How Deep Is the Wound? Why I Wrote This Book

n our current conversations around mental health, the word trauma is everywhere. It has become the default explanation for suffering, distress, and emotional difficulty. Almost everyone, in one way or another, is now encouraged to see themselves as damaged by trauma.

As a trauma therapist, I find this concerning.

Often, when I question colleagues about whether some of their clients may be dealing with emotional wounds rather than trauma, I’m met with looks that suggest I’m denying people’s pain. But that is not what I’m doing.

Questioning the depth of a wound is not a denial of pain—pain is real, and it matters enormously. What I’m pointing to is something more precise: not every painful experience is, or becomes, a traumatic wound.

When we collapse all suffering into a single category, we risk creating unnecessary labels, unnecessary fear, and unnecessary confusion about what kind of care is actually needed. We may end up treating scratches as fractures—or scars as open wounds—leaving people feeling more broken than they are.

Knowing how deep a wound goes, and what that depth implies for care, can spare people from being defined solely by their pain. It helps clinicians choose more accurate interventions, and it frees those who suffer from the belief that something inside them is irrevocably damaged.

This concern is what led me to write my new book, How Deep Is the Wound? It is a guide to understanding emotional pain with more nuance, more accuracy, and more compassion—without minimizing suffering or exaggerating its consequences.

Scratch, Fracture, or Scar? A Practical Image

Imagine three scenarios: a small scratch on the skin, a broken bone, and a healed scar.

A scratch stings for a while but quickly closes and fades. A fracture requires realignment, immobilization, and specific care to heal properly. A scar, though, is not a wound at all—it is a reminder, a testimony that something happened and that the body worked hard to repair what was once torn. Scars may itch from time to time, but in most cases they no longer interfere with functioning.

Emotional pain works in much the same way.

Some experiences leave a sting. Some leave a scar—something that reminds us of what we learned and what we survived. And some, when the nervous system is overwhelmed, repeatedly triggered, or left without repair, behave like fractures that went untreated. They demand a different kind of attention and a higher level of care.

Not all suffering requires the same remedy. Measuring the wound’s depth is the first compassionate, necessary, and wise act.

From Adaptive Reaction to Persistent Wound: A Spectrum

Our emotional system is designed to be effective. Emotions help us adapt: they alert us, mobilize resources, assess risk, anticipate consequences, and guide learning. Most of the time, the system processes an event, integrates what was learned, and returns to baseline.

But when those efforts fail—because of repeated exposure, lack of repair, toxic relational contexts, catastrophizing, or biological vulnerability—what remains is not just pain, but a wound: a pattern of sensitivity that alters beliefs, behavior, and expectations. At that point, flexibility is lost. Tolerance narrows. Meaning hardens. The system adopts protective strategies—don’t dare, don’t trust, don’t get close—not because they are healthy, but because they feel safer. We are not only wired to avoid death; we are also wired to avoid pain and the actions that once hurt us—betrayal, rejection, criticism, and loss.

People often ask: If our system is meant to help us, why do we become traumatized at all?

Traumatization appears when situations—present or unresolved—are experienced as unmanageable or unsolvable. Survival settings take over. Alarm circuits hijack daily life. Memory becomes intrusive. Identity feels unstable. Relationships are lived under a shadow of mistrust. At that point, the wound is no longer an event—it becomes a strategy. One that once protected, but now creates dysfunction and suffering.

Identifying Types of Wounds

One of the aims of How Deep Is the Wound? is to help readers distinguish among different kinds of emotional injuries and to differentiate wounds from trauma, rather than treating them as interchangeable.

Instead of a single category, I offer a functional classification—based on what the wound does to a person’s life.

For example, heartbreak, betrayal, or the slow drip of criticism often injure us not through one violent moment, but through the quiet gap between what we needed and what we received. These relational wounds don’t always activate classic survival alarms. Instead, they reshape emotional scripts, self-worth, and the internal narratives we use to remain “acceptable.”

Seen this way, insecurity becomes less a flaw and more a protective architecture—an ego acting as a house manager, patching leaks so the system can keep functioning. Learning to name those habits, to notice a brief “ego alert,” and to cultivate an observing self becomes the beginning of repair.

Other wounds—often rooted in neglect or chronic invisibility—produce a different injury altogether. These are slow-bleeding wounds that flatten feeling into numbness or turn ordinary needs into urgency. When reaching for connection repeatedly meets absence, the psyche may learn scarcity as its baseline. Later, desire can feel dangerous, and reassurance becomes a substitute for safety.

Naming these distinctions matters. A wound that dulls requires different care than a wound that clings. Repair may involve retuning expectations, restoring mental space, and engaging in small relational experiments that teach the nervous system it is safe to feel, to want, and to ask.

Each wound exists on a spectrum—from superficial to deep. Context, timing, resources, and meaning shape that depth.

Resolution, Not “Cure”

Healing is not about forgetting. It is about relocating memory so it informs rather than governs.

That is why I speak of resolution rather than cure. Resolution means organize what was left unfinished, reducing the wound’s control over daily life, and restoring agency. It does not mean erasing the past. It means integrating it so it no longer dictates identity or behavior.

Once the symptoms stop reproducing, healing follows—much like tending a cut so it can finally stop bleeding and closes.

How Deep Is the Wound? was written to help people ask a better question than “What’s wrong with me?”The better question is: What kind of injury is this—and what kind of care does it actually need?