Spend ten minutes on social media and you’d think trauma therapy is a rare, specialist service that only a select few therapists can offer. The implication is clear: most therapy isn’t “trauma-informed,” so you need to shop for the right label.
This is marketing, not clinical reality. If you are in depth psychotherapy, psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, relational, or any integrative work with substance, you are already in trauma therapy. It’s not a niche. It’s the core of the work.
The social media framing doesn’t just mislead the public, it obscures what trauma actually is and how psychotherapy addresses it.
Trauma is a state of overwhelm
Trauma is not just an event. It is an internal state of overwhelm, which is to say the point at which an experience exceeds your capacity to process it. The psyche cannot integrate what has happened, leaving it lodged, often in the body, raw and unresolved.
This can happen in response to the obvious horrors: abuse, violence, catastrophic loss. But it can just as easily stem from the chronic and subtle: persistent neglect, emotional absence, shaming. Trauma is not defined by the size of the event but by the inability to process it.
The antidote: feeling, not just knowing
If trauma happens when experience cannot be processed, its antidote is not intellectual insight alone. It is feeling fully, safely, and in a way that no longer tips you back into overwhelm.
Good psychotherapy is where this happens. In the safety of the therapeutic relationship, the unprocessed emerges, sometimes as memory, but often as emotion, bodily sensation, or relational pattern playing out in the here-and-now. This is where the work is: making space for feelings to be experienced and integrated. That is how the trauma stops dictating our lives.
When “trauma” loses its meaning
The term trauma has become so common it risks meaning almost nothing. Everything from a bad date to a slow coffee order is now labelled “traumatic.” In one sense, this reflects a cultural shift towards acknowledging psychological injury. But in flattening the term, we lose the ability to distinguish between distress, difficulty, and the kind of psychic injury that overwhelms our capacity to process.
When every wound is trauma, depth and nuance disappear and “trauma therapy” becomes a brand rather than a discipline.
The red herring of “trauma therapy”
All competent depth therapists are trained to work with trauma. It is not an add-on. It is the fabric of the work. Whether the trauma is obvious or hidden in the patterns of everyday relationships, the task is the same: to create a space where what was once unbearable can be felt and integrated.
To suggest otherwise by implying that “trauma therapy” exists apart from psychotherapy, is a red herring. It creates unnecessary hierarchies and false distinctions, and plays into a consumer model of therapy that mistakes labels for depth.
Depth therapy has always been trauma therapy. Long before hashtags, before influencers, before “trauma-informed” was a marketing term, psychotherapy has been about one thing: helping a person bear what they could not bear before. That is the work.
Mark Vahrmeyer is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist working in private practice in Hove and Lewes, East Sussex. He is trained in relational psychotherapy and uses an integrative approach of psychodynamic, attachment and body psychotherapy to facilitate change with clients.
Further reading by Mark Vahrmeyer –
How AI tools between therapy sessions are undermining the therapeutic relationship
Why there is no such thing as a patient
Masochism and the impossibility of desire
Dissociative identity disorder: a rare trauma response, not a social trend
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