Yes. Trauma doesn't always come from one dramatic or life-threatening event, like war, a natural disaster, or a car accident. Something can seem small at the time and still affect you deeply. Little t trauma can come from experiences that, on the surface, seem almost insignificant.
Things like not feeling seen or heard as a child, not being acknowledged, being frightened by something that other people have shrugged off, or growing up without much safety or stability are common examples.
The difficulty is that when nothing obviously terrible happened, it's very easy to dismiss what you experienced. You look at somebody else's life and think, ‘They had it much worse than me.’
You tell yourself you should be coping better. And eventually, you stop asking why you're struggling at all. I hear this a lot. People come to me with patterns they're unhappy with, but they're also convinced they don't have a reason to feel the way they do.
So let's look at what trauma can actually look like when there isn't one obvious event to point to.
What is the difference between Big ‘T’ and little ‘t’ trauma?
Big T trauma is the sudden, shocking, catastrophic life events. Something that comes completely out of the blue and changes everything in an instant.
Things like car accidents, the sudden death of someone you love, or losing someone from suicide can fall into that category. They're shocking events that completely blindside you.
Little t trauma can look very different. It can be something as seemingly innocuous as not feeling seen and heard as a child. Not feeling acknowledged or not being allowed to express yourself.
Over a period of time, experiences like that can have a very deep psychological impact. That's what people often miss. They're looking for something dramatic enough to explain why they're struggling now.
Sometimes there isn't one big event. Sometimes it's the accumulation of experience that quietly teaches you what to expect from other people.
What are examples of little t-trauma?
One of the common examples is neglect, because it can be incredibly difficult to recognise.
When a child is growing up, they rely on their parents to keep them safe. But safety isn't only about physical protection. It also involves feeling seen and heard and being allowed to express yourself.
Think about a child who is repeatedly told to be quiet. Eventually, they can simply stop expressing themselves. Underneath that, they can develop a belief:
- I'm not worth acknowledging
- I'm not worth listening to
- I'm not worth seeing
The child doesn't necessarily sit there consciously deciding this is what they believe. It becomes part of their experience of themselves. And that can follow into adulthood.
This is something I've seen over and over again in my clients. They can end up in relationships that don't serve them, sometimes abusive or narcissistic relationships, because they haven't learned what it feels like to stand in their own power.
They don't consciously recognise that as something connected to their childhood. They just know they keep ending up in the same kinds of situations. That's why something very subtle can still have a massive impact.
Other people had it worse than me, so why do I feel so bad?
This is one of the most common ways people downplay their own experience. We compare our circumstances with somebody else's and decide that because they had it worse, we should be coping better. But we're each living our own unique experience.
Our emotional capacity isn't the same at every point in our lives either. Something you could cope with easily at one stage of your life can completely overwhelm you at another.
So saying ‘other people have it worse than me’ doesn't actually answer the question of why you're struggling. It simply takes the focus off you.
I think that can sometimes come from low self-worth or low self-esteem. You believe you should be able to cope with something more easily than you are.
You're the person living your life. It's okay not to be coping, and it's even more than okay to heal that.
Little t trauma can feel ‘like concrete’ over time
With little t trauma, it can sometimes feel as though things have become ‘set like concrete’. Not because one catastrophic event happened, but because certain experiences and patterns have been repeated for so long they've become familiar.
When something is part of your life for a long time, your system can become used to it. You learn ways of coping, protecting yourself, and keeping difficult emotions under control, often without even realising you're doing it.
This is something I see a lot in my work. Someone can come to a session completely open in a logical sense. They know they want to do the work. But internally, there can still be enormous resistance. It can take time to get through that resistance until the system relaxes enough to allow the process to happen.
I think fear plays a big part in that. Even if something is painful, it can become familiar. It becomes what you're used to. In a strange way, it even becomes the ‘comfort zone’.
Changing that means moving away from something you've known for a very long time. And there can also be a fear of losing control, because keeping a lid on difficult emotions takes a lot of work, even when that work isn't conscious.
And there's a reason these patterns can feel so deeply ingrained. Research into chronic stress and childhood adversity has found that prolonged exposure to stress can affect the body's stress response systems, including cortisol regulation, inflammation, and areas of the brain involved in stress and emotional regulation.
So while the experiences themselves may have seemed small at the time, the impact of repeated experiences can build. What started as a way of coping can eventually become a pattern that feels almost impossible to change.
That doesn't mean it can't change. It just means we sometimes need to understand how long that pattern has been helping us feel safe before we can begin to let it go.
How does neglect work in trauma?
Neglect can be particularly difficult to identify because there may not be a single event you can point to.
A child grows up without feeling particularly seen or heard. Perhaps their parents were busy, there were few boundaries at home, or they learned from an early age to look after themselves.
I've seen examples of children whose parents were running a pub and who were effectively looking after themselves from a very young age. There may not have been obvious abuse. But there may also not have been much safety, structure, or emotional attention.
The child grows up with an underlying sense that they don't count for very much. And that can become a big part of what they think they deserve from life.
I've seen how this can then play out in relationships. People can repeatedly find themselves in situations that don't serve them because they don't know what a different kind of relationship feels like. It's subtle. But subtle doesn't mean insignificant.
A client who thought nothing bad had happened to them
Sometimes a person can go through much of their life genuinely believing that nothing particularly bad happened to them. They aren't deliberately hiding anything. They simply don't see their childhood experiences as significant.
That can change when they begin to look at the patterns in their adult life. Perhaps they're repeatedly choosing relationships that aren't healthy. Or perhaps they struggle to stand up for themselves, or they don't really know how to recognise what they need.
The question then becomes less about finding one dramatic event and more about understanding what they learned about themselves while growing up. I've worked with people who only began to make that connection much later in life. And sometimes, that realisation can be a shock in itself.
How is it possible to be anxious about a tiny thing that happened 20 years ago?
A seemingly tiny experience can have a much bigger impact than you would expect.
For example, imagine a child who is frightened by a dog. They aren't attacked; they're simply badly startled. That child grows up to remain anxious around dogs. Whenever they see one, the same reaction comes back. Another child can have the same experience and not be affected by it at all.
We're all different, so we don't respond to experiences in exactly the same way.
This brings me to another example. I remember my ex-husband once telling our children, when they were running around upstairs, that they sounded like a herd of elephants. I happened to see my youngest daughter's face when he said it. She was in pain.
It was only around three years later, when she developed anorexia, that I understood how deeply that comment had landed. It had pressed on something that was already there: the idea that she was heavier than she should be.
That experience really stayed with me because it showed how quietly something can take root. At the time, it was just a sentence. But for her, it had landed somewhere much deeper.
That's why I think it's important to remember that we're unique and that we respond to things differently. Because once a particular reaction has been established, it can take work to change it.
Why minimising trauma can keep you stuck
You can decide that what happened to you wasn't ‘bad enough’ to matter, but that doesn't necessarily change how you're functioning. You can keep telling yourself that you should be coping, even when you're struggling to.
From my point of view, the minimising itself can become part of the pattern. It can come from fear, from not recognising your own self-worth, or from having become so accustomed to functioning in a particular way that changing feels frightening.
You can keep doing the same thing over and over again, forcing yourself to cope, forcing yourself to carry on. But eventually, people come to me when they're completely fed up with the way they're functioning. They reach a point where they start to question whether things can actually be different.
And sometimes, that can become a point of choice. A point where you begin to recognise that you deserve more than simply getting through each day in the same way.
You don't need to prove that something was ‘bad enough’ before you're allowed to acknowledge that you're struggling. If something is affecting the way you live, that's enough reason to look at it.
Does a traumatic event have to be life-threatening?
No. A traumatic event doesn't have to be life-threatening. What matters is how safe a person feels.
You can experience something where you feel completely out of control, completely unsafe, and completely overwhelmed without your life actually being in danger.
If it's the first time you've experienced something like that, it can be shocking on every level. And sometimes, the impact isn't obvious until much later.
That's one reason I don't think it's particularly useful to decide whether something can objectively qualify as ‘bad enough’. The more useful question is: what effect has it had on you?
How do you know if you have trauma from childhood?
You don't necessarily know. Sometimes it only becomes obvious when you start seeing patterns in your adult life, such as repeatedly finding yourself in relationships where you're not functioning in a way that serves you.
You can become more self-aware as you get older and suddenly start noticing things about yourself you never questioned before.
If you haven't grown up around people who were self-aware and self-reflective, you may simply never have had much practice observing yourself. So when something eventually surfaces, it can come as a genuine shock.
I've had some clients who have remembered things much later in life that they had completely locked away. One woman I worked with had a sudden recollection in her mid-40s of severe abuse she had experienced as a child. She had no conscious awareness of it for years. The realisation itself was enormous, and she then had to begin processing what had surfaced.
That's an extreme example, but it illustrates something important: you don't always have a clear understanding of what has affected you. Sometimes you only start to understand when something in your present life makes you look back.
Why being alone can make trauma harder to recognise
Being alone isn't necessarily the whole explanation. Timing matters too. Sometimes a person needs to sit with themselves and their experiences for however long it takes before they become fed up enough to question whether things can be different.
They may start asking why they can't form a lasting relationship, or why they keep ending up in relationships that are abusive or narcissistic. And sometimes, being alone within a relationship can be one of the worst kinds of loneliness there is.
I've also seen situations where someone doesn't initially connect their current anxiety with a particular experience at all. One recent client had ended up in A&E thinking she had COVID. She hadn't, but she became frightened that she was going to die.
The physical illness passed, but the fear remained. Months later, she recognised that her anxiety had started from that moment. She hadn't initially connected the two, but once we explored it, she could see that the fear she had experienced when she believed she might die had stayed with her.
That's another reason these things can be difficult to identify. Sometimes the experience that sets something off isn't the one we initially think is important. It can take time before we recognise what has actually been affecting us.
You don't have to prove that it was ‘bad enough’
You don't have to compare your childhood with somebody else's. You don't have to find the worst thing that happened to you. And you don't have to prove that your experience was dramatic enough to deserve attention.
What matters is what's happening in your life now.
If you're repeatedly finding yourself in situations that don't serve you, struggling with patterns you can't seem to change, or you simply know that the way you're functioning isn't how you want to live, it's worth becoming curious about where those patterns came from. You may discover something you hadn't recognised before.
You may also discover that something you've been minimising for years is worth taking seriously. That doesn't mean your past has to define you. It means you're willing to look at what may be keeping the pattern in place.
And once you recognise that something is keeping you there, the next question is a very practical one: what do you actually do about it?