Lisa Feldman Barrett

There could be an adverse event that is not traumatic to you because you're not using past experiences to make sense of it as a trauma.

On the other hand, something that could be like an everyday experience to somebody else, to you,

it links to a set of memories that are very traumatic, were very traumatic.

Those events were very traumatic.

And so to you, it is a trauma.

So trauma is not an objective thing in the world.

It's also not all in your head.

Trauma is a property of the relation between what has happened to you in the past and what is occurring in the present.

So here's an example.

There is an anthropologist who works at Emory University, and she studies people in a lot of different cultures, and she studies trauma in a lot of different cultures.

And there was this one girl that she wrote about, a case study of a girl named Maria, who was a young adolescent girl.

And she lived in a culture where it was more normative for men to

physically, be very physical with women and girls.

So in our culture, we would say it's physical abuse.

But in her culture, this is just what men did.

So her stepfather would slap her around, and she didn't like it, but she didn't show any sign of trauma.

The way she made sense of it was that men are just assholes.

It was very much a, this is not about me.

This is about them.

It's not pleasant, but she slept okay.