It Wasn't What Happened. It Was What Didn't.

You weren't hit. You weren't neglected in any way that would show up in a report. You had a roof, meals, parents who showed up to your games. If someone asked about your childhood, you'd say it was fine. You might even mean it.

But something still doesn't add up. You're competent, responsible, often the one others lean on. And underneath all of that, there's a tension you can't quite name. A feeling of bracing. A sense that you're performing your life more than living it.

You've probably never used the word "trauma" to describe your childhood. That word belongs to people who went through something terrible. What happened to you was just normal. Wasn't it?

The quiet injuries

Developmental trauma doesn't require a catastrophic event. It can happen in the absence of what was needed rather than the presence of something harmful.

A child who was told to go to her room until she could pull herself together. A boy who threw things when he was overwhelmed and was met with silence. Not cruelty, necessarily. Just no one coming toward the distress. No one helping to make sense of the big feelings. The child, left alone in their pain, learns to manage it alone.

Over years, these moments accumulate. Not as memories you can point to, but as a felt sense that your emotions are too much, that needing comfort is a burden, that the safest option is to handle things yourself. The nervous system encodes this long before language can capture it. By the time you're an adult, it doesn't feel like a wound. It feels like who you are.

Why it doesn't look like trauma

Most people picture trauma as a single overwhelming event: an accident, an assault, a disaster. Developmental trauma is different. Sometimes it's what happened. Often it's the accumulation of what didn't happen, repeated thousands of times across the years when your brain and nervous system were still forming.

No one moment was dramatic enough to count. But the pattern was consistent. Your feelings weren't met with curiosity. Your distress wasn't soothed. You learned, implicitly, that certain parts of your experience were unwelcome.

This is why so many capable adults dismiss their own histories. They compare their childhood to something worse and conclude they have no right to struggle. They've read enough to know their parents did their best. They understand the context, the pressures, the generational patterns.

And there's another layer of dismissal, one that's generational. If you grew up in the '70s or '80s, you may have already filed your childhood under "that's just how it was." Mothers smoked through pregnancy and nobody blinked. There were no seatbelts. Kids roamed the neighborhood until well after dark and nobody called it neglect. You might have been slapped and told to stop crying, and so was everyone else you knew. Some people will say this out loud, almost proudly something like: "I was a latchkey kid and it was probably for the best because my dad was a nightmare and my mom was checked out." There's a dark humor to it that serves a purpose. If everyone had it rough, then yours doesn't count.

But "everyone had it rough" doesn't mean nobody was affected. It means an entire generation learned to minimize what happened to them, and they passed that minimization down alongside everything else. The fact that it was normal doesn't mean it was without cost. Your nervous system wasn't grading on a curve.

And it's worth knowing: the impulse to minimize your own experience isn't just a cultural habit. It's one of the hallmarks of complex trauma itself. The dismissal is part of the pattern, not proof that the pattern doesn't exist.

Understanding all of this can coexist with the body still carrying what it learned.

What the body learned

The nervous system doesn't store developmental trauma as a narrative. It stores it as a set of automatic responses: how quickly you brace when someone raises their voice, how easily you go numb during conflict, how hard it is to ask for help even when you're drowning.

You might notice a persistent tightness across your chest that no amount of stretching resolves. A jaw that clenches in your sleep. A baseline level of vigilance that you've mistaken for conscientiousness. These aren't personality traits. They're the body's ongoing response to an environment that required you to stay alert and manage yourself long before you were equipped to.

The body keeps a record the mind has learned to minimize.

The gap between knowing and feeling

If you've been in therapy before, you may have already traced your patterns back to childhood. You can explain the dynamics with clarity. You know your mother was anxious, your father was emotionally absent, your family didn't do feelings.

And you still flinch when someone gets close. You still over-prepare for everything. You still feel a flash of something, shame or irritation or blankness, when someone asks how you're really doing.

This is the gap between cognitive understanding and nervous system experience. Insight is valuable. It helps you stop blaming yourself. But the patterns that formed before you had words for them don't resolve through words alone. They live in a layer of experience that talk therapy often doesn't reach.

What somatic work offers

Somatic therapy doesn't ask you to relive your childhood or produce memories you don't have. It works with what's present now: the sensations, the tensions, the automatic responses your body still runs.

In practice, this work is precise. We notice what happens in your body when certain topics come up. The held breath when you talk about your mother. The pulling away that happens when connection gets close. The way your system settles when there's space and contracts when there's pressure. We're tracking shifts most people have never been taught to notice, and working with them directly.

Over time, the nervous system learns that what was necessary then is not necessary now. The bracing softens. The vigilance eases. Not because you've figured something out, but because your body has had a different experience in the presence of another person attuned to it. That relational element matters. Developmental trauma happened in relationship. It heals in relationship too.

Recognizing yourself

You don't need a dramatic origin story to benefit from this work. If you've done the intellectual work of understanding your past and still feel its weight in your body, if the word "trauma" has never seemed to apply to you but something in this description is familiar, that recognition is worth paying attention to.

The absence of what you needed was real, even if no one named it at the time.

What if the next step isn't more understanding? What if it's letting your body finally have a different experience?

If this resonates, somatic therapy might be worth exploring.

Margaret Sigel is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) in Santa Monica, California, specializing in somatic therapy for anxiety, trauma, and burnout. She works with adults in person and online throughout California.