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“There is no traumatic experience” means that what makes an experience traumatic is that it fails to register as an experience. This does not mean that trauma does not exist, or that traumatic experiences are invalid; it means that traumatic experiences are traumatic because they elude representation within the psyche because they overwhelm the psyche’s ability to make sense of lived experiences.
Trauma bores holes in the psyche, and we constantly recreate traumatic experiences in attempts to fill these holes. Holes can’t actually be filled — otherwise they wouldn’t be holes anymore — which is why traumatic experiences elude conscous representation despite their continual (re)enactment.
Just as some galaxies orbit around black holes, our personalities might be stylized responses to core traumatic events that comprise our unconscious. Traumatic experiences are unconscious because their conscious impact would be too much for the psyche to bear, which is why defense mechanisms are used to prevent the trauma from becoming conscious. Trauma and the unconscious might be the same thing, and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious in the late 1800s might have been humankind’s first scientific encounter with trauma.
Successful healing of a traumatic experience requires having a similar-enough experience that allows the psyche to reframe the…
