The mental health revolution got it wrong. Here is the beginning of a new one.
While awareness of trauma has reached unprecedented levels, therapist Antonieta Contreras argues that our linguistic inflation—calling everything from childhood disappointments to genuine abuse "trauma"—is creating more harm than healing. When the same word describes both a scraped knee and a severed limb, how can we possibly know how to treat either wound?
In this paradigm-shifting book, Contreras exposes the dangerous consequences of trauma overdiagnosis: people with genuine psychological injuries dismiss their need for specialized help, while those dealing with ordinary struggles become convinced they're permanently damaged. Drawing from clinical expertise and her own complete recovery from serious trauma, she offers a revolutionary framework that distinguishes between three distinct types of psychological wounds.
How Deep Is the Wound? isn't just about understanding your pain—it's about reclaiming your power to heal. Through practical exercises, real case studies, and cutting-edge insights, Contreras shows readers how to assess their wounds accurately, choose effective interventions, and move beyond victim narratives toward genuine recovery.
In a world obsessed with trauma, discover why precision—not awareness—is the key to healing.
The mental health revolution got it wrong. Here is the beginning of a new one.
While awareness of trauma has reached unprecedented levels, therapist Antonieta Contreras argues that our linguistic inflation—calling everything from childhood disappointments to genuine abuse "trauma"—is creating more harm than healing. When the same word describes both a scraped knee and a severed limb, how can we possibly know how to treat either wound?
In this paradigm-shifting book, Contreras exposes the dangerous consequences of trauma overdiagnosis: people with genuine psychological injuries dismiss their need for specialized help, while those dealing with ordinary struggles become convinced they're permanently damaged. Drawing from clinical expertise and her own complete recovery from serious trauma, she offers a revolutionary framework that distinguishes between three distinct types of psychological wounds.
How Deep Is the Wound? isn't just about understanding your pain—it's about reclaiming your power to heal. Through practical exercises, real case studies, and cutting-edge insights, Contreras shows readers how to assess their wounds accurately, choose effective interventions, and move beyond victim narratives toward genuine recovery.
In a world obsessed with trauma, discover why precision—not awareness—is the key to healing.
"The same experience can become either wisdom or burden, depending on the story we tell ourselves about what it means."
What if everything you’ve been told about emotional healing is only half the story?
Let’s explore together how that could be true.
For decades, the dominant narrative blamed people for their own suffering. If someone struggled emotionally, they were labeled “neurotic,” “paranoid,” or “hysterical”—terms that had no scientific foundation but plenty of power to shame. Emotional pain was dismissed as “self-sabotaging” or “resistance,” as if struggling meant the person was choosing to suffer.
But today, we’ve swung to the other extreme. Almost every painful experience gets labeled as trauma, and we’ve started seeing ourselves primarily as victims—of our circumstances or of others’ actions. Social media has contributed to turning victimhood into a trend, with industries profiting from the notion that we are all broken. The “trauma culture” we live in has moved from “everything is your fault” to “nothing is your fault,” risking the loss of our power to influence our own emotional responses, our sense of agency, and, ultimately, our healing.
We also live in a sea of labels—“narcissist,“ “sociopath,” “victim,” “survivor”—assigned to people we don’t even know, often without understanding their circumstances or the complexity of their experiences. We have a tendency to pathologize and judge (demonize?) others without giving it much thought, without understanding the meaning of what we say, or considering the consequences our words can have on the sense of self of those we label. Let’s imagine we could break free from this narrative and choose a path that leads to a deeper understanding of ourselves. How would it feel to see ourselves through a lens that embraces complexity rather than demanding simple explanations? What if we could hold space for the reality that we are neither completely broken nor perfectly whole, but beautifully, messily human?
The truth is, emotional struggles are far more within your control than you’ve been led to believe. There’s a way to rethink emotional suffering beyond limiting categories—a way to truly understand what’s happening beneath the surface and reclaim your power to heal.
Breaking free from the current unhealthy narrative starts with recognizing what you can actually control. Instead of focusing entirely on the event/person/actions that caused you distress, you can shift your attention to how to process and integrate it—how you relate to your pain and whether you allow it to define you. For example, someone treated you disrespectfully and hurt your feelings. You experience a series of sensations and emotions that go from a boiling feeling to deflation. Your system clearly indicates that it needs attention; however, I bet most of us would instead ruminate for hours about the person who disrespected us, their words, their actions, the injustice, and the unfairness... until we feel lost, wishing to disappear or get even. While doing that, the system runs wild on stress hormones that flood the body with toxic chemicals, creating inflammation, disrupting sleep, weakening the immune system, and leaving us physically and emotionally depleted—essentially making us sick from the inside out.
Too often, we leave our emotional responses unresolved, unknowingly reinforcing our suffering. Instead, I suggest you shift from seeing yourself as a victim of trauma to actively addressing your pain. The key lies in understanding that while emotional pain is real and demands your attention, how you work with it determines whether your response becomes adaptive or gets trapped in patterns that perpetuate misery.
Picture yourself slamming on your brakes as you see something darting in front of you. Your heart pounds as your muscles tense and your breath turns shallow. Seconds later, you realize it was just a dog—unharmed. Although the immediate danger passes quickly, the rush of fear and adrenaline lingers not because you want it, but because that’s how your system is designed to respond. However, it’s also designed to bounce back, especially if helped by reassuring thoughts like, “Wow, that was close—but nothing bad happened,” “I’m glad I’m a careful driver,” or “Next time I’ll stay alert on this road.” This scenario represents an adaptive emotional response—your nervous system activates appropriately to protect you, processes the experience completely, learns from it, and returns to baseline functioning. This adaptive response leaves you more prepared, not damaged.
Now imagine that, instead of these balanced thoughts, you start replaying anxious ideas, such as “That dog could have died because of me,” “I’ll never tell anyone,” “What if next time I’m not so lucky?” or “I should never drive this road again.” The result of feeding those thoughts is that whenever you drive down similar roads, you might feel uncomfortable, tense, ashamed, or overly cautious—even when no real danger exists. This lingering unease, though it doesn’t dominate your life, can still influence your confidence and decisions.
That is how an emotional wound forms. An emotional wound is a lasting sensitivity that develops when distressing experiences remain unprocessed due to distorted interpretations, which leave emotions unmetabolized and create reactive patterns long after the situation has ended. Unlike an adaptive response that helps our system return to baseline, an emotional wound keeps you partially unresolved and reactive to reminders of the original experience. Not trauma, but lasting emotional pain, over-cautiousness, and some negative schema development.
Finally, imagine that the intense fear persists without relief, cycling for months. Thoughts such as “Roads are never safe,” “Something terrible will definitely happen if I drive,” or “I’m dangerous behind the wheel” now fuel your fear. These thoughts fundamentally alter how you feel each day, how you see yourself and others, and how you engage with life. Hypervigilance and anticipating danger become your norm. Nightmares about driving are constant, etc. This final scenario represents trauma—a lasting emotional injury that stays active, fundamentally reshaping your world every day.
In this chapter, we’ll look at what emotional suffering really is—from daily stress to deep trauma—and how it’s not just what happens to you, but how you make sense of it, that shapes both your conflicts and your chances to overcome them. Before you can recover your life, you must first understand what you’re actually struggling with. The depth of your wound determines the path to your recovery.
***
Get to Know the Basics of your Inner World
“Pain is meant to be a temporary response tied to a specific occurrence, asking to be resolved as it happens.”
These are great times. We have reached a level of comfort and progress in technology and science that sci-fi literature didn’t anticipate. And yet, we keep suffering as if we didn’t know much about ourselves. Well, there is something we could do: accept that pain is an inevitable part of the human experience. You can’t escape it, no matter how much you wish otherwise. But understanding pain—its role, its purpose, and how it interacts with your life—can fundamentally change how you tolerate, deal with, and resolve it.
Fortunately, a fundamental truth is coming to light: you have far more power over your emotional well-being than you may have considered. This power doesn’t lie in controlling what happens to you—that’s often impossible—but in recognizing the brain characteristics that your mind can use in your service, rather than the other way around.
To grasp this concept, start with a simple yet profound distinction: What’s the difference between your brain and your mind? Understanding this will help explain why you have more influence over your emotional responses than you might have thought.
Is there a real difference between the brain and the mind?
If I had to answer this question in a single line, I’d say the brain is our biological processor—the physical organ made of tissue, cells, and chemicals—while the mind operates more like an electrical system that creates our conscious awareness with the ability to direct our responses.
Try to visualize the brain as the physical structure we can touch—an intricate network of neurons and tissue housed within our skull. But the mind? That’s where a fascinating phenomenon happens. The mind is the dynamic electrical activity constantly firing through those neurons, creating everything from our deepest emotions to our most fleeting thoughts. And here’s what’s remarkable: this electrical activity creates our consciousness—our ability to observe our own thoughts, direct our attention, and choose how we respond.
Illustration: Brain vs Mind
While the brain is the physical tissue we can examine and measure, the mind emerges from the electrical activity flowing through it. That activity is called “action potentials”—invisible pulses of energy that travel from one neuron to another, connecting different parts of our brain. These electrical patterns create the programs that drive our mental processes, influencing everything from our smallest impulses to our biggest decisions, in ways science is still working to explain.
I like thinking of the brain and the mind like a lamp and the light it produces. The brain is the lamp—a physical structure with circuits and components that process energy. The mind is the light that the lamp emanates—an intangible result of the lamp’s functioning. Our brain absorbs signals from our senses, our life experiences, and even subtler environmental influences—social cues, cultural patterns, or intuitive responses to situations we’ve encountered before—even when they’re out of our awareness. The mind then takes these inputs and weaves them together into thoughts, memories, predictions, emotions, and experiences.
Obviously, the brain doesn’t work in isolation—it relies on constant interaction with the environment to gather the rich mix of elements that shape our inner experiences. Beyond the traditional five senses, science now includes balance (vestibular sense), body position (proprioception), and internal bodily states (interoception). Some researchers even point to “neuroception”—an unconscious process that scans for safety or threat in our surroundings—as an additional sense.
But here’s what makes this process powerful (and magical): these multiple layers of sensory input don’t just passively flow into our consciousness. Perception isn’t just a passive reception of external information; it’s an active process that results from the brain’s interpretation and filtering of those signals based on our past, emotions, and expectations. This implies that the lens we use to view the world profoundly shapes our subjective experience of it. A constant dance between the information coming in and the meaning we make of it creates what we call “reality”—which explains why two people can experience the exact same event yet walk away with completely different stories about what happened.
Once we understand how much perception shapes our emotional responses, it becomes clear how crucial it is to take charge of it. Developing healthy ways of perceiving ourselves and our surroundings can be one of the most transformative areas for personal growth and resilience.
For example, imagine receiving a text message that simply reads, “Can we talk?” If your initial interpretation is rooted in fear, you might feel anxious or defensive, preparing for bad news. But if you actively consider other possibilities—like a friend wanting to share good news—your emotional state remains calmer and more open. This small shift in how you engage your mind shows how you can alter your perception, emotions, and ultimately your response, illustrating just how powerful your interpretations can be. If you find yourself anticipating the worst outcome, take a moment to consider, “What evidence do I actually have for this prediction?” “What are some alternative scenarios that could unfold?” Instead of rushing to conclusions, approach situations with genuine curiosity. Replace “I know exactly what this means” with “I wonder what’s really going on here,” while keeping connected to the present and to the reactions of your body.
Supportive environments and relationships can enhance our capacity for positive perception, while chronic stress or hostile environments can narrow our perceptual range and bias us toward threat detection. This is why understanding that the mind is shaped by what we encounter matters—but more importantly, understanding that we can actively direct how we process those encounters.
Our mind holds the remarkable power of guiding and instructing our brain on how to respond. While the brain houses the machinery (neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters), the mind—encompassing our thoughts, feelings, interpretations, decisions, and intentions—can guide how the machinery operates in a given moment. Traditionally, our cultural understanding positioned the mind as something we experience rather than something we can train—a witness to life’s events rather than a tool for intentional living. Only recently have we come to understand that we have the ability to actively take ownership and command.
Picture your brain as an orchestra filled with instruments—neurons, circuits, and all the physical components. Your emotions and instincts function similarly to the spontaneous sounds that each instrument naturally produces when allowed to play independently. But your mind? Your mind is the conductor. It can guide the tempo, adjust the volume, and coordinate the instruments to create harmony instead of chaos.
This illustrates how something intangible (the mind/conductor) can direct what emerges from the tangible (the brain/orchestra), ultimately shaping our experience. By choosing hopeful thoughts, reframing negative situations, or practicing self-compassion, we’re giving the brain new directions—helping it respond calmly instead of panicking. This doesn’t mean we can magically delete all our troubles, but it does mean we have remarkable power to shape how we handle them.
Within the “trauma culture” framework, we have come to believe that the nervous system is the director of the orchestra and that we are at the mercy of the tune it wants to play, but under closer look, we can see that our brain and nervous system “take over” and default to survival responses only when the mind has essentially given up—when our thoughts tell us we can’t cope, that we are powerless, or that there is no hope. When the mind withdraws its guidance, the brain falls back on its most primitive protective mechanisms, those that, as we’ll see later in detail, can end up hurting us at different levels of depth.
Understanding the brain-mind distinction is fundamental to everything that follows in this book. The mind encompasses our beliefs, experiences, and the meaning we assign to them. This broader view helps explain why two people with similar circumstances can have vastly different experiences. It also illustrates the necessity of both our brain and mind working together in a coordinated manner: the brain, which has automatic responses, efficiency, anticipatory mechanisms, and complex sensory processing; and the mind, which possesses the capacity for conscious direction, meaning-making, and choice.
The remarkable power of the mind to guide and instruct our brain on how to respond is where your agency resides, and this is where healing commences.
Sensory Visualization: The Luminous Orb Practice. Let me show you what I mean with a short exercise. You may have done the one imagining squeezing a lime in your mouth and feeling the sensations. Remember how you salivate almost automatically? This one requires a little more of your imagination and your concentration.
Please pause for a moment and close your eyes.
Breathe deeply, and while exhaling, imagine you’re holding a warm, glowing orb of light in your hands. It’s soft, pulsing faintly. As you focus, it shifts color based on your breathing—deep blue when you inhale, warm gold when you exhale. See it in your mind while you feel its gentle heat spread up your arms. Notice how your shoulders relax or your chest feels lighter.
Stay there for a minute or two.
With practice, you’ll see your mind’s ability to shape sensation and calm your body with nothing but intention.
My therapist told me I lack mental space. What are they talking about?...
**This book is an ARC provided by Reedsy Discovery **
How Deep is the Wound sets out to describe emotional pain and trauma. It separates the two and explains the differences. This is important because they are treated differently and have different physiological and psychological effects.
As someone with a master's in psychology and an additional 51 hours of graduate work in clinical counseling, I can appreciate the care and knowledge that went into this book. Every chapter is carefully written to guide lay people through understanding their emotional pains that bring adaptability and trauma that brings post traumatic growth. For instance, trauma is found in victims of abuse, crime, war, and natural disasters among other extreme cases. Emotional stress occurs after a traffic accident, a bad grade, or punishment for an action. As the author says, the former is an open, festering wound and the latter a shallow cut that heals with time and some effort.
Within each chapter are exercises that are designed to complement the subject of the chapter and the current discussion within it. These are clinically proven exercises, many of which were taught to me to use in practice. They are designed to be simple to implement and take only a few minutes. They are easy to combine into a mindfulness program that helps you to let go of immediate emotional pain. The exercises are detailed enough to be easily followed and remembered.
The actual writing is excellent. The author does not talk down to the readers. This makes it accessible to everyone. The information is carefully laid out, and headings are presented as questions that may be occurring to you even as you read the book. Even someone like me, who has read many books on trauma and its effects, learned from this book.
Based on my educational knowledge and the overall readability of the book, I give it five stars. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone.