The Shape of Trauma, Part II: Proxies
How therapy confuses symptoms for the field
This is Part II of a three-part series. In Part I, we explored trauma as curvature—the bending of lived space around powerlessness. Now we’ll look at how current therapies both help and miss this reality.
CBT: The Newtonian Frame
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy often begins with the thought itself. If you panic when the phone rings, the work is to ask whether that panic is rational. If you avoid a neighborhood where you once felt unsafe, the task is to gather evidence that the danger is past. The focus is on challenging the thought, undoing the avoidance, recalibrating the schema.
This can help, sometimes profoundly. A person caught in catastrophic loops can find clarity. Someone afraid to step into public life again can recover a sense of choice. There is real relief here, and it matters.
But underneath this approach is a Newtonian frame. It sees trauma as an impact, symptoms as vectors of force, healing as counterforce. Safety becomes a proposition to be disproven or proven—“I am unsafe” corrected with evidence of safety. Yet trauma doesn’t simply implant faulty thoughts. It reshapes the terrain itself. Safety isn’t just questioned in the mind; it has been bent out of the world.
When thought is mistaken for terrain, trauma collapses into proxy. For autistic people like me, this collapse is sharper still: our natural ways of speaking or moving are often pathologized as irrational, so divergence itself gets mistaken for trauma, and trauma mistaken for identity. For abuse survivors, the same misstep can feel like gaslighting—the world really was bent, and therapy risks making the bend invisible.
CBT can loosen constriction, yes. But often it braces against gravity with muscle rather than recognizing curvature. Exposure may help us map safer paths again—but if cognition is mistaken for the ground itself, the bends of the world remain unnamed, and systemic curvature gets translated into private pathology.
Somatic Therapies: The Body
For many people, trauma announces itself through the body. Breathing stays shallow. The jaw tightens. Muscles refuse to release, even in sleep. Somatic therapies lean into this reality. The task is to notice what’s frozen, to follow the impulse that never completed, to let the body move again.
This can bring real relief. Someone who has been stuck in fight-or-flight might notice their chest loosen and realize they’re breathing all the way down for the first time in years. Muscles that felt locked start to let go. The body stops feeling like it’s braced for impact and starts to feel a little more like it belongs to them again.
But here too trauma risks being mistaken for the signs it leaves behind. The rigid shoulders, the restless leg, the flinch at sudden sound—these are treated as if they are the trauma. But these are signs of a bend, not the bend itself.
The risk is especially sharp for bodies that move or respond differently to begin with. A stim, a tremor, an atypical posture—any of these may be misread as evidence of unresolved trauma. What is natural difference becomes pathologized as injury.
Somatic work shows something indispensable: trauma is not just in the mind but lived through the body. Yet when tension or posture is mistaken for trauma itself, indicator collapses into proxy. Discharge can ease constriction, but without naming the field that shaped those tensions, the underlying curvature is left unrecognized.
IFS: Curved Orbits
Anyone who has felt torn in two directions at once knows what it’s like to live with parts. One voice wants to hide, another pushes forward, another says, “Don’t trust anyone or you’ll get hurt again.” Internal Family Systems names these voices and gives them roles: exiles carrying unbearable pain, protectors defending against collapse, firefighters distracting or sabotaging. The Self, when restored to leadership, brings coherence.
For many, this model resonates deeply. It reframes inner conflict not as brokenness but as adaptation. And among therapeutic approaches, IFS comes closest to seeing trauma as curvature—recognizing that parts are not pathological in themselves but responding to a reshaped field.
Yet even here trauma risks being reified. It is described as burdens lodged in exiles, to be released through “unburdening.” But trauma is not the burden. Trauma is the field that bent the system into these roles.
For autistic people, this distinction is critical. Our “extreme” parts are often simply the natural orbits of monotropic minds, not distortions caused by trauma. For anyone navigating marginalization, the same risk applies: survival roles mistaken for pathology.
IFS approaches curvature, but by treating trauma as a thing to be removed it slips back into the old frame. Unburdening can re-coordinate parts—but if burdens are treated as the trauma, we miss the field that organized those roles in the first place.
EMDR: Bent Time
For many people, trauma lives as a memory that won’t stay in the past. A smell, a sound, or a sudden image can collapse years in an instant. The body reacts as if the danger never ended. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) meets this directly: through bilateral stimulation, the brain reprocesses the memory, and the nervous system resets. Many describe the change as dramatic—flashbacks fade, time begins to flow again, what once felt unbearable loses its sting.
Part of EMDR’s power is that it recognizes trauma’s distortion of time. Trauma collapses past into present, and EMDR offers re-stitching. But the frame remains mechanistic. Trauma is treated as misfiled data, a stuck object to be shifted from one place to another.
Yet trauma is not a lodged substance. It is the bending of memory’s field itself. Even after EMDR, curvature often remains. A flashback may recede, the body may loosen, a sense of agency may return—but this doesn’t mean the field was never bent.
What changes is how we navigate. Conditions shift, new paths open, and time itself reshapes what it means to walk the same terrain. Sometimes the bend remains but becomes livable. Sometimes the conditions of powerlessness dissolve and the field partially unbends. Curvature can shift, and navigation can improve—neither requires the person to be “fixed.”
For autistic people, nonlinear memory complicates this further. Deep recall and recursive looping are often mistaken for trauma pathology when they are simply difference. For the grieving, collapsed time may reflect mourning rather than trauma—painful in its own right, but not always a bending of agency. EMDR touches the right dimension—time—but still treats trauma as substance. Reconsolidation re-sequences memory, yet the field itself remains unnamed, and its curvature continues to shape tomorrow’s paths.
Narrative Therapy: Story as Terrain
Trauma often shows up in the way we tell our lives—what repeats, what gets left out, what futures seem closed. Narrative therapy meets this directly: it asks us to re-author, to reposition, to externalize trauma’s hold.
This can be liberating, allowing us to discover we are not only characters inside the story but also its authors. New possibilities emerge, identity opens, and futures can finally breathe.
But here again, trauma is reduced to an object. It becomes the plot kernel around which everything orbits. Even when moved to the margins, it’s still treated as a thing—an object in the story rather than the shape of the telling.
That risk is compounded for those of us who have been mis-storied by deficit frameworks, disability models, or cultural stereotypes. Our lives have been bent as much by other people’s stories as by the events themselves. Narrative therapy senses this pressure, yet it still places trauma as something inside the story rather than the curvature shaping how stories themselves unfold.
Re-authoring can reorient identity—but if trauma is treated as plot, we mistake the story for the field that shapes it.
The Pattern
Each of these methodologies achieves something meaningful. Each offers real relief. CBT helps loosen the grip of catastrophic thinking. Somatic therapies reconnect body and breath. IFS reframes inner conflict as adaptation. EMDR restores a sense of time. Narrative therapy reopens identity to new possibilities. These are not small things. They have changed lives, and they continue to.
Still, there is a pattern of fundamental risk that remains largely unaddressed. In different ways, each of these approaches collapses indicators into proxies and treats trauma as a thing. Trauma becomes faulty thought, blocked energy, exiled burden, stuck memory, colonizing story. The symptom is mistaken for the structure, the measurement for the field.
It’s important to acknowledge that many leading trauma practitioners already recognize and appropriately address these potential shortcomings. The best somatic therapists distinguish difference from residue. Skilled IFS guides recognize that not every “part” is born of trauma. EMDR facilitators are largely aware that memory is more than an object to be shifted. Narrative therapists increasingly attend to the cultural forces that mis-shape our stories. The field is moving, slowly but meaningfully, toward greater nuance.
And yet the older gravitational pull remains significant. The language of wounds and burdens, of stuckness and brokenness, still dominates both clinical settings and public imagination. Even when practitioners work carefully, the models themselves can tug us back toward reification—toward seeing trauma as a thing to be fixed rather than a field to be navigated.
What I am offering here is not a replacement but a reframe: a way of holding trauma that may help make sense of why these approaches help but also why they fall short. Trauma may not be a force, substance, or burden. It may be better understood as curvature: the bending of lived space-time around powerlessness.
This isn’t the final word, but a working lens. It is meant to honor what is already being done, to name what still goes unseen, and to keep the conversation open toward practices that both relieve suffering and recognize the shape of the world we move through. ∞