The Shape of Trauma, Part I: Curvature
Reframing trauma as the bending of space, time, and self
Trauma isn’t a thing inside you—not a wound you carry or a force that struck once and left its mark.
Trauma is curvature: the bending of lived space and time around powerlessness.
This reframe isn’t just semantic. If trauma is curvature rather than injury, then healing isn’t about fixing what’s broken inside you. It’s about learning to navigate terrain that’s fundamentally bent. That changes everything—how we understand our own responses, what we ask of therapy, what we expect from recovery.
This is the first of a three-part series exploring that idea. This piece introduces the metaphor and why it matters. The second will examine how therapies both help and fail when they treat trauma as damage. The third will sketch what trauma-aware practice might look like if we approached it as navigation rather than repair.
As always, I’m sharing this perspective through the lens of my own experience with disability, neurodivergence, and marginalization. My hope is that whether you’re living with trauma, supporting someone who is, or working in the field, something here clarifies, affirms, or opens new ways of seeing.
The details matter. Let’s get into them.
The Metaphor
We’ve been taught to see trauma in much the same way children are first taught to see gravity. Newton described gravity as a force—bodies pulling on each other, impacts causing motion, apples falling from trees. It’s a neat, digestible picture, and it works well enough at first. But it is only the beginning of the story.
Einstein showed us that gravity isn’t a force at all but curvature: matter shaping spacetime itself. The apple doesn’t fall because the tree tugs it downward, but because spacetime itself curves around the Earth, guiding the apple along the straightest possible path through that curvature. What we see as a fall is really motion along a bent stage; what looks like impact is actually trajectory.
Trauma is often treated in the same way. We’re taught to see it as a blow, an external force that leaves damage behind. That picture is simple enough to codify into manuals and therapies: here is the event, here is the scar, here is the treatment. But that frame collapses complexity. It makes trauma into an object—something you can point to, isolate, or patch up—when in reality it is a distortion of the very ground you stand on.
To say trauma is curvature is to say it is not a force and not a deficit. It is the shape of experiential space and time itself. Not a thing you carry or a wound lodged within, but the bending of lived reality around powerlessness. Sometimes the bend is sharp, collapsing whole moments into wells you can’t climb out of. Sometimes it is diffuse, tilting every choice, every interaction, so that life itself feels like walking uphill.
And of course, I’m not saying trauma is gravity. This is metaphor—metaphor with a purpose. Trauma is complicated, multifaceted, and abstract, a word we use to capture the scope and impact of a wide range of painful experiences. The point of naming it at all is to give us a frame we can actually work with, something that makes the overwhelming at least a little more navigable.
All I’m really doing here is offering a framework that works for me—one that I believe, and hope I’m showing, can also be broadly applicable, relatable, and useful. The metaphor isn’t meant to pin trauma down or flatten it into a single truth. It’s meant to open a way of seeing that might resonate, a map you can pick up if it helps, and set aside if it doesn’t.
The Bending Principle
Powerlessness is what bends the field. It’s the principle behind the curve.
By powerlessness I don’t mean only helplessness, but the interruption of agency’s natural path—the ways our ability to act, to choose, to move forward gets disrupted. Sometimes that interruption is blunt: choices stripped away entirely. Sometimes it comes as forced choices, where every option carries harm. Sometimes it takes the form of betrayal, when someone you trust uses that trust against you. And sometimes it arrives slowly, in the background, through the structural constraints of poverty, racism, ableism—conditions that make every step heavier than it should be.
You see this in the child who cannot escape abuse. In the partner trapped in a violent relationship where leaving might be even more dangerous. In the community that learns every institution around them is rigged against their survival. In the disabled person facing a world designed to exclude them. These aren’t just moments of pain. They are distortions of the ground beneath a person’s life, reshaping what’s possible and what isn’t.
Some of these distortions come suddenly. A car crash, an assault, a betrayal—events that collapse time into a single point you can’t get away from. Others accumulate gradually, bending life more diffusely: the constant pressure of discrimination, the weight of being silenced, the chronic grind of poverty or illness. For many people it’s both: the sudden collapse layered on top of an already tilted landscape.
Even when action is technically possible, if every available route leads to loss—if survival requires collaboration with violence, complicity with oppression, or abandonment of your own truth—the field still bends. The mark of trauma isn’t just what happened. It’s the experience of agency being twisted into shapes it was never meant to take, the lived reality of being forced into impossibility.
Weight and Misreading
Misreading is itself a form of power—interpretive power—that bends the field by replacing your map with someone else’s. Diagnostic systems, cultural norms, and everyday assumptions often mistake difference for damage, compounding the distortions already present.
Survivors of domestic violence are told they are broken. Communities targeted by racism, xenophobia, or homophobia are told they are exaggerating or overreacting. Disabled and neurodivergent people are told their differences must be the result of trauma—or deficit—whether they are or not.
My own differences in communication have often been interpreted this way: my flat affect, my discomfort with greetings and eye contact, my struggles with normative verbal flow. These were read as symptoms rather than expressions of who I am. The pressure to correct those traits left me masking heavily, scripting interactions, and staying hyper-vigilant in every social space. Over time, that vigilance hardened into anxiety, burnout, and a distorted sense of connection—relationships filtered through performance, identity shaped through misinterpretation. Untangling that has taken years, and in many ways it’s still ongoing.
This is what misreading does: it deepens the curvature. The weight of trauma is one thing. The weight of being read only through trauma—even where it isn’t there—is another. It narrows the terrain and steals interpretive agency.
And that matters for what comes next: not everyone carries the same bends, and the way care responds can either reinforce the distortion or help return the map to the person who lives in it.
Uneven Terrain
Misreadings, events, structures—they accumulate in different ways. What they share is that none of us moves through flat space. To be human at all—to be finite, interdependent, vulnerable—is to live in a world shaped by constraint and curvature. But trauma, understood as the significant bending of experience through powerlessness, is not equally distributed.
Some landscapes tilt only slightly, the minor warps of ordinary disappointment, manageable loss, the friction of growing up. Others are steep, sudden drops where violence or betrayal creates wells that pull everything toward them. Still others collapse under the weight of systemic oppression, compressing whole regions of experience so that no level ground is available.
To speak of people as either traumatized or untraumatized misses the complexity. It casts some as damaged and others as untouched, when the reality is more layered: everyone moves through curved space, but not all curvature is trauma, and not all bends are equal.
Trauma is not who we are. It is not identity. It is sustained or acute curvature of experiential space-time produced by powerlessness, such that perception, memory, and action all bend around it. Distinct from the person, distinct from life itself. Real and unevenly borne, but never the sum of a self.
Measurement
We encounter curvature only through its measurements. Flashbacks collapse the line between past and present. Avoidance shrinks the map of what feels possible. The body clenches against blows that have not yet come. These are not trauma itself, but indicators of its shape—though over time, indicators can solidify into new bends, as when years of bracing change posture, habit, or expectation.
A flashback is not a false signal but the lived experience of bent time. Hypervigilance is not trapped energy but the felt sense of curved space. Avoidance is not weakness but the narrowing of available routes across warped terrain. Each is real. Each is the body and mind navigating a tilted landscape.
The mistake is to treat symptoms as if they were the trauma itself, rather than the way trauma is measured and lived. What we call symptoms are the instruments by which the curve becomes visible: flashbacks as bent time, avoidance as constricted pathways, hypervigilance as bracing against the slope.
They are real experiences, but they are not the field itself. Trauma isn’t the flashback, the vigilance, or the avoidance. It is the bent terrain beneath them—the curvature of lived space and time around powerlessness.
But when therapies mistake the measurement for the field, they aim at the wrong target. ∞
I’m looking forward to parts 2 & 3. The section on measurement really hit home. 💜