At some point most of us have told ourselves we should be stronger than this. We should be over it by now, we think, especially when we can name someone who went through something similar and seems perfectly fine. I hear versions of this from people all the time, and what I want them to hear first is that being affected by trauma is not a flaw in your character. It’s what happens when a human nervous system, which has limits like every other one, meets something it couldn’t fully absorb.
That idea sits at the center of iZen, the internal Zone of Empathetic Navigation, a process I’ve built over twenty years of practice. Its definition of trauma is deliberately personal: an event that was deeply distressing or disturbing to you. Everyone has their own threshold, and when an experience goes past what you can handle with the support you had at the time, it leaves a mark. That is as true of the strongest person you know as of anyone else. Put them in the wrong situation without enough support and they will be affected too, the way a dandelion is scattered by the wind without having done anything wrong.
It also explains why the comparison to “she’s fine” never holds up. Your threshold was shaped by how old you were, what else was happening in your life, whether anyone was there to help, and what you had already been through. Someone who went through “the same thing” never went through it as you. Her reaction tells you about her, and it says nothing about whether your experience counts, which is why iZen rates distress by your own ability to manage a situation and no one else’s.
What that mark looks like in daily life has to do with how the brain handles information. Everything we sense reaches the amygdala first, the part of us that runs fight or flight, before moving on to the prefrontal cortex, where we think things through and put them in context. The hippocampus stores the memory, though loosely, since memories are reshaped each time we revisit them. When trauma has taught the amygdala to be cautious, it can respond before the thinking part of your brain has had a say. That is what a trigger is: not simple discomfort or disagreement, but a physical reaction to something in the present that your brain has linked to an old threat. A smell, a song on the store intercom, a tone of voice, a particular time of year, and suddenly your heart is racing as if the danger had returned, though nothing is wrong. I don’t see triggers as something to be ashamed of or to organize your life around avoiding. They are clues to where something still needs care.
iZen gives the part of you that is still reacting a name: a Peace. A Peace is the snapshot a memory holds of who you were in that moment, unaware of what year it is and still doing its job of protecting you with the information it had then. Seen that way, a trigger is often that Peace calling out, and the work is learning to tell it, gently, that you’re safe now.
This also helps explain why trauma can surface years after you thought it was behind you. You were fine for a long time, and then you moved, or had a baby, or lost a parent, or finally landed somewhere stable, and suddenly the past is everywhere. Because memories are pulled back into the prefrontal cortex whenever something touches them, and are changed by whatever you know at that point, every shift in perspective can bring old material up to be looked at again. It doesn’t mean you’re falling apart. More often, a part of you has decided you now have the safety and strength to deal with more of it, and the resurfacing is simply part of the natural process of healing.
The same brain that holds your history is the one that lets you feel for other people. In iZen we describe how the brain can send signals based on a remembered sensation instead of a present one, which is how empathy forms, and why you wince when you watch someone else burn their hand. It also means you don’t have to live through something yourself to be deeply affected by it. If you’re a nurse, a teacher, a first responder, or just the friend everyone calls in a crisis, you may know what this looks like: numbness, irritability, never enough sleep, images in your head of things you never saw. That is secondary, or vicarious, trauma, and it’s a predictable result of holding other people’s pain. The person everyone leans on needs somewhere to lean, too.
On a wider scale, some trauma lands on all of us at once, such as a pandemic, a disaster, or violence we watch repeated on the news for hours, delivered by hosts and influencers who are carrying part of it themselves. Whole communities can end up anxious, grieving, or numb, and yet many people feel they have no right to struggle because everyone went through it. But shared pain is still pain, and talking about it can be part of healing.
If trauma trains the brain to scan for danger, the encouraging news is that the brain can learn to scan for safety as well. Sunlight through a window, a dog running to greet you at the door, the weight of a sleeping baby: in moments like these your whole body relaxes for a second, and those moments are called glimmers. They tell your nervous system that you are safe. Today, when something gives you even a little ease, pause and notice it, and you teach your brain that good things are real too. It’s one of many tools that serve the first directives of iZen, which are to come to the work calm and focused, to keep that calm in your everyday life, and to stay engaged with the people around you, because healing goes better when your body has somewhere steady to stand.
If some of this sounds like you, I’d really like to hear from you. I offer telehealth therapy in several states, and you can reach me through In One Peace. And if I’m not licensed where you live, please don’t stop there. I’m happy to help you find a trauma-informed therapist near you, because you deserve support in carrying what you carry.