05/15/2026
You've told yourself to move on. And in your head, you have.
But then something small happens. A tone of voice. A certain smell. A look on someone's face. And suddenly your heart is racing, your chest is tight, and you're reacting in a way that feels completely out of proportion to what just happened.
That's not weakness. That's the difference between a bad memory and trauma.
May is National Trauma Awareness Month, and this is one of the most important distinctions I share with clients.
A bad memory is something you can recall, feel the weight of, and still stay present. It might be painful. But you're here, in the room, knowing it's in the past.
Trauma is different. When a memory becomes traumatic, the brain doesn't store it the way it stores everything else. Instead of processing it as something that happened, it gets frozen. Incomplete. And the nervous system keeps it on high alert, treating it as a threat that never fully ended.
This is why you can intellectually know you're safe and still not feel safe. Why you can understand something logically and still react emotionally as if it's happening right now. The mind moves on. The body keeps the score.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's leading trauma researchers, spent decades documenting exactly this. Trauma lives in the body, not just in the story we tell about it. And healing it requires more than thinking your way through it.
This is something I see in my clients all the time. Smart, self-aware people who have done a lot of work on themselves and still can't figure out why certain things keep triggering them. It's not because they haven't tried hard enough. It's because the part of them that needs healing isn't listening to logic.
If that resonates with you, you're not broken. You're carrying something that was never fully put down.
And that can change.
