When people hear the word trauma, they often think about catastrophic events: abuse, violence, a serious accident, combat, a natural disaster, or the sudden loss of someone they love.
And sometimes trauma does look like that.
But sometimes it looks like growing up feeling as though you had to be perfect to be loved. Being bullied or chronically excluded. Having a parent who was unpredictable, emotionally unavailable, highly critical, or overwhelmed. Growing up in a home where there was constant conflict. Feeling responsible for other people’s emotions. Repeatedly being told you were too sensitive. Learning that your needs were inconvenient.
You may look back at your childhood and think:
Nothing that bad happened to me.
And yet, as an adult, certain experiences can leave you feeling overwhelmed, panicked, ashamed, rejected, or completely shut down in ways you don’t quite understand.
Trauma isn’t only about what happened. It’s also about how your brain and nervous system experienced what happened—and what they learned from it.
Big “T” Trauma and Small “t” Trauma
Therapists sometimes informally distinguish between Big “T” trauma and small “t” trauma.
Big “T” trauma typically refers to experiences we readily recognize as traumatic: violence, abuse, serious accidents, life-threatening events, or other overwhelming experiences.
Small “t” trauma can be less obvious.
It may involve experiences that weren’t necessarily dangerous but were emotionally overwhelming, painful, humiliating, frightening, or repeatedly destabilizing.
One embarrassing moment in elementary school may sound insignificant when you describe it as an adult. But if your eight-year-old brain experienced that moment as Everyone is laughing at me. Something is wrong with me, the experience may have had a lasting impact.
And when experiences like these happen repeatedly during childhood, their effects can accumulate.
Developmental Trauma Can Be Hard to Recognize
Developmental trauma refers to painful or overwhelming experiences that occur during the years when our brains, identities, relationships, and understanding of the world are still developing.
Sometimes developmental trauma involves obvious abuse or neglect. But it can also be more subtle.
Maybe you grew up walking on eggshells around someone’s moods.
Maybe affection or approval felt conditional on achievement.
Maybe there wasn’t room in your family for anger, sadness, fear, or disagreement.
Maybe you were the responsible one.
Maybe you learned very young that being easy, successful, helpful, funny, quiet, attractive, or perfect was how you stayed connected to the people around you.
These experiences can shape the beliefs we develop about ourselves and the world without our consciously realizing it.
Years later, those beliefs can still influence how we respond to relationships, conflict, criticism, failure, uncertainty, and perceived rejection.
Developmental trauma can sometimes feel almost paralyzing precisely because we don’t recognize it as trauma.
We simply think, This is who I am.
Why Does My Reaction Feel So Much Bigger Than What Just Happened?
One clue that an old wound may have been activated is when your emotional or physical response feels disproportionate to what’s actually happening in the present moment.
Your partner seems distracted and suddenly you’re convinced they’re going to leave you.
Your boss gives you constructive feedback and you spend the rest of the day feeling ashamed and incompetent.
Someone doesn’t respond to your text and your stomach drops.
You make a relatively small mistake and can’t stop thinking about it.
Someone becomes irritated with you and your entire body goes into fight-or-flight mode.
Logically, part of you may know:
This isn’t that big of a deal.
But your body doesn’t seem to know that.
That’s because the brain doesn’t always make the connection consciously between what is happening now and what happened then.
A current experience can activate an older network of memories, emotions, physical sensations, and beliefs. Suddenly, you’re not responding only to what happened five minutes ago. Your nervous system may also be responding to experiences from five, fifteen, or thirty years ago.
New Trauma Can Trigger Old Trauma
Trauma doesn’t necessarily exist in neatly separated boxes.
A breakup today may activate memories of abandonment from childhood.
A frightening medical experience may awaken feelings of helplessness from an earlier experience.
Conflict in an adult relationship may activate the same fear you experienced listening to your parents fight.
Being excluded from something as an adult may connect with years of feeling unwanted or different as a child.
Sometimes a recent traumatic event is particularly destabilizing because it lands on top of something older.
You may wonder why you’re having such a difficult time recovering when someone else seems able to move forward.
The answer may be that your brain isn’t processing only this experience.
It’s touching an entire network of experiences that feel similar.
Trauma Can Leave Behind Negative Beliefs About Ourselves
Our brains are meaning-making machines.
When something painful happens, particularly when we’re young, we try to understand why.
Unfortunately, children don’t usually conclude:
My parent is emotionally unavailable because of their own unresolved trauma and limited capacity for emotional attunement.
A child’s brain is much more likely to conclude:
I’m not important.
I’m not good enough.
I’m not safe.
It’s my fault.
I can’t trust anyone.
I have to be perfect.
I have to take care of everyone.
I don’t deserve love.
I’m powerless.
In EMDR therapy, we often refer to these as negative cognitions—negative beliefs about ourselves that become connected to distressing experiences.
And they can become attached to both Big “T” and small “t” traumas.
The event may be over, but the belief can remain.
“I Have to Be Perfect”
Consider someone who grew up receiving praise primarily for achievement.
Maybe nobody explicitly said, You have to be perfect for us to love you.
But perhaps mistakes brought criticism, disappointment, withdrawal, or embarrassment, while accomplishments brought warmth and attention.
Over time, the brain may create its own explanation:
I have to be perfect.
Decades later, that person may be highly successful—and completely overwhelmed by relatively minor mistakes.
They may procrastinate because beginning something means risking failure. They may overwork. They may have difficulty delegating. They may obsess over whether someone is disappointed in them.
From the outside, it may look like perfectionism.
Underneath it may be an old belief about what is required to be safe, accepted, or worthy.
Knowing Something Logically Isn’t Always Enough
This is one of the most frustrating aspects of unresolved trauma.
You may already understand it.
You can tell yourself:
I know I’m good enough.
I know my partner isn’t my parent.
I know making one mistake doesn’t mean I’m a failure.
I know I’m safe now.
And yet your body still reacts.
That’s because intellectual understanding and emotional processing aren’t necessarily the same thing.
You can know something intellectually while another part of your brain continues to respond as though the old belief is true.
This is one reason trauma therapy can be different from simply talking about what happened.
How Can EMDR Help With Trauma?
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy approach designed to help the brain process distressing experiences that have remained inadequately processed or continue to feel emotionally “stuck.”
In EMDR therapy, the goal isn’t to erase a memory.
You will still know what happened.
Instead, EMDR helps the brain reprocess the memory so that it becomes less disturbing in the present.
The memory that once produced an eight-out-of-ten level of distress may eventually feel like a two—or perhaps no longer feel disturbing at all.
And importantly, EMDR also works with the negative cognition attached to the experience.
For example:
“I’m not good enough” might shift toward “I am good enough as I am.”
“I’m powerless” might become “I have choices now.”
“I’m not safe” might shift toward “I’m safe now.”
“It’s my fault” might become “I did the best I could.”
The goal isn’t positive thinking or convincing yourself to believe something that doesn’t feel true.
The goal is for the healthier belief to begin to feel genuinely true because the underlying memory has been reprocessed.
You Don’t Have to Decide Whether Your Experience Was “Bad Enough”
People sometimes hesitate to explore trauma because they compare their experiences to someone else’s.
Other people had it worse.
My parents did the best they could.
Nothing terrible happened.
I had a pretty good childhood.
All of those things may be true.
And you can still have experiences that shaped your nervous system, relationships, and beliefs about yourself.
Trauma therapy isn’t about blaming your parents or declaring your childhood terrible.
It’s about becoming curious about why certain experiences still have so much power in your life today.
If your reaction to something in the present repeatedly feels much bigger than the situation itself, it may be worth asking:
What does this feeling remind me of?
Sometimes the answer leads somewhere much older than we expect.
EMDR and Trauma Therapy in Hermosa Beach and the South Bay
At Beach Cities Psychotherapy, we work with adults and teens experiencing trauma, anxiety, relationship difficulties, negative beliefs about themselves, and patterns that can sometimes be traced back to earlier experiences.
Our therapists include clinicians trained in trauma-focused approaches, including EMDR therapy, and we work with both the experiences people immediately recognize as traumatic and the quieter developmental experiences they may never have thought to call trauma.
You don’t need to have experienced one catastrophic event to benefit from trauma therapy.
Sometimes healing begins simply by recognizing that the way you’re reacting today may make much more sense when you understand what your brain learned a long time ago.
If you’re looking for trauma therapy or EMDR in Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Torrance, Palos Verdes, or the greater South Bay—or virtual therapy in California—contact Beach Cities Psychotherapy to learn more about working with one of our trauma therapists.