What if trauma isn’t defined by the event — but by how your nervous system experienced it?

In this episode of Healing Is My Hobby, Jessica Colarco, LCSW, breaks down one of the most misunderstood topics in mental health: trauma.

Many people believe trauma only applies to extreme, life-threatening events. But trauma is actually about nervous system overwhelm — when experiences exceed our capacity to process them in the moment.

Jessica explains the difference between Big T trauma (major life-threatening events) and little t trauma (chronic emotional stress, relational wounds, and repeated experiences of not feeling safe, seen, or supported). Both shape how our nervous system learns to respond to the world.

This conversation reframes trauma through a compassionate, neuroscience-informed lens, helping listeners understand that trauma responses like hyper-vigilance, people-pleasing, emotional numbing, or overworking are not character flaws — they are adaptations your nervous system developed to survive.

The most hopeful part? Trauma is not permanent damage. Because of neuroplasticity, the nervous system can learn new patterns of safety, regulation, and resilience.

If you’ve ever wondered why certain situations trigger strong reactions or patterns you can’t quite explain, this episode offers clarity, understanding, and the first step toward healing.

Key Takeaways

1. Trauma is defined by nervous system overwhelm, not just by the event itself.
2. Big T trauma involves life-threatening events, while little t trauma involves chronic emotional stress and relational wounds.
3. Trauma responses are survival adaptations, not personal weaknesses.
4. Trauma is often stored in the body and nervous system, shaping how we react to stress.
5. Through awareness, regulation, and supportive practices, healing is possible.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview

01:05 Jessica's Background and Focus on Trauma

02:03 Defining Trauma: Nervous System Overwhelm

04:26 Big T Trauma: Life-Threatening Events

06:24 Little T Trauma: Chronic Emotional Experiences

08:06 Why Both Types Matter for Healing

09:04 What Trauma Is Not: Common Misconceptions

11:34 Trauma Is Not Permanent Damage

12:36 Trauma Stored in the Body and Nervous System

14:30 The Body Keeps the Score and Healing Strategies

15:55 Trauma's Impact on the Nervous System

17:52 Trauma Responses and Reactivity

20:18 Shifting from Self-Judgment to Compassion

21:36 Reflective Practice: Noticing Patterns

23:04 The Power of Understanding and Compassion

24:11 Next Steps in Healing and Upcoming Topics

Want to stay in the know? Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Contact Jessica here.

Let's connect:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healingismyhobby/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@healingismyhobby

Would you like to learn more about Jessica’s clinical practice? Click here.

Resources

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

What Happened to You by Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey

Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal

trauma, nervous system, healing, big T trauma, little t trauma, mental health, regulation, safety, recovery, neuroplasticity

Hi friends, welcome to Healing Is My Hobby, the podcast where we explore the tools, practices, and curiosities that support mental wellness and personal growth. I'm Jessica Colerco, a licensed clinical social worker. I believe healing doesn't have to feel heavy or clinical all the time. It can be something we play with, explore, and weave into our everyday lives. As you know, last month was all about staying regulated in a dysregulated world.

My biggest takeaway, regulation isn't about controlling your reactions, it's about increasing your capacity. When we feel steadier internally, we respond instead of react. And that steadiness creates room for deeper work. And this month we're going deeper because we're gonna be talking about trauma. And before your mind goes somewhere extreme, I wanna slow this down. Because trauma is one of the most

misunderstood words in mental health. You don't have to identify as traumatized for this month to resonate. Some people hear it and think, that wasn't me. And others hear it and think, that explains everything. Today, we're going to define it clearly, calmly, clinically, and compassionately. It is so weird. I'm in my office right now on a Saturday and I am usually

never here on a weekend and the whole space no one is anywhere in the building but it feels eerie and strange as I get into trauma but this week the stomach flu came into the Colarco household and so I'm so grateful that my practice allows me to have flexibility so I was able to help my youngest heal but that did not give me time

for all the extra work and I like to record in the studio and not at my home where I was doing a lot of my paperwork this week. anyway, I feel some weird vibes in the studio. All right, so Today is our expert insight episode. And first we're gonna start with what trauma really is.

Trauma is not defined only by the event. It's defined by what happens inside the nervous system.

When an experience overwhelms

ability to cope. Two people can experience the same event. One walks away shaken, but integrated. The other walks away dysregulated and altered. The difference is

support, perceived safety, prior experiences, nervous system sensitivity. Trauma isn't about drama. It's about overwhelm without enough support. So I want to get into big T versus little t. You may have heard clinicians talk about big T trauma and little t trauma, and these terms aren't meant to rank suffering or minimize anyone's experience.

They're simply a way to describe different kinds of overwhelming experiences. Big T trauma refers to events that are clearly life threatening or deeply destabilizing. These might include things like physical or sexual assault, serious accidents, natural disasters, combat exposure, witnessing violence, sudden loss of a loved one. These experiences

often overwhelm the nervous system very quickly. For example, imagine someone who is involved in a serious car accident. In the moment, their body goes into survival mode. Adrenaline surges, the brain focuses only on immediate safety, and the nervous system stores the experience as a threat. Later, even when they're physically safe, they may notice their body reacting when they drive again.

their heart might

they may feel panic when they hear screeching brakes, they may avoid driving altogether. The body remembers the danger even when the mind knows they're safe. Long-term, Big T trauma can sometimes lead to things like intrusive memories or flashbacks, heightened startled responses, avoidance of reminders of the event, difficulty feeling safe in the world,

sleep

Those are a lot of symptoms that we're looking for when diagnostically diagnosing post-traumatic stress disorder. But not everyone develops these patterns. But when the nervous system doesn't fully process the event, the body can continue responding as if the threat is still present. Now that is compared to

little t-trauma, is different. These are experiences that may not look dramatic from the outside, but over time they shape how safe a person feels in relationships, in their body, or in the world. Little t-trauma often comes from chronic emotional environments rather than one single event. Examples might include

growing up with frequent criticism

emotional neglect, unpredictable caregivers, bullying, feeling unsafe expressing emotions, even chronic instability in the home. Here's an example. Imagine a child who grows up in a household where mistakes are met with harsh criticism. Maybe they hear things like, why would you do it that way? That's not good enough. You should know better.

Over time, the child learns something important about safety. Mistakes equal rejection, so they adapt. They become extremely careful. They work harder than everyone else. They try to anticipate problems before they happen. As an adult, this person might be highly capable and successful, but internally, they may struggle with perfectionism, overworking, difficulty relaxing, fear of disappointing others.

intense self-criticism, what began as a survival strategy in childhood becomes a pattern that follows into adulthood.

Why do both matter? The important thing to understand is that the nervous system responds to overwhelm, not just dramatic events. Both big T and little T trauma can shape how we experience safety, trust, and control. And they simply describe how the body learned to adapt. When we understand these patterns, we stop asking, what's wrong with me? And we may begin asking a much more compassionate question.

What did my nervous system learn it had to do to stay safe? And that reminds me of the book, What Happened to You by Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, and they explore asking children and adolescents what happened to you versus what's wrong with you. I'm gonna talk more about that book and I'm gonna talk about a couple more books in this episode, but this month instead of this might be a trauma response episode,

I'm going to dive deep into some books. If you really want to learn more about trauma, there are some books that I think are must reads. But going back to these questions, when we ask these questions in a more compassionate way, that can be

incredibly healing. We're going to talk about what trauma is not. You know, it's important because as the word trauma has become more common in everyday conversation, it can sometimes get used in ways that create confusion. Trauma is not the same thing as every uncomfortable or stressful experience. Trauma is not weakness.

Trauma also does not mean someone is weak. In fact, trauma responses are adaptive survival responses. Your brain and body are designed to protect you when something overwhelming happens. Your system mobilizes every available strategy to keep you safe. Fight, flight, freeze, or please. And these responses are not flaws. They are evidence that your nervous system was trying to help you survive. Trauma is not

permanent damage. Another misconception is that trauma means someone is permanently damaged. That simply isn't true. The brain and nervous system

are capable of remarkable healing and adaptation. With the right support, safety, and awareness, people can process trauma, update old survival responses, and build new experiences of safety. Healing doesn't mean erasing the past. It means the past no longer runs the present. Trauma is not an identity. It may be part of someone's story, but it does not define who they are.

When we talk about trauma and mental health, the goal isn't to label people. The goal is to understand patterns, because understanding allows us to respond with compassion rather than shame. Instead of asking, what's wrong with me? Like I talked before, we begin asking, what happened that my system learned to protect me this way? And that question, again, opens the door to healing.

Why trauma lives in the

is physiological before it is cognitive. Your body responds first. Your mind makes meaning later. Often, that's why trauma responses can look like overreacting, freezing, avoiding, people pleasing, numbing, and hyperindependence. Those are all adaptations.

And again, it's important to remember that trauma isn't just living in our memories, it lives in our body. For a long time, psychology focused primarily on thoughts and emotions, but over the past few decades, trauma researchers have helped us understand that traumatic experiences are stored physiologically as well. This also makes me feel really old because I have been practicing for over a few decades. So what I learned has been changing so much.

Psychiatrist and trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk famously wrote the book The Body Keeps the Score, which explores how traumatic experiences become embedded in the nervous system. What that means is this, when something overwhelming happens, the brain survival systems activate immediately. Your body prepares to fight, flee, freeze, or submit. Your heart rate increases, your breathing changes,

Stress hormones flood the system. All of this is designed to protect you in the moment. But when the experience isn't fully processed, when the body never gets the signal that the danger is truly over, those physiological responses can remain stored in the nervous system. So later, even when you are objectively safe, the body can still react as if the threat is happening.

I gave that example so much last month when I was in a car accident because my brain knew I was safe, but it was so fascinating to see that it took my body about five more days to feel safe. And so I was really practicing all different strategies that I know of to help keep my body safe. And in the book, The Body Keeps a Score, he talks about it as a three-pronged approach to healing from trauma, which processing it cognitively.

finding something physically to do, and he really emphasized the importance of human connection and healing. Our body remembers because trauma often bypasses the parts of the brain responsible for logic and language. Instead, it gets coded in areas connected to sensation, emotion, and survival. That's why trauma responses often show up as physical reactions before conscious thoughts.

Someone might notice their heart racing in certain situations, tightness in the chest or stomach, muscle tension, a sudden urge to leave a room, feeling frozen or unable to speak, becoming emotionally numb. These responses can happen very quickly, sometimes before the person even understands why they're reacting. And that shows how our body remembers patterns of danger.

I also wanted to explore a little bit about Dr. Gabor Mate's perspective. I'm currently in the middle of reading his book, The Myth of Normal, which I'm obsessing over. He is a physician and trauma expert and often emphasizes that trauma is not just the event itself, but the impact the event has on the nervous system. He describes trauma as what happens inside us as a result of what happened to us. In other words, trauma isn't only about the story.

It's about the imprint the experience leaves behind. And that imprint can influence how safe someone feels in relationships, how their body responds to stress, and how they interpret the world around them. For example, if you're someone who grew up in an environment where emotional expression was unsafe, their body may have learned to suppress feelings. As adults, they might find themselves disconnecting from their emotions automatically, not because they want to,

but because our nervous system learned that shutting down once helped them survive. And like I said before, trauma responses are adaptive. And this is an important point. When trauma lives in the body, those responses aren't random. They're adaptive. At some point, those reactions help protect you. Avoidance may have reduced conflict. Hypervigilance may have helped you anticipate danger.

emotional numbing may have prevented overwhelm. The body was trying to help, but the challenge comes when those protective responses continue long after the original danger has passed. What once helped us survive can begin to limit how fully we live. You know, if we think about fight, flight, freezer, please, that's so easy to understand with fight, right? If you're triggered and you fight,

Think about how that pattern's gonna go and play itself out in relationships. So if you are not in tune with your body and you don't know that your body is triggered and you are not feeling safe, you can be reactive in a very explosive way. Maybe someone who goes around over identifying with rage or things easily make you feel rageful. And to me, that's a sign, not that you're just an angry, terrible person, right? But that you're not feeling safe.

And we have talked about this before, but anger is a secondary emotion, often preceded by feelings such as pain or fear. And so that's really an interesting way to understand how that plays out later, and again, limits how we can fully live our life. We can feel triggered or unsafe indefinitely. And so it's really critical that we learn strategies to not only show our mind that we're safe, but to show our body that we're safe.

The good news is the body can heal. The encouraging part of all of this is that the body is also capable of healing because trauma lives in the nervous system. Healing often involves helping the body experience safety again. That might happen through therapy, movement, breath work, supportive relationships, mindfulness, or other practices that help the nervous system regulate. Over time, the body can learn something new.

It can learn that the danger is no longer happening. And when the body learns safety again, the mind often follows. Let me give you a simple example of what this can look like in real life. Imagine someone who grew up in a household where conflict often

escalated quickly. Maybe voices were raised frequently. Maybe there was unpredictability around anger. As a child, their nervous system learned something important.

Conflict equals danger. Let's fast forward to adulthood. Now this person is in a healthy relationship and their partner may raise their voice slightly during a disagreement. Not in a threatening way, just frustrated. But the moment the tone changes, the body reacts. Their heart starts racing, their chest tightens, they suddenly feel the urge to shut down or leave the room. Logically, they may know they're safe, but their body remembers something different.

The reaction isn't really about the current moment. It's about the nervous system recognizing a pattern that once signaled danger. This is what people mean when they say trauma lives in the body. The response happens before the mind has time to catch up. You know, in that example really resonates with me and I have worked so hard to notice if I'm triggered. But if we understand that the rational brain goes offline when we're triggered and we can go into these well adapted

responses that we learned in childhood. So it really is important that we learn to tune into our body. Well, why does this all matter? Again, like I was just saying, understanding this can be incredibly relieving for people because we're, instead of asking, why am I overreacting, we begin to understand my nervous system learned something earlier in life and it's trying to protect me. That shift from self judgment to understanding,

is often one of the first steps in healing. And I know that was my experience. over time with awareness and supportive experiences, the nervous system can begin to update those old patterns. It can learn that not every raised voice means danger, and it can learn that safety exists now.

Before we wrap up today, I want to offer a small reflection you can try sometime this week. Nothing intense, nothing that requires digging into difficult memories, just curiosity. Let's take a few minutes and think about a pattern you notice in your life. Maybe it's overworking, people pleasing, avoiding conflict, feeling hyper alert in certain situations, or shutting down

when emotions get big. Now ask yourself two simple questions. First, when do I notice this pattern showing up most strongly? Is it at work? In relationships? When you feel criticized? When things feel unpredictable? Then ask a second question.

What might my nervous system have learned that this pattern is protecting me from? Not perfectly, not with certainty, just with curiosity. Maybe it protected you from rejection. Maybe it helped you avoid conflict. Maybe it helped you stay connected to people you depended on. The goal here is not to analyze yourself.

It's simply to begin noticing that many of the patterns we criticize in ourselves once served a purpose. And when we understand that purpose, we often start relating to ourselves with a lot more compassion.

Awareness is often the first step in healing. When we can see our patterns clearly, we stop fighting ourselves and start working with our nervous system instead.

And that is why understanding trauma can be so powerful. We begin to see our reactions through the lens of survival instead of failure and something ships.

We're not frustrated with ourself asking, why am I like this? But we're curious and compassion and begin asking, what did my system learn it needed?

to do to stay safe? And that question opens a door to compassion. The patterns you carry didn't appear out of nowhere. They developed for a reason. Your nervous system was doing exactly what it was designed to do, protect you. And the beautiful thing about the nervous system is it's not fixed. It can learn, it can update, and it can experience safety again. Not overnight. And not by forcing yourself to just get over it.

but through awareness, supportive relationships, and practices that help the body experience safety in the present. That's the work of healing, and that's what we're going to keep exploring this month. Next week on Healing Is My Hobby, we are talking about something that surprises a lot of people, high-functioning trauma responses, because trauma doesn't always look like struggling. Sometimes it looks like overworking, perfectionism,

hyperindependence, being the strong one for everyone else, and many people who appear the most put together on the outside are actually carrying a lot internally. So next week we'll explore how trauma can show up in ways that are easy to miss and what healing can look like when those patterns begin to shift. Until then remember nothing you learn to survive makes you broken. It simply

your system was trying to keep you safe.

and healing begins the moment we start understanding why. If you wanna learn more about me or my clinical practice, you can go to jessicacolarcolcsw.com or follow me on Instagram at jessicacolarcolcsw. If you wanna know more about the podcast or read weekly blogs, you can go to healingismyhobby.com and you can sign up for the newsletter

where you get sneak peeks on what's coming up on the podcast. There are more activities and tips for you to engage in on your own. And you can also follow me on YouTube and Instagram at Healing Is My Hobby. I'll see you next week.