Understanding Trauma: Internal Wounds and Healing Potential

Trauma is a wound within, but healing and restoration are always possible.

### The Transformative Power of Understanding Trauma
* 🧠 Trauma is not just what happens to you, but also how it affects you internally, shaping your **beliefs and sense of self**.
* 🛡 The speaker, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, emphasizes that while the events of trauma can never be changed, the **internal wounds and beliefs can be healed**.
* 👶 Trauma can result from both **overt events, like abuse**, and from the **absence of essential needs being met in childhood**.
* 💔 The key distinction is between the **external events (which can't be changed)** and the **internal wounds and beliefs (which can be transformed)**.
* 🔄 By reframing trauma as a wound that can be healed, rather than a fixed event, individuals can **reclaim their authentic selves** and **reshape their worldview**.
* 🌱 This perspective offers hope for those dealing with trauma, suggesting that **healing and transformation are always possible**.
* 🌟 The speaker highlights that **trauma doesn't have to define one's life, relationships, or spiritual growth**, and that it's possible to **move beyond its limitations**.

Trauma is not what happens to you; it's what happens inside you. That's a good thing, by the way. Because if trauma, in terms of what happened to me as a Jewish infant under the Nazis, if that was the trauma, I'll never be. I'm pretty sure if I wasn't a Jewish infant under the Nazis and during that period of genocide, if trauma is the fact that you were abused as a child, you will never be a person who wasn't abused as a child. Trauma can also be inflicted not by what happens to you but what doesn't happen that should happen. So that when your needs aren't met, that can wound as well. Even though you weren't overtly hurt, you're still wounded by not having your essential human needs met. But if that was the trauma of what happened to you, guess what? It'll never unhappen. But if trauma is what happened inside you,

the wound that you sustained, the meaning you made of it, the way you then came to believe certain things about yourself or the world or other people, and if trauma was that disconnection from your authentic self, well guess what? Good news. That can be restored at any moment. So that's why Sharon, when you talk about the new view of trauma, when we see it as that wound, as long as we see it that way, it's a sound that can be healed. If we see it as a bunch of things that happened, that'll never unhappen. But we don't have the biggest lesson for me and one I continue to learn is that we don't have to allow it to define our lives, how we see ourselves, how we see the world, how we relate to other people, how we relate to possibility, how we relate to even spiritual transformation.

Gabor Mate - Trauma Is Not What Happens to You,  It Is What Happens Inside You

Skoll.org

Trauma is defined by the internal impact it has on a person, rather than the external events that occur.

It can result from both harmful experiences and unmet essential human needs.

The internal nature of trauma means that, while external events cannot be changed, the healing and transformation of one's inner experience is possible.

Trauma can lead to a disconnection from one's authentic self, but this disconnection can be restored at any moment.

Viewing trauma as a wound allows for healing, rather than seeing it as a series of unchangeable events.

The key lesson is that trauma does not have to define our lives or how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world.