Dr. Gabor Maté

The word?

I define it very specifically.

It's not something bad that happens to you.

I went to this movie last night and I was traumatized.

No, you weren't.

You were just sad or you had some emotional pain, but you weren't traumatized.

Trauma means a wound.

That's the literal meaning of the word.

It's a Greek word for wounding.

So trauma is a psychological wound that you sustain and it behaves like a wound.

So on the one hand, a wound, if it's very raw, if you touch it, it just really hurts.

So if I have a wound around not being wanted, or the belief that I'm not, then decades later, if anything reminds me of that, it hurts as much as it did when I originally incurred the wound.

In one sense, trauma is an unhealed wound that touched, we get triggered.

That's what triggering means, by the way.

Some old wound gets activated or touched.

And the other thing that happens to wounds is that they scar over.

And scar tissue has certain characteristics.

It's thick.

It has no nerve endings, so there's no feeling in it.

So people traumatized.