We speak of trauma as a thing that belongs to the past, an incident that happened and is left behind. But the effects of experiencing trauma don’t follow the same timeline.
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in his famous book "The Body Keeps the Score", explores how traumatic experiences shape people's knowledge of their bodies, emotions, memories, and relationships long after the original event has passed. It leaves people in persistent states of alarm, rage, or numbness, and difficulty trusting others.
Recent research on adverse childhood experiences (ACE) traces these effects clearly. A 2025 systemic review examining 26 studies on ACE found greater exposure to childhood adversity was associated with difficulties in adult interpersonal functioning. It affects a person’s communication, conflict management, and the ability to maintain supportive relationships.
So, trauma may not only change how a person remembers what happened to them. It can also influence what they come to expect from themselves and others around them. To understand what happens between that original experience and the relationships a person builds later, I spoke to Dr Mahima Sahi, a clinical psychologist based in Chandigarh.
She has a decade of experience in trauma-informed care, counselling, and relational complexity. As Clinical Director at eMbrace, a health and developmental care platform in Delhi, she oversees supervision systems, clinical frameworks, and therapist training for children, adolescents, adults, and families. She was also the Co-Founder of heyy, a mental healthcare app in Singapore.
A major part of her work involves holding heavy emotions, which makes her days feel much longer than usual. But strong coffee and whey protein fuel her body while morning meditation powers her mind. Read on for insights on trauma and how to hold grace for those who’ve been through life-altering events.
This is Part I of a two-part series.
Dr. Mahima, why did you choose the field of trauma care?
My relationship with trauma is both professional and deeply personal.
For years, I was a high-functioning adult carrying everyone else’s emotions. I was dependable, anticipating people’s needs and holding things together. I believed this was who I was until compassion fatigue happened. It made me pause and realize that the things I was calling my personality were actually patterns I adapted to feel safe, useful, and connected.
I learnt that setting boundaries, tolerating disappointing people, and staying connected to myself was not quick or particularly tidy. Years of my own work, clinical practice, and training helped me to begin choosing differently. This is one of the reasons I was drawn to trauma and relationships.
How did it influence your growth and practice in the field?
My work is at the intersection of clinical depth and real-world impact. As Co-Founder and Chief Psychologist at heyy, I worked on a narrative and solution-focused first-aid model supporting approximately 8,000 corporate employees in India, Singapore, and Indonesia.
As Clinical Director at eMbrace, I am rooted in clinical practice, including trauma-informed and relational care. Underneath both of those roles is a decade of hands-on clinical work across individual therapy, couples work, supervision, and groups.
I have also had the privilege of working with clients across more than 11 countries and contributing to over 20 peer-reviewed publications. More than these qualifications, what matters to me is understanding the person underneath a pattern.
I am interested in the question: What did this person have to learn to survive? What we casually judge as anxiety, hyper-independence, people-pleasing, over-functioning, perfectionism, or difficulty trusting others were once incredibly intelligent adaptations to an environment that did not feel safe.
My work is all about helping people understand such patterns underneath their lives, rebuild a sense of safety and self-trust, and eventually have more choice in how they live.
Trauma work is not about making someone unaffected by their past but instead helping them reach a place where the past no longer makes their future decisions.
I am an optimist when it comes to interpreting media that covers heavier topics and explains them realistically. Several media, podcasts, and short films are trying to explain complex concepts and stir conversations on being empathetic in an age where everyone’s so quick to judge, cancel, or dismiss.
But I rationally agree that the handling of the word “trauma” itself has become frivolous. When we use the same word for varying experiences like “that outfit is traumatizing,” “I was traumatized by that date,” “that movie traumatized me,” or even using “trauma” as shorthand for an awkward, embarrassing, or unpleasant experience, we lose the specificity and depth the word carries. People can describe their experiences in whatever is meaningful to them, but it shouldn’t minimize feelings of those who are living with the aftermath of actual trauma.
We need to talk with awareness, greater precision, curiosity, and care. Trauma shouldn’t become a catchphrase for anything that makes us uncomfortable.
So then how would you highlight the distinction between what trauma is and what isn’t?
I’d say trauma is a scar that has been left open and raw, without the opportunity to heal or be bandaged, until the wound becomes so deep that it begins to affect the whole of you. It is something that overwhelms or exceeds an individual’s capacity to cope at that point in their life. It leaves a long-lasting impact on how they recognise themselves, their sense of safety, and their connections with others.
It is also important to recognize agency and helplessness. Trauma is not the event itself; it is also what happens afterwards because every individual can experience the same thing differently.
To give you an example, a child may survive a frightening event, but is brought back into safety by their caregivers; they are allowed to express fear and regain control. But another child who experiences the same event in isolation, with no safety, will process it differently. When someone feels trapped, helpless, unable to escape, protect themselves, or make sense of what is happening, it becomes deeply traumatic.
So we cannot reduce it to a checklist of events. Trauma is not simply a bad day at college, an embarrassing or awkward moment, or another unpleasant experience. Those things can absolutely hurt us and leave bad memories, but distress alone does not necessarily mean trauma.
What helps a person process and integrate what happened rather than carrying it ahead?
A traumatic event can keep getting re-experienced emotionally, physically, or relationally, as though the person is caught in a loop or a pattern they cannot break away from. They may know intellectually that the event is over, but some part of them continues to respond as though it’s still happening. This brings a whole range of emotions like fear, shame, abandonment, disgust, anger, rage, helplessness, and exhaustion.
The ability to talk about what happened and enough opportunities to gradually reclaim their sense of agency are powerful protective factors in how the incident is processed instead of taking it ahead.
When someone experiences trauma, what changes first: their sense of safety, their sense of self, or their understanding of other people?
Trauma doesn’t follow a particular order. But in many instances, a person's sense of safety gets disrupted first. And safety is much more than knowing that you are physically safe. It is the sense that I can be myself here. I can make a mistake and still be loved. I can say no and still be safe. I can have a need without being punished for having it.
But if saying no becomes judgment, making mistakes means punishment, or dressing a certain way means shame, then the world around stops feeling like a place where you can simply exist. The sense of safety diminishes, and people adapt from being independent to becoming hyper-independent.
It inevitably affects the other two things in the question: how we see ourselves and how we see other people. If I repeatedly learn that my needs are dangerous, I may eventually conclude that there is something wrong with having needs. If I learn people leave when I disappoint them, I may begin to believe that all relationships are conditional. And, if closeness comes with the loss of autonomy, I may begin to experience intimacy itself as threatening.
So, I don't think trauma necessarily moves neatly from safety → self → others. These systems are deeply interconnected.
No safety-net perception would also mean that people learn to not trust others. It would affect their relationships further…
Not just others, trauma impacts trust in both self and others. And when you stop trusting yourself, it becomes much harder to recognize whom to trust outside of yourself. This impacts interpersonal relationships in many ways: a person may develop relationships where stating a need comes with fear or asking for something feels shameful. They struggle with decision-making or trusting their own judgment.
They begin to feel as though they don't have a brain of their own. “Tell me what to do. You know better. Maybe I'm getting it wrong again.” And I think this is where trauma impacts the way we attach. Attachment is our internal GPS for relationships; it shapes what we attract, tolerate, or what feels normal in love.
And an important thing to note here is our idea of “normal” is often built around what is familiar, not necessarily what is safe.
So, if unpredictability, emotional unavailability, criticism, or having to earn someone's affection become familiar, a relationship with some of those dynamics doesn't immediately register as alarming. It may simply feel normal. While a relationship that is actually safe feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or strangely “wrong” because the person's internal GPS has learnt a different map.
How do we then navigate this?
We change the questions and perceptions when dealing with relationship conflicts post-trauma. Instead of asking, “Why do you keep choosing these relationships?” the more impactful question is, “What does this relationship feel familiar to you about?”
Our work is not simply teaching someone to identify a “good” or “bad” partner. It is helping them rebuild enough trust in themselves to recognize safety, tolerate it, ask for what they need, and eventually believe that they are allowed to have relationships that feel safe without having to earn them.
In the next part, we talk about healing and recovery via trauma care and counselling.
