What Actually Is Trauma?

The word trauma carries a great deal of weight now. It gets used for events that reshape an entire life, and for days that simply went badly, and somewhere in between the meaning has blurred. So what actually is trauma, and how do you know whether you are carrying it?

In a conversation on the Mind Triumph podcast, Behold Retreats co-CEO Sarah Thomas offered a definition that steps around the whole argument about severity. She also drew a line between pain and suffering that becomes difficult to forget once you have heard it.

Her framing is useful because it gives you something concrete to look at in your own life, rather than a checklist of events to measure yourself against. If you have ever quietly wondered whether what happened to you counts, this offers a kinder and more practical way in:

Why Does the Same Event Affect Two People Differently?

The instinct with trauma is to rank it, and to ask whether what happened was bad enough to qualify. Sarah declines that premise entirely.

“I would never tell somebody, ‘Oh, that wasn’t trauma,'” she says, “because each of us has a spectrum at which something feels traumatic.”

Her reasoning is that the same event lands differently in different nervous systems. Something may have happened to her that disrupted her life and left imprints on her mind and on the way she shows up in the world. Someone else could live through that same event and find their mind and heart largely untouched by it.

So What Actually Is Trauma?

Her own definition has nothing to do with severity:

“Trauma is an event that happened that now reshapes how we show up in the world.”

Notice what that reframe does. It moves the measurement off the event itself and onto the footprint the event left behind. The question becomes whether something is still shaping you today.

By that definition, a comparatively small event that quietly rewrote how you trust, how you attach, or how much you are willing to be seen may well be trauma. A genuinely awful event that you have fully processed may no longer be.

What Is the Difference Between Pain and Suffering?

This is the heart of it, and Sarah illustrates it with a dog.

Pain, she says, is something we are all going to have in this lifetime. Life can be painful. Anyone who has had a dog knows life is painful, because their lives are shorter than ours and they will pass away. That is pain, and it arrives whether we invite it or not.

Then comes the turn:

“If in five years I still don’t go get another dog because I’m afraid that they will also die and I’ll have to go through that pain again, that’s suffering. And I’m choosing to do that. I didn’t heal from that first event.”

She uses the dog deliberately, because it is gentle enough to think clearly about. Then she moves it closer to the bone: a partner who cheated.

The betrayal itself is pain. So is everything that follows in its immediate wake, including the question of whether something is wrong with you, the collapse in self esteem, and the worry that if you start dating again you may quietly lower your standards because of a feeling of not being good enough. All of that is a normal response to something that genuinely happened.

If it goes unhealed, though, and five years later you have serious trust issues, you are going through a new partner’s phone, and you neither fully let them love you nor fully love them, that is suffering. The original event stopped being the thing hurting you a long time ago. What hurts you now is the structure you built to make sure it never happened again.

That distinction gives healing a specific job. The work is to end the suffering, while leaving room to still feel something about what happened.

Why Can You Understand Your Trauma and Still Feel It?

Here is where many people get stuck, and it is a distinction Sarah draws sharply.

She can intellectually say that a person hurt her because someone hurt them. She can reason her way through it, follow the chain, and arrive at a conclusion that makes complete sense. For that same understanding to fall into her body, into her heart, and into her spirit is a whole different thing.

Most of us have known exactly why we are the way we are and stayed exactly that way regardless. Insight and change turn out to be different currencies, something we explore further in why you can understand your pain completely and still feel it.

Sarah is careful not to dismiss talk therapy here. She calls it beautiful. Her point is about mechanism rather than merit: the work reaches completion when the realization lands somewhere below the neck.

What Comes After Forgiveness?

Sarah describes a progression she has watched people move through, and the second step is considerably harder than the first.

Forgiveness comes first. She notes that plant medicine has a remarkable way of opening the heart and offering perspectives that make forgiveness possible where reasoning alone had failed.

Then there is a further stage:

“Gratitude is when we can recognize, I am who I am today because of that. I had to go through something really hard, and I don’t wish this on anyone else. But today I am incredible, so I am grateful for that experience. I’m grateful for that human.”

She is honest that this is a vibration that is hard to reach. It is not a box to tick, and a rushed gratitude over something still raw tends to be avoidance wearing a nicer coat. She says she has seen people arrive there many times, and it sits some distance beyond simply no longer being angry.

Can Plant Medicine Heal Trauma on Its Own?

Given the work we do at Behold, you might expect a harder sell here. Sarah goes the other way.

Plant medicine, she says plainly, is one path among several. There is contemplative work. There is breathwork. There is yoga. The right one depends on the person and on the moment they are in.

She is equally direct about the biggest misconception guests arrive with, which is the hope that it might be a silver bullet. The belief that someone could show up, have their identity completely shift, and become the highest version of themselves at all times without doing any further work.

What she describes instead is a compression of time. Where talk therapy may work patiently over years, Ayahuasca can bring the subconscious and conscious mind into contact quickly, which starts a path rather than finishing one.

She is also candid that the experience does not always explain itself. Sometimes you know exactly what shifted, including the event and the timeline, and you leave with a clear new perspective. Sometimes you have no idea what was cleaned or unblocked. There is a mercy in that, she notes, because it means we may not have to relive every experience in order to move forward. Some of it stays ineffable. You cannot put words to it, and you simply feel better.

What Decides Whether Anything Changes After a Retreat?

Sarah draws a contrast between two people, five years on from the same experience.

One mentions in passing that they sat with Ayahuasca once and found it profound. The other says it changed their life, and as she points out, the tell is that they went on to change their life.

Almost everyone has a powerful experience in ceremony. What separates those two outcomes is what happens afterward.

She offers a personal example. In one ceremony she saw that, because of something from her childhood, she had never built an organization with someone she loved, out of a fear that if the relationship ended she would lose everything. The insight took roughly five minutes. The next day she asked herself whether it was true, decided that it was, asked whether she wanted to keep living that way, and began building differently straight away.

Her caution concerns what happens when someone does the opposite. Once something has been brought to consciousness and a person carries on regardless, they are choosing the path of fear over the path of love and growth with full awareness. That, she suggests, is the one scenario where someone may leave feeling worse than when they arrived. This is why integration matters as much as the ceremony itself.

A few things worth carrying with you:

• Trauma is measured by its footprint. If an event still shapes how you show up, it counts, whatever it looks like beside anyone else’s story.
• Pain arrives with life. Suffering is what remains when pain goes unhealed.
• Your present tells you more than your history. The doors you leave closed are the clearest signal.
• Insight alone rarely changes behavior. The realization has to reach the body.
• Integration decides the outcome. The ceremony opens a door, and the months afterward determine whether you walk through it.

Where Do You Go From Here?

If you recognized yourself somewhere in the space between pain and suffering, that recognition is worth taking seriously, whichever path you choose to walk it out on.

Plant medicine is one of several, and it is not right for everyone or right at every moment in a life. If you are curious whether this work may be for you at this point in yours, a Discovery Call is a conversation rather than a sales pitch. We are here when you are ready.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

Thomas, Sarah. Interviewed on Mind Triumph, Episode 34, 2026. Quotations have been lightly edited from the spoken conversation for clarity.

About the author: Sarah Thomas is co-CEO of Behold Retreats and has worked with plant medicine for nearly three decades. She guides guests through preparation, ceremony, and integration at Behold retreats in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Portugal.