Is a child being excluded from a group of friends during a sleepover traumatic? Is getting fired from a job, tripping on the stairs at a conference, being broken up with by a long-term partner, being put on the spot during a meeting, or a parent being late to school pickup traumatic?
Some people will say yes, some will say no, some will argue they need more information, and many will say that they don’t even know what the word “traumatic” means anymore.
The clinical definition of “trauma” has evolved over time, and it now coexists (or perhaps competes) with an increasingly expansive colloquial usage. As a result, we risk overusing this term and thus diminishing its meaning and power.
The definition of “trauma” isn’t as straightforward as one might think. In the DSM-5-TR, a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) requires exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. This includes directly experiencing an event, witnessing it, or certain forms of indirect exposure, such as learning that a close family member died violently. It’s a necessary criterion that must be met for someone to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
However, “trauma” is also used more broadly in psychology to mean an experience that has lasting emotional consequences, even if it doesn’t meet the PTSD criterion. Clinicians sometimes distinguish between “big T” and “little t” traumas, which can make things a tad confusing. “Big T” traumas are the ones we usually think of— fighting in a war, witnessing a life-threatening fight, nearly drowning, etc. “Little t” traumas are experiences that don’t necessarily fit into the DSM’s exposure criteria but can still have significant psychological consequences, especially when they’re repeated or prolonged. They include events like bullying, rejection, or some types of neglect. The extent of impact depends on severity, frequency, and duration of the event(s), as well as the support and resources available to the person.
It’s these “little t” traumas that have muddied the waters. These experiences can cause genuine psychological harm, yes, but the boundaries of what qualifies as traumatic are increasingly difficult to define. We’re having a hard time differentiating psychological harm from psychological trauma. The vagueness has allowed for a rapid expansion of what classifies as a trauma, causing it to become an individually determined label with little room for challenge. Who’s to say that your father having a child with your new stepmother isn’t traumatic if that’s how you feel?
However, life is full of hardships, and not all of them are traumatic. Most of us will get dumped by someone we love, laid off from work, embarrassed in front of friends, devastated by loss, saddened by unwanted change—and that’s okay. A large part of life involves suffering and learning how to get through it. “Trauma” carries a different weight; it suggests that something was distressing, threatening, destabilizing, and possibly life-altering. But something can be distressing and entirely undeserved without being traumatic.
Plus, hardship can have the redeeming quality of creating opportunities for growth. When we navigate manageable adversity, particularly if we have adequate support and resources, we can discover our inner strength, develop resilience, deepen relationships, build coping skills, and develop confidence in our ability to handle future challenges.
There is also a desire to have our pain legitimized by a label. The word “trauma” instantly makes our suffering feel more valid. What we endured wasn’t just “bad,” a word that makes it sound like it could have happened to anyone; it was “traumatic,” a psychological label that conveys an undeniable degree of depth and severity. It’s a word that’s commonly understood to mean something truly devastating. What is this cultural tendency to only view pain as legitimate when it’s clinically significant? Why can’t something simply be painful, humiliating, or heartbreaking without needing it to be traumatic?
However, nobody wants to push back and tell someone their experience wasn’t traumatic. It’s invalidating and would likely embarrass or hurt someone who is trying to communicate the depth of pain they experienced. We don’t want people to become the mental health terminology police, doubting every diagnosis and demanding evidence to justify a label.
At the same time, it’s also not helpful to let every declaration of trauma be considered automatically correct. The word will lose its meaning if it can be used to label any hard or unwanted experience, and we do need a way to distinguish between the painful but manageable events from more serious threats with profound psychological consequences. The severity and impact of a traumatic experience will be diluted if we put performing CPR on an unconscious family member and getting rejected from graduate school in the same category.
Trauma has a clinical meaning, and a colloquial one, which is the case for many psychological terms (e.g., depression and anxiety). We can’t eliminate the colloquial use of “trauma,” nor should we regulate and restrict language to that degree. But we can be more mindful of when and how we use it, recognizing that its everyday meaning may differ considerably from the clinical criteria associated with PTSD.
Many painful experiences are things you can navigate, recover from, and integrate into your life. Don’t fall into the trap of calling something traumatic and then viewing your coping or healing as insurmountable. Be mindful of the story you tell yourself about what happened. When we begin to view a painful experience as something that has permanently damaged us, we can underestimate or even limit our capacity to recover, adapt, and move forward.
Preserving the meaning of “trauma” matters, especially for those who have survived profoundly traumatic experiences. Life includes many instances of suffering and, while suffering is painful, it’s not always traumatic. Perhaps the real change we need to make is recognizing that any kind of painful experience is legitimate, even without a clinical label.
