Or how one word came to explain everything — and what we lose when we use it for anything

At the end of a workshop, while we were stacking the chairs, a participant said to me, half joking: "I think I have a trauma with airports. Ever since they lost my luggage, my whole body tenses up the moment I walk into one."

I smiled. I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant.

An hour earlier, in the same circle, another woman had spoken about her mother, dead for two years. At one point she stopped and asked, more to herself than to us: "I don't know if this is trauma, or just missing her."

I drove home with the two sentences side by side. The same word. Two worlds that never touch. And somewhere between them, a question I haven't managed to put down since: how did a single word come to hold both a lost suitcase and a lost mother?

A word that grew

"Trauma" comes from Greek and means, quite simply, wound. For centuries it belonged to surgeons. A trauma was something you could see: a cut, a fracture, a blow to the head.

Only at the end of the nineteenth century did the word cross from body to mind. Charcot, then Janet and Freud, began speaking of wounds that cannot be seen but leave their mark.

And in 1980, when post-traumatic stress disorder entered the American diagnostic manual, largely under pressure from Vietnam veterans, the definition of a traumatic event was narrow. In its early formulations, it had to be something that would distress almost anyone, something outside the range of ordinary human experience. War. Rape. Catastrophe.

Then the definition widened. The 1994 edition included witnessing such an event. The 2013 edition included learning that someone close to you had died violently or accidentally, or had been exposed to extreme danger. Harvard psychologist Richard McNallywas already calling this, in 2003, a problem of ever-expanding definitions of trauma. Not to say that witnesses don't suffer. But to note that a word which once covered a handful of extreme experiences had begun to cover more and more.

Nick Haslam, of the University of Melbourne, gave the phenomenon a name that stuck: concept creep, in a 2016 paper in Psychological Inquiry. He shows that many concepts related to harm, among them abuse, bullying and trauma, have expanded in two directions. Horizontally, toward new kinds of situations. Vertically, toward situations that are less and less severe.

This is not just an impression. In 2023, a team that included Haslam analyzed more than 800,000 abstracts of psychology articles published between 1970 and 2017. The conclusion of the study, titled The semantic inflation of „trauma” in psychology, is simple: over time, the word came to be used for progressively less severe contexts.

It's worth pausing on that. The widening didn't begin on TikTok. It began in the professional literature. Social media merely carried forward, at its own speed, a movement the profession had already made.

One more thing needs saying before we go on. In today's language, "trauma" can name the event, the person's response to it, or the psychological traces that persist afterward. These are not the same thing, though in everyday conversation we often blur them. The history of diagnostic criteria I've just traced concerns, first of all, the first sense: what kind of event can count as traumatic exposure. The word on our lips carries all three at once.

Why it's so easy to say "trauma"

This is where I become less interested in definitions and more interested in people.

Because most of the time, we don't say "I have a trauma" unless the word is doing something for us. And I think it does at least three things.

First: it gives a cause. Sadness without a cause is hard to carry. It makes us feel strange, ungrateful, defective. Trauma, by contrast, has a source. Something happened. It isn't your fault.

Two sociologists of psychiatry, Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, wrote an entire book about this, The Loss of Sadnessin 2007. Their thesis is that for two thousand years medicine distinguished sadness "with cause" from sadness "without cause," and considered only the second an illness. Modern manuals have largely erased the distinction. And when sadness is no longer allowed to be a normal response to something that happened, it needs a label to be legitimate.

The second thing the word does: it grants legitimacy. Anthropologist Didier Fassin and psychiatrist Richard Rechtman traced, in The Empire of Trauma (2009), how trauma moved from a suspect diagnosis, once associated with malingerers, to a moral category. Today, to be "traumatized" means your suffering is real and others owe it recognition. You no longer have to justify it.

And the third thing is perhaps the most human: the word closes an uncertainty. "I don't know what's wrong with me" is a hard state to stay in. "I have a trauma" is somewhere you can sit down.

Oxford psychologist Lucy Foulkes, together with Jack Andrews, proposed in 2023 a hypothesis she called prevalence inflation. The idea is that mental-health awareness efforts, however well-intentioned, also have a side effect: some people begin to interpret milder forms of distress as clinical problems. The authors don't say their suffering is false. They say the name it receives can change it.

That's the part that concerns me. Not that we misuse a term. But that sometimes the word arrives before the experience and shapes it in its own image.

What no longer fits inside the word

When everything becomes trauma, a few very human things are left without a place.

The first is sadness that isn't aimed at us. You watch the news, a flood, a family on the roof of their house, and you find yourself crying at the dinner table. Or you're on the tram and an elderly woman is counting her coins and doesn't have enough. You carry a heaviness for the rest of the day. None of it happened to you.

That sadness shouldn't be assumed, automatically, to be a wound. It may be the sign that you are still porous to the world. That something in you responds to someone else's suffering without asking permission. If we call it trauma, we turn it into something to be treated. When it was, perhaps, exactly what it needed to be.

The second thing is shame. In recent years shame has become almost synonymous with the childhood wound. You felt ashamed, therefore someone once shamed you.

Sometimes that's true. But not always.

The researcher June Tangney, who has studied shame and guilt for decades, distinguishes between shame, an emotion every human being feels, and shame-proneness, the tendency to judge your whole self negatively at every mistake. The first is universal. The second is what hurts chronically. Anthropologists went further still: for Ruth Benedict, in the 1940s, shame was a social regulator, the way a community keeps its bonds without needing punishment. Shame tells you that you've fallen out of step with others. It isn't necessarily a symptom. Sometimes it's information.

Of course, not every social agreement is just. Shame can be planted by families or communities that punish difference. But neither is it, by its mere appearance, proof of a trauma. Sometimes it signals an old wound. Other times it asks us to look at what happened just now.

If every shame is a trauma, we go looking for the wound in the past. And we stop hearing what the shame is saying now.

And the third thing that no longer fits is, paradoxically, strength. When we speak of trauma, we speak of something done to us. Grammatically, we are in the passive voice.

George Bonanno, of Columbia, has spent twenty years studying what happens to people after loss and extreme events. His conclusion, repeated study after study and summed up in his 2021 book The End of Trauma is that the most common trajectory after a potentially traumatic event is not collapse. It is resilience. Most people do not develop lasting symptoms. That is why Bonanno refuses to say "traumatic event." He says "potentially traumatic event." The event does not decide on its own. What happens afterward matters at least as much.

This doesn't mean that whoever collapses is weak. It only means that by calling an event "trauma" in advance, we take from the person the right to discover for themselves how they will cross it.

I sometimes see this in constellations too. Someone arrives with the explanation already formed: they carry a transgenerational trauma. As we work, the explanation may remain relevant. But sometimes something else moves into the foreground: an unacknowledged grief, a sadness that was never given room, because grandmother had to work and mother had to be strong. A constellation cannot establish a diagnosis, nor prove what was passed between generations. But it can open a different question: whether what is asking for room now is not only the wound, but also the grief.

And the difference is not theoretical. Trauma may call for safety, a slow pace, a nervous system learning that the danger has passed. Grief often needs something else: to be acknowledged, to have a place, to be allowed to change.

Healing a wound and letting a grief find its place are not the same thing.

The words therapists are moving toward

I think this is exactly where a movement I've been quietly noticing in recent years comes from: more and more people who work with suffering are looking for more precise words.

Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, working with veterans, proposed the term moral injury, for what happens when someone in legitimate authority betrays what is right in a high-stakes situation. Brett Litz and his colleagues developed the concept in 2009. It isn't fear. It's a rupture of trust in the world, and it calls for repair, not just soothing.

Sue Johnson, in couples therapy, introduced the attachment injury: in 2001: the moment when one partner is not there precisely when the other needed them most. It isn't trauma in the clinical sense. It's a specific relational wound, with a specific path to repair.

In 2022, the American diagnostic manual added prolonged grief disorder as a category in its own right. The choice says something: the profession preferred to give grief its own name rather than dissolve it into trauma.

And the researchers who built the well-known score for adverse childhood experiences, ACE, chose from the start the word "adversity," not "trauma."

There is one more word many practitioners are returning to, almost full circle: the wound. Not in the clinical sense. In the old, plain sense of the Greek word we started from. A wound can be small or large. It can close. Sometimes it leaves a scar. But it doesn't assume, by itself, that everything that comes after it is a symptom.

I don't want to idealize any of these words. Each has its limits. Some very widespread explanations today about the "dysregulated nervous system," especially simplified versions of polyvagal theory, are sometimes presented with more certainty than the research allows. Moral injury is still a young concept, with unsettled measurement tools, as its own researchers acknowledge. But the movement itself seems healthy to me. It isn't a flight from trauma. It's an attempt to speak more exactly.

Because precision, in this field, is not coldness. It is care. The right word can show us what the experience needs. Grief asks to be mourned. Shame, to be understood. Moral injury, recognition and repair. Trauma, safety and time.

When everything bears the same name, we risk seeing everything through the same explanation. And nothing gets exactly what it needs.

What I don't want to say

I need to pause here, because this text can be misread.

I am not saying trauma is a fashion. I am not saying people exaggerate. Post-traumatic stress disorder exists, it is rigorously studied, and a real minority of people live for years with the traces of events the rest of us can't even imagine. I have written, in other articles, about how the suffering of one generation can shape the lives of those who follow, through silences, relationships, rules and fears. I believe in that influence. I have seen its traces.

I am only saying that when every pain bears the same name, differences in intensity, duration and need become harder to see. And people living with severe, persistent symptoms risk being understood through the same vague vocabulary we use for any discomfort.

Widening the word cancels no one's suffering. But it can reduce its precision.

The question before the word

There is a moment, a brief one, between feeling something and giving it a name. I think everything that matters happens there.

In that moment, the mind reaches quickly for an explanation. And the one closest to hand, today, is trauma. Not because it's always true, but because it's the most available. The word arrives, the explanation closes, and the feeling, which had barely begun to say something, falls silent.

Here is the paradox I've been circling throughout this text: the faster we rush to understand what we feel, the less we feel. The name arrives before the experience and replaces it.

So the question I've begun working with, in myself and with others, is no longer "which wound is this from?" It's simpler, and harder: "what is this feeling doing here, now?"

Sometimes the answer really is an old wound. Then it deserves all the time and all the care in the world.

But often the answer is something else. It's sadness, because the world is sometimes sad. It's shame, because I've stepped outside an agreement I cared about. It's "dor," the Romanian word for missing someone, because someone is gone.

I return, in my mind, to the woman who asked whether it was trauma or just missing her mother. I didn't answer her then. I think today I would tell her: perhaps it was ''dor'' (missing someone). Not "just" ''dor''. ''DOR''(I MISS YOU.)

And perhaps her question was already part of the answer. Someone who can pause for a moment before choosing the word already has a kind of freedom.

Perhaps emotional maturity doesn't mean finding the strongest name for what you feel. It means bearing, for one moment longer, not having it yet.

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If you feel you want to explore more of what is happening in your emotional life, there is a space for that.