I was recently talking to a friend about trauma and the different ways that people can recover from it. I’ve come to find, through working with clients over the years, that trauma is a very common thread that underlies many of the struggles they face.
But as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, “trauma” doesn’t necessarily have to be a dramatic, life-altering event for it to have a big impact; trauma can also form through experiences that seem small on the outside, but feel overwhelming on the inside. What really matters is how your nervous system handled that moment.
In other words, it’s not necessarily the content of the event that makes trauma stick – it’s the imprint that’s left behind, inside of us, and how we internalize what happened.
What Trauma Really Is (nervous system imprints + meaning)
Here’s a simple way to think about it: When an overwhelming experience happens, certain things can take place inside of us that make the impact of that experience more “sticky”. Here’s how it works:
- The initial impact: an overwhelming moment gets stored as a memory that’s tightly linked to a strong feeling in your body (like fear, shame, or helplessness). That intense emotion gets imprinted onto your nervous system, and similar situations later can re-trigger that same feeling.
- The meaning we add: sometimes, it stops being just about what happened and instead, it turns into what you believe the experience means about you, your life, or your future. Beliefs like “I’m not safe,” “I’m not enough,” or “People can’t be trusted” start to sit on top of the imprint, and this is very often what amplifies the intensity and keeps people stuck. It starts to be about more than just the event itself; it starts to be about what you believe, and this can often be what truly ends up limiting us.
This “meaning layer” often determines how far the impact spreads in our day-to-day life.
For example, if in your past someone was emotionally abusive to you, and their yelling caused a high-impact emotion to be felt inside of you, if while it was happening you gave meaning to the experience by thinking things like, “I’m not good enough,” or “Speaking up isn’t safe”, that could form a deep-seated belief in your subconscious mind, causing similar experiences in the future to re-trigger those same feelings and thoughts about yourself, causing you to act in ways that reinforce the negative beliefs you hold.
When we “link” meaning (how patterns generalize)
When trauma happens, it can make us hyper-sensitive to things around us that would otherwise be completely benign.
For example, when I was just out of high school, I went travelling with a friend, but one day I got a call that shook my world… My Dad told me that a friend of mine had been killed in a car accident. I flew back to my hometown immediately for the funeral, but without realizing it back then, that experience changed me.
For a very long time afterward, whenever I thought about leaving my hometown, I was terrified that something bad was going to happen. While still living at home at the time, I remember whenever a family member would leave the house, I’d feel a sense of panic, like someone was going to die.
I’d planned to keep travelling after high school, but I was suddenly scared to do so – it halted a lot of my plans to travel and live in other locations. I just couldn’t leave.
That internal association I had made, made me feel like if I or anyone else left town, someone else would die.
When superstition sneaks in
Not only did the above happen, but even more nonsensical nuances got linked inside of me. I remember thinking back to what I was doing when the accident happened, and it turns out that I’d been walking through nature singing the song “Tomorrow” from the movie Annie.
After realizing that, from that point onward, whenever that song popped into my head or I heard it being played somewhere, I’d get scared and would do my best to try to avoid it – I thought it was a bad omen.
Logically, I knew it probably meant nothing, but the feeling of fear it brought up inside of me dictated my actions.
These are just two examples of how one traumatic experience can limit us in multiple ways. When we create meaning and tie it to something, it can deepen the depth of what’s driving us. It becomes not only about the initial imprint (the feeling triggered in our nervous system), but about what that feeling means in our everyday life, and how we react to the world because of it.
The depth of meaning (Robert Dilts’ Logical Levels)
One of the highest levels of meaning we can give to an experience is one that’s tied to our identity, because it causes us to see ourselves in a way that limits us. For example, think of a kid who is told by someone that they’re stupid, and in that moment they feel sad, embarrassed, etc (an intense emotion). And they create a belief: this person told me I’m dumb, so I must be.
That internalized meaning gets mapped onto experiences that are “like that”, and years later, the person might start to avoid taking classes, jobs, or being part of conversations that could expose them as “dumb,” even though, if they took the time to apply themselves, they’d see that they aren’t. This is how meaning can become a lens we continue to look through, which distorts our perception of reality, causing our reality to perpetuate that same belief because we don’t ever let ourselves get past it.
Levels of meaning (from light to deep)
When something hard happens, we don’t just store the event; we store the meaning we gave it. That meaning can land at different “levels,” inside of us, and the deeper it lands, the more it shapes what we’ll do next.
A teacher I follow named Robert Dilts came up with a model called “Logical Levels” that explains the different levels of meaning/belief people can hold within themselves. Meaning can land at shallow levels (easy to change) or deep levels (harder to change). Below are some examples of what belong at each level:
- Environment: “That timeline was unrealistic.” or “That test was hard”.
- Behaviour: “I rushed the presentation and skipped key points” or “I avoided the tough conversation”.
- Capability: “I’m not good at this yet,” or “I’m under-practiced at this right now”
- Beliefs/Values: “If it isn’t perfect, it’s not worth sharing,” or “If I say no, they’ll think I’m selfish.”
- Identity: “I’m not smart enough,” or “I’m bad at relationships.”
- Purpose/Mission: “My work only matters if it makes a big enough impact.” or “This industry rewards the loud, not the thoughtful, so my values don’t fit.”
The same experience can be internalized at different levels. For example, if a student failed their test, depending on the level of meaning they give it, it could be easier or harder to change:
- Capability-level: “I didn’t study well enough for that test.”
- Identity-level: “I’m dumb.”
Identity/Purpose-level meanings feel heavier in the body and are more likely to freeze you, because they threaten who you are or how safely you belong.
One quick rule of thumb: If your inner sentence starts with “I am…” or “They/People/The world is…,” you’ve hit the deep end, and that belief is one of the most challenging to get past.
Where is meaning holding you back? (3-minute exercise)
Try this 3-minute exercise to see what level of meaning/belief you’ve tied to a challenging situation in your life:
- Step 1: Find a recurring challenge: Bring to mind a situation where you consistently feel limited or find yourself repeating an unwanted pattern.
- Step 2: Feel it in your body: As you think about that challenge, where do you feel it most strongly in your body? What emotion comes with it? (Sometimes feelings can take time to understand – sit with the feeling for long enough to unravel what it is).
- Step 3: Identify your personal lens: What’s the underlying belief or story you tell yourself about that situation? What does it mean about you, or about how the world works?
- Step 4: Identify the level: What level of meaning did it land on? Did it fall into a level of behaviour, or a deeper level, like identity?
When you start to notice the meaning you’ve tied to your experiences, you shift into a third-person or “meta” perspective (observing yourself as the observer). This shift takes you out of autopilot mode and into a state where you have conscious awareness of what you’re doing. Awareness is powerful because once you can see your pattern, you can change it.
Nikki