When Everything is Trauma, What is Human?

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the language of trauma, the science of stress, and what it actually means to be human right now.

I have been experiencing a quiet identity crisis in my career lately, and honestly, I welcome it.

There is a certain health in questioning what you have always held to be true. It forces a return to a fundamental reality we often forget: everything is theory. Everything is a hypothesis. In the world of therapy, the desire to help people—or to understand ourselves—is so strong that we constantly search for the one framework that finally works. We want a map that explains human suffering and offers a clear path out of it.

In my specialty of attachment, relationships, and complex trauma, the work itself can sometimes feel like the holy grail of therapy. It is easy to become deeply invested in the prevailing models and begin treating them as absolute truth. We start to believe that everything in the trauma therapy world is biological fact.

But it is necessary to pause, slow down, and remember that very little of this is settled fact. Most of it is our best guess. And what brought me to this pause is a phenomenon I write about often: the pathologizing of the human experience.

The Expansion of Harm

What actually constitutes the human experience? It ranges from the mundane friction of everyday life to profound, life-altering tragedy. Historically, when we thought about something traumatic, it meant an event that occurred outside the realm of everyday life. The term “trauma” described an experience that overwhelmed the body and mind, something the nervous system was unable to process at the time, leaving lingering symptoms and distress. It marked a clear division: there was the person before the event, and the person after.

Lately, however, my field has been swept up in a phenomenon known as concept creep.

Concept creep is the gradual expansion of harm-related terminology over time. It often happens vertically, meaning a clinical term lowers its threshold to include less extreme phenomena. We are seeing this happen rapidly with the word trauma.

I am relatively new to social media. I joined recently to build an audience for my work, learning quickly that without “social proof,” your expertise is often questioned. Because I teach about trauma, wholeness, and adaptation, my algorithm is saturated with mental health content. And what I see there is surprising.

The internet is flooded with infographics and short videos that present a list of common symptoms, followed immediately by a clinical diagnosis. The narrative usually sounds like this: If you feel like a failure, struggle with self-worth, or have difficulty in relationships, you likely experienced childhood trauma.

When I read these lists, my immediate thought is: Doesn’t everyone feel like that to some degree?

Surely, we all struggle with feelings of inadequacy. The self-help and wellness industry is a $9 trillion machine built entirely on the premise that we are all trying to feel better. Clearly, a vast majority of us are in pain. But does that mean we all have childhood trauma?

This question forces a reexamination of our language. The word trauma is changing, and in its expansion, it is losing its meaning.

Fitting the Narrative to the Symptoms

My clinical training is focused almost exclusively on attachment dynamics—how the environment of our childhood shapes our adult lives. A recurring theme in these trainings is the tendency to define almost any adaptation to childhood dynamics as trauma.

The logic follows a specific path: when a child’s baseline stress elevates and does not return to normal, the nervous system becomes stuck in a state of fight, flight, or freeze. If you are stuck in that state, you cannot learn how to sustain open, compassionate, and vulnerable relationships. Therefore, as adults, when we experience the symptoms of a heightened nervous system, we assume we must be stuck in a trauma response. We conclude that something in our childhood must have been unsafe enough to break our ability to relax.

The flaw in this logic is that most adults can look at a list of “fight or flight” symptoms and identify with nearly all of them.

The field of relational trauma has essentially provided a universal explanation for all human distress, regardless of the actual environment a person grew up in. We have begun fitting the narrative to match the symptoms, rather than seeking to truly understand the narrative itself.

In therapy, the way a person perceives their own story is incredibly powerful. When we encourage people to shift their narrative to fit a trauma framework just to make sense of their adult struggles, we risk causing unintentional harm.

We absolutely need the field of developmental trauma. It was a necessary evolution in psychology to recognize that chronic, prolonged exposure to abuse, neglect, or pathological parenting creates a different symptomology in adults—one that requires specialized treatment.

But somehow, the process has inverted. Now, a person presents with low self-worth or identity struggles, and we immediately look backward to find the abuse or chronic stress that caused it. And because of concept creep, if you look hard enough for trauma in any childhood, you will find something to label.

The Cost of the Label

When we use this language to construct our life stories, it often creates an immediate opposition to the family system.

Sometimes, this opposition is necessary. In cases of abuse or emotional manipulation, denial and enmeshment are common because the reality of the harm is too painful to face. Breaking that denial requires boundaries and distance.

But in cases where a childhood simply contained normal ruptures—perhaps a lack of repair, or parents who were overwhelmed but not abusive—this trauma framework can create an unnecessary rift. An adult might feel owed an apology they will never get, or decide they can no longer be safe around their parents. This disruption can actually prevent the adult from stepping fully into their own agency.

I am now seeing teenagers and young adults categorize their parents as abusers or emotional manipulators based entirely on content they consumed online, when the reality of their home life does not reflect that severity.

Simultaneously, I see incredible amounts of stress on the parents of young children. They are terrified that any moment of frustration or rupture is actively traumatizing their child. They feel an impossible pressure to be perfect, believing that any misstep will cause permanent neurological damage.

It leaves me wondering: what does it mean to be human today, when we have so much clinical terminology available to interpret every uncomfortable experience as damage?

It is undeniably hard to raise children right now. Most households require two working parents. Children enter daycare earlier. Families are isolated from extended support networks. Research suggests that to develop secure attachment, a child only needs a caregiver to be attuned and responsive 30% of the time. That sounds like a low bar. But for a working parent who only sees their child for a few exhausted hours between dinner and bedtime, that 30% of quality presence can easily slip away.

A child in that environment will adapt. Their adaptations may even look similar to those of a child with developmental trauma. But an overwhelmed, under-resourced home is not inherently a traumatic one. It is simply a reflection of the lack of a village in our highly individualistic society.

These children grow up with adaptations, but that does not mean they are traumatized.

Unraveling the Adaptation

Making this distinction matters because it changes how we carry our own stories. It changes how we relate to our families, how we view our own resilience, and the pressure we place on ourselves. We have to ask: what is the reality of being human right now? What is normal adversity, and what is the consequence of calling the friction of the human experience trauma?

If you have built your story around the idea that you experienced childhood trauma, and you feel threatened by this perspective, I invite you to just stay with that feeling. Be curious about it. What does that attachment to the label provide for you? What do you fear losing if the lens shifts?

Many people believe that if they do not label their past as trauma, it means their pain wasn’t real. Regardless of whether you grew up with an overwhelmed parent, or in a home where resources were scarce and you felt isolated—it was still hard. It is vital to recognize that it was challenging.

But an experience being hard does not mean something went fundamentally wrong.

Whatever your subjective experience was, it does not have to carry the label of trauma to be valid. Notice the difference in how those two frameworks feel. Notice if dropping the label allows space for you to view your family with more nuance, or if clinging to it makes you feel permanently harmed. Notice what the narrative makes you want to do next.

The goal of this work is not to fix a broken machine. The goal is to unravel the adaptations that kept you safe in the past, so you can actually experience the life you are living now. It is not about becoming healed; it is about unbecoming who you had to be to survive.

Just be curious.