It’s hard to know what counts as trauma and what doesn’t when people talk about “big T” and “little T” traumas or when people tell you your experience wasn’t a trauma. But trauma is individual. Trauma happens when an experience exceeds a nervous system’s ability to cope with it. One person may experience a mugging as trauma while another experiences it as a bad experience but not traumatic. This means that other people cannot determine whether an experience was traumatic for you simply by looking at the event itself. If you’re wondering whether a specific experience may have been traumatic for you, it can be helpful to look at how your nervous system responded both during and after the event.
This page is part of the What Counts as Trauma? section of the CommuniDID site, which explains how trauma can occur without obvious violence and why survivors often doubt or normalize what happened to them.
Explore more:
- Questions about What Counts as Trauma?
- The guide What Counts as Abuse? helps readers evaluate past experiences and understand why confusion about abuse is common.
- Can You Have Trauma Without Obvious Abuse?
- Why It Can Be Hard to Recognize Your Own Trauma
- How Do I Know If Something I Experienced Was Traumatic?
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