The chapter after trauma
Inertia — 206
Trauma is not the most important thing about you. The most important thing is what happened next.
I’ve encountered a small share of major trauma doses in my own life. Some I’m still working on. For others I’ve gotten over the hill of it and down the other side.
My most significant trauma was a bike accident when I was seventeen. Early one morning, I hit a car at just under 30mph (50kph) and nearly died. All I remembered beforehand was the car turning in front of me and bracing before I breached its windshield, and everything went black. I woke up briefly later to the sounds of a medical team putting me in an ambulance, but it was impossible to open my eyes. I fell unconscious again until later that evening, dropping in and out with the sight of different family members by my hospital bed each time before the eventual work on my major laceration kept me up.
Nearly two years later, I was back on the bike without fear. A bit later, I returned to riding past the old spot again. I do it all the time now. I had issues being in a car and going through junctions for a long time. It was worse when I got back on the bike much later. The weight of this trauma felt fixed and unchangeable, which brought on signs of depression, and I didn’t start to learn how to deal with it until my school assigned a therapist to me in what was my final year.
Since the first incident, I’ve been in a hit-and-run, narrowly avoided a tractor with its harvesting equipment attached, and I once hit a low wall on a hairpin and almost fell off a cliff in Mallorca. The point I want to make with these is that resilience was my partner through each episode, and what helped me was getting back, building resilience, and exposing myself to what I was afraid of as soon as I felt a little ready. There were other, less physical, longer and more personal bouts of trauma I’ve had, which I won’t go through—but the recovery process and cure for me has been the same.
I didn't fully understand until years after my accident how trauma physically stores itself in our bodies—not just as memories in the mind but as actual physiological patterns held within our tissues and nervous system. I learned only recently that treating resilience as a skill to build is the very nature of how we recover from trauma or general difficulty, helped along by speaking with a friend a few years ago who was working through a PTSD diagnosis and told me about their stages of recovery.
When trauma occurs, we activate our body's stress response and are flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. In normal circumstances, this system activates to help us respond to danger and then returns to baseline. But with trauma, especially repeated trauma, the system can remain partially activated, keeping our body in a state of hypervigilance or, alternatively, shut down. Dealing with something like this is so complex that there’s no universally correct answer, but the themes of recovery I noticed when learning more included:
Intellectualisation and connecting with your current state during stress
Being and staying in your body without trying to escape
Journaling
Positive interactions with people
Supporting the nervous system with long-term management (e.g. meditation, breathing exercises, or gaining distance from a trigger or source of abuse)
And many more, less mentioned interventions, such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy for intense emotions, somatic therapy, surrounding yourself with healthy and constructive relationships whereby negative coping mechanisms aren’t judged, connecting the dots, and training resilience.
The body literally holds on to trauma. Not metaphorically, but biologically. Trauma researcher Dr Bessel van der Kolk describes it in his book, "The Body Keeps the Score." Unprocessed traumatic experiences become stored as fragmented sensory and emotional states rather than coherent memories. This explains why trauma can resurface as physical sensations: the tightness I used to feel in my chest when approaching a junction. However, resilience is a cornerstone of healing that I once saw as inherent. The belief grew stronger when I made friends with people who seemed to shrug off anything. But it’s not true.
Resilience isn’t innate, like eye colour or height. Nor predetermined. This thinking is part of the fixed mindset theory that creates an invisible divide between “resilient people” who bounce back and “everyone else” who struggles indefinitely. I caught myself reinforcing this belief not long ago when observing others who I knew were going through a lot, thinking, “I could never smile away and manage stress like they are right now.”
But the matter of fact is I can. I did. And we all can. Otherwise, healing would be impossible for most people. Research from Dr Sherry Hamby further painted that differing picture. Scientists recognise that trauma operates on a principle of dosage—each exposure adds to the cumulative impact, partly due to the biological effects of chronic stress. This concept may help you understand trauma’s burden and our capacity to overcome it.
Dr Hamby expressed that almost everyone is, or has been, exposed to traumatic events (the pandemic, for one), meaning resilience is far more common than once believed. It made the idea of a widespread capacity for recovery quite misunderstood, even in the scientific literature.
Resilience isn’t a single trait but rather a sum of all resources. Think about it as a portfolio spanning your meaning-making, regulatory, and interpersonal domains. Like trauma, these strengths may also operate on a dosage principle, countering the harm of difficult experiences.
When faced with rejection or disappointment, there’s a critical moment where you can curve upwards or downwards; either you spiral into catastrophising, or you manage to draw from your resources—seeking a supportive conversation, practising mindfulness, or taking yourself away from a toxic environment to focus on healthy physical movement. When I was younger, it would be boxing or cycling because it created a healthy space between the feeling and my response.
Trauma makes the brain’s alarm system (amygdala) hyperactive while the prefrontal cortex becomes less effective—reducing our ability to reason and regulate. After trauma, many people get stuck in sympathetic dominance and stay constantly on alert. Others swing into parasympathetic freeze responses, experiencing numbness or dissociation. This dysregulation explains why trauma survivors often struggle with seemingly unrelated physical issues like chronic pain, digestive problems, or autoimmune conditions. Deliberately building our resilience portfolio can help this.
I think back to being in the hospital when my grandma was told she had cancer. Shock, anger, and fear on everyone’s faces. Except hers. I also look at some of my colleagues who are dealing with their family members having cancer and notice how they show strength in regulating stress at work. While some people remain stuck, others engage with their strengths to create doses of resilience that counter the trauma dosage.
It’s not that people are born resilient; we can, through various life experiences, develop a diverse portfolio of resources to rely on. We can experience the full weight of emotions without being defined by them. The tools are accessible because they’re everyday practices. Committing to meaningful causes or culture, or spending time in nature (“forest bathing”). These have been dampened somewhat due to the popularisation and craze of self-care, but it’s still true that they minimise trauma’s aftereffects. I was lucky to go to Jamaica soon after my big accident, and the timing was perfect; to be in nature with reliable sunlight felt like a total reset before coming back to build from the trauma. This understanding of it as ‘physically embodied’ helped to explain why purely cognitive approaches to recovery often fall short—you can intellectually know you're safe while your body continues to react as if you're in danger. This is why somatic (body-centred) approaches to trauma recovery grew in support.
Looking back at my recovery, the physical activities that helped me most—cycling (eventually), boxing, swimming—weren't just distractions. They were recalibrating my nervous system. They helped discharge the trapped energy of trauma that remained stored in my body. Each ride, especially past that same junction, wasn't just psychological exposure therapy—it was my body unlearning its trauma response.
Overcoming trauma doesn’t mean minimising genuine suffering or saying it’s a simple matter of “trying harder”. Some traumas involve heavy doses, and many factors influence our ability to rebuild, such as the supportive relationships we have to lean on. But whatever the circumstances, there is always a space to develop strengths that expand our capacity not only to cope but to thrive away from trauma. As Dr Hamby said, it’s not the most important thing about you because the most important thing is what happened next. Each positive, regulating experience creates a biological counter to trauma's physiological imprint. Over time, these experiences don't just help us to cope better—they transform our bodies from dysregulation back toward balance.