A recent episode of Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett featured Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist, making an argument about trauma that reached a very large audience and that I think deserves a careful, direct response.
Barrett described a girl named Maria, a young adolescent who had been physically abused by her stepfather. Despite the abuse, Maria showed no signs of trauma - she was sleeping well, performing well at school, maintaining friendships. Barrett's argument was that trauma is not an objective event in the world but a property of the relationship between past experience and present meaning-making. Maria interpreted what her stepfather did as men simply being that way - not as something about her, not as abuse in the psychological sense. And so, Barrett argued, it did not become traumatic for her.
Then Maria watched Oprah. She heard other women describe experiences of physical abuse from male figures and observed them experiencing trauma symptoms. She recognised the similarity to her own situation and began making different meaning of what had happened. After that, her sleep deteriorated, her grades dropped, she became socially withdrawn.
Barrett's conclusion was that the meaning Maria made - not the abuse itself - was the determining variable. The implication being that if you interpret what happened to you in a way that doesn't damage you, the harm is essentially neutralised.
I found this argument genuinely concerning. Not because it contains nothing true - it does - but because of what it leaves out, and what that omission costs the people who receive it.
What Meaning-Making Actually Contributes to Trauma Recovery
Barrett's argument draws on a real and well-supported body of research. Trauma is not purely objective. Two people can experience the same event and be affected very differently, depending on prior experience, relational context, nervous system history, and yes - the meaning they make of what happened.
Research on post-traumatic growth, associated particularly with the work of Tedeschi and Calhoun, consistently demonstrates that meaning-making is a genuine factor in recovery. The capacity to locate significance in what was survived, to shift one's relationship to painful experience, is associated with better long-term psychological outcomes. Viktor Frankl's clinical and philosophical work makes a similar argument about meaning as a fundamental organising force in human psychological life.
So the claim that interpretation matters is not wrong. It is supported by evidence.
Where I part from Barrett is in the suggestion that meaning is the primary - or sufficient - determinant of trauma's impact.
What Meaning-Making Cannot Reach
Barrett herself, in the same episode, noted that Maria developed a belief that men are just assholes. She framed this almost as a functional adaptation - a way of making sense of the experience that allowed Maria to keep functioning.
But consider what that belief actually means for Maria's life. Every relationship with a man - intimate, professional, familial - will be shaped by that generalised expectation of threat or contempt. The capacity to distinguish who is safe from who is not, to trust selectively and appropriately, to experience genuine intimacy with a male partner - all of this is compromised by a belief encoded through repeated experience of harm. This is not a minor downstream consequence. It is a significant relational and neurobiological impact that will operate largely below the level of conscious meaning-making.
Trauma research over the past three decades has consistently demonstrated that traumatic experience is stored not only in explicit memory and conscious narrative but in the body, the nervous system, and implicit memory systems that operate below awareness. Bessel van der Kolk's work on somatic encoding, Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory, and Peter Levine's research on incomplete defensive responses all point in the same direction: the nervous system encodes what the mind has learned to explain away or normalise.
The prefrontal cortex generates interpretation and meaning. The amygdala, the hippocampus, and the autonomic nervous system encode experience through pathways that narrative does not automatically access or resolve. A startle response to a raised voice is not a cognitive interpretation. Chronic hypervigilance is not a meaning someone is making. A generalised belief that men are dangerous is not simply a thought - it is an expectation shaped by the body's implicit memory of repeated threat, and it will activate automatically in contexts that carry even faint resemblance to the original environment.
The Clients Who Never Called It Trauma
Most of my clients do not arrive describing trauma. Their meaning-making around what happened to them in childhood is: this was just my family, this was normal, it wasn't that bad. They do not use the word trauma. They have not framed their experiences as abusive or significantly harmful.
And they simultaneously carry relational patterns that repeat across every close relationship. Very low self-esteem that does not respond to evidence of their competence or worth. Corrosive core beliefs about themselves that feel like facts. Coping strategies - overworking, substance use, self-erasure, dissociation - that cause ongoing harm. Sleep difficulties, chronic anxiety, depression, health problems, career difficulties.
The meaning they made was accommodation. The impact ran underneath it, entirely intact.
This is also what Selma Fraiberg described in her influential paper "Ghosts in the Nursery" - parents with unprocessed trauma who had assigned no particular significance to their early experiences nonetheless transmitted those relational patterns to their children through subtle, automatic responses. The absence of conscious meaning did not prevent the transmission. The body and the nervous system carried what the mind had not processed.
The Problem with What Happened to Maria on Oprah
Barrett uses what happened to Maria after watching Oprah as evidence for her argument: Maria made new meaning, and symptoms emerged. Therefore meaning caused the trauma response.
But there is another way to read this. Maria had been carrying a nervous system shaped by repeated physical harm. Her body had encoded that experience regardless of the meaning she had consciously assigned to it. What watching Oprah may have done is not create a trauma where none existed - it may have provided a frame that finally allowed what was already there to surface. The symptoms that emerged after were not created by meaning. They were permitted by it.
This distinction matters considerably. If symptoms emerge when someone names their experience as harmful, that does not mean the naming caused the harm. It may mean the naming finally made the existing harm visible - and that visibility, without adequate support, was destabilising.
Why This Argument Causes Harm at Scale
Meaning-making is most available and most effective as a later stage of trauma processing - after the nervous system has achieved enough regulation that integration becomes genuinely possible. Research on post-traumatic growth consistently identifies this reframing and meaning-construction as something that tends to emerge after the acute phases of processing, not as a shortcut to them or a replacement for them.
When the argument that trauma is primarily about interpretation reaches a very large audience through a figure carrying institutional authority, the cost is real and specific. It reaches people who are already struggling - who carry significant symptoms, relational difficulties, and chronic distress - and offers them an implicit conclusion: if you are still suffering, it is because of the meaning you are making. Not because of the impact you are carrying. Not because of what happened to your nervous system before you had language or agency or choice.
That conclusion adds shame to an already heavy load. And shame, as research on affect regulation consistently shows, is one of the most significant barriers to the therapeutic processing that genuine recovery requires.
What the Fuller Picture Looks Like
A person who appears to be functioning is not necessarily unaffected. They may be very well adapted. Functioning and integration are not the same thing. Adaptation and healing are not the same thing.
Trauma lives in the nervous system, in relational patterns, in the automatic responses that operate long before conscious interpretation arrives. Meaning-making is one genuine part of a complex process - and an important one. But it is not the whole of what trauma leaves behind, and it is not the whole of what recovery requires.
The question worth sitting with is not whether interpretation matters. It does. It is whether we are willing to take seriously everything that interpretation alone cannot touch - and whether the people who reach the largest audiences are willing to hold the full complexity of what trauma actually does to a human life.