Irish psychiatrist Ivor Browne has a simple and elegant definition of trauma: unexperienced experience. He says: “Instead of a way of avoiding external danger, it [dissociation] is now utilised to deal with the threat of internal destabilisation; whenever we are faced with an overwhelming experience that we sense as potentially disintegrating, we have the ability to suspend it and “freeze” it in an unassimilated, inchoate form and maintain it in that state indefinitely, or for as long as necessary”. The mechanism by which traumatic experiences remain unexperienced is dissociation. That is how important dissociation is to trauma; they are inherently linked.

External threats become internal threats because they feel too threatening to experience. Our body takes them on because we cannot. Rather than experience them as they happen, which is often impossible due to developmental stage, no support or co-regulation, layer after layer build up into a frightening mountain of unresolved hurt. But there is hope, as Peter Levine says; trauma is a fact of life but it does not have to be a life sentence.

A traumatic experience does not necessarily lead to trauma. If we have support and resources we can overcome traumatic expereinces before they develop into trauma. This is why our early life experiences and having strong attachments are crucially important to our development, wellbeing and resilience.

I do not believe that we can define trauma objectively, because without a subjective response it would be impossible to be traumatised. My focus is on how people experience events rather than the events themselves. The problem with emphasising events is that it often results in the minimisation or the maximisation of someone's experience. What really matters at the end of the day is whether you are traumatised, not what traumatised you. As Peter Levine says, trauma is in the nervous system, not the event.

Sometimes the labels of trauma and dissociation can frighten us or even be stigmatising, but we've all been wounded (traumatised) and we've all avoided pain because it was just too much (that is, we dissociated). This is why feeling our feelings and body sensations so we can heal our traumatic experiences is so important. I have written lots of articles about trauma and dissociation on my blog if you are interested in reading more.