Beyond the Trauma Echo: Reclaiming Depth, Discernment and Dignity in a World Awash with Wounds

We are living in the age of trauma. From bookshelves to boardrooms, social media to therapy rooms, “trauma” is everywhere. In many ways, this is a long-overdue reckoning with pain that has too often been buried, silenced, or stigmatised. But as the trauma conversation gains momentum, I find myself asking deeper questions:

What happens when trauma becomes not just part of the story, but the whole story?
What do we lose when healing gets reduced to hashtags and symptom checklists?
And what sacred nuance might we reclaim if we listened beyond the trauma echo?

This is not a call to abandon trauma-informed practice, far from it. It is a call to evolve it.

Many critics, including respected clinical psychologist Richard McNally, caution against overextending trauma as an explanation for everything. When we start attributing all distress, dysfunction, or disease to trauma, we risk simplifying the complex web of human experience. Trauma matters, deeply. But it is not the only lens.

In The Voyage®, we honour trauma. And we teach discernment. Because not every wound is a trauma. Not every symptom is a survival strategy. And not every healing journey must revisit the past to move forward.



Some of the most powerful critiques, such as those from Stef Craps and Catrina Brown, remind us that trauma doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The pain of the personal is often rooted in the political: poverty, racism, patriarchy, displacement. To truly be trauma-aware, we must be system-aware.

At The Voyage®, this means teaching more than regulation tools. It means fostering emotional literacy alongside social justice. It means helping people recognise how trauma lives not only in bodies, but in institutions, policies, and generational silences. Healing is sacred work, but so is resistance.

In the age of the “trauma plot” as Parul Sehgal calls it, there is a subtle pressure to perform our pain. Sometimes, the sharing of trauma becomes a currency. But at what cost?

Healing must not be a performance. It must be a reclamation.

The Voyage® offers space to show practitioners how to help others reconnect with their wholeness, the part of them that was never traumatised, only obscured. People are more than what happened to them. Their worth is not in their wounds.

Some, like Stanton Peele, critique popular trauma narratives (including those of Gabor Maté) for leaning too heavily on anecdote over science. While I hold deep respect for Maté’s work, and agree with much of it, we must walk the line between soul and science with care.

At The Voyage®, we do not shy away from intuition, spirituality or story, but we also ground our teachings in neuroscience, attachment theory, and somatic psychology. We bridge evidence and embodiment.

The trauma field is evolving fast. But without dialogue, especially with its critics, it risks becoming an echo chamber. That’s why I welcome the voices that challenge us. Because they remind us to keep asking, keep refining, and keep returning to the deeper question:

Not just what is trauma, but how do we hold it in ways that honour human dignity, depth, and difference?

This is the trauma revolution I stand for.

Not a louder trauma discourse.

But a wiser one.

Let us begin again.

Not from our wounds, but from our wisdom.

Not from our diagnosis, but from our dignity.

Not from our pain alone, but from the possibility that we are already — always — more than what broke us.

Let the revolution begin.