alert — scanning for danger, bracing against a threat that is no longer present. This is not a choice. It is a physiological reality. The nervous system has learned that the world is unsafe, and it is doing its job.
Trauma is not stored only in memory. It is held in the tissue — in patterns of muscular tension, autonomic activation and fascial bracing that the body has been carrying, sometimes for decades. This is why understanding what happened is rarely sufficient to change how the body continues to respond to it. The pattern lives below the level of conscious thought.
3. It constricts your capacity to respond
One of the most telling signs of unresolved trauma is the loss of response flexibility. You find yourself reacting — automatically, disproportionately — rather than responding. A small thing in the present activates something enormous from before. The reaction belongs to a past moment that the nervous system has never fully updated.
4. It disconnects you from yourself
Trauma creates a split between the person and their own inner experience. Gut feelings become unreliable or absent. Authentic emotional response gets suppressed. The capacity to be fully present in the moment is compromised — because at some point, the present moment became too dangerous to inhabit fully.
What This Means Clinically
Perhaps the most important insight from trauma-informed research is this: the same event can traumatise one person and not another. What makes the difference is not the event itself but the context of holding around it. A child who experiences something overwhelming but is emotionally supported — seen, held, allowed to move through the experience — is far less likely to be traumatised than a child who faces the same event alone.
This is not to minimise anyone’s pain. All difficult experiences deserve to be witnessed and honoured. But genuine trauma — the kind that reorganises the nervous system and shapes the body’s ongoing responses — requires specific, targeted work to resolve. Not just time. Not just understanding. Somatic work that meets the body where the pattern actually lives.
Trauma Resolution Through The Body
That is precisely what the ARC Method™ at The Reset Room in Johannesburg is designed to do.