Trauma is often misunderstood, even by those who experience it. While mental health awareness has grown, certain misconceptions persist, preventing individuals from seeking help or fully understanding their struggles. The following are four of the most common and damaging misconceptions I’ve come across recently in regards to trauma. Hopefully by speaking about them, it will help limit the number of people getting stuck in pain instead of moving toward healing.
- Time Heals All Wounds
One of the most widespread myths is that trauma simply fades over time. While time creates needed distance from the experience, unresolved trauma doesn’t just disappear. Instead, it can manifest in unexpected ways such as chronic anxiety, emotional numbness, difficulty in relationships, or even physical symptoms.
Trauma changes how the brain and nervous system function. Without intentional healing, people may find themselves reacting to present situations based on past wounds. True recovery requires active processing through therapy, support groups, or body-based practices that help rewire the nervous system.
- Trauma Is Just a Mental Issue
Many believe trauma is purely psychological, but science tells a different story. The body holds onto trauma, sometimes more than the mind does. Studies show that trauma survivors often experience chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, digestive issues, and heightened stress responses.
This happens because the nervous system gets stuck in survival mode, constantly being on high alert or shutting down in exhaustion. Healing from trauma often includes not just mental processing but also physical approaches like movement, breathwork, or somatic therapy that help regulate the body’s response to past experiences.
- You Have to Talk About It to Heal
While talking about trauma can be helpful for some, it’s not the only, or even the best, path to healing. Many trauma survivors struggle to verbalize their experiences, especially if the trauma occurred early in life or was nonverbal in nature. When experiencing a trauma, the body naturally goes into a survival mode and shuts down the higher reasoning and language structures of the brain. This makes speaking about the experience not just difficult emotionally, but difficult in general as the language to speak about it at times malfunctions completely.
Approaches like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and A.R.T. (Accelerated Resolution Therapy) allows people to process trauma without having to relive it in words. While it may sound like magic, through bi-lateral stimulation (rhythmic, back-and-forth sensory input) and eye-movements, one can rapidly reduce emotional distress and reframe negative associations.
- Children Are the Most Resilient
One of the most harmful misconceptions I’ve heard is that young children are too little to remember or be affected by trauma. I’ve often heard the phrase “kids are resilient, they’ll forget it”. In reality, early experiences shape brain development, attachment patterns, and stress responses in ways that strongly evolve into adulthood.
Even before a child has words, their nervous system is learning what safety and connection feel like. Trauma at an early age such as neglect, exposure to violence, or unstable caregiving, can lead to difficulties with emotional regulation, trust, and self-worth later in life.
Understanding these misconceptions is the first step toward real healing. Trauma is not just a mental wound, nor is it something time alone can fix. It affects the body, sometimes more than the mind, and healing doesn’t always require talking about the past. And perhaps most importantly, early trauma matters, but it doesn’t define a person’s future.
By shifting how we understand trauma, we open the door to more effective healing, not just for individuals but for entire communities.
Max Kirshblum, LCSW, is the clinical director at Collaborative Minds Psychotherapy LLC. He has extensive experience working with adolescents, young adults and family units impacted by trauma. He has been trained in the leading treatment practices for trauma including EMDR and ART. For more information about Max or to schedule an appointment with him, visit
www.collaborativeminds.net/max-kirshblum.
