Deeply hurt or shocked by a distressing experience, often leading to lasting emotional damage.
From Greek 'trauma' (wound) + '-ized.' Originally a medical term for physical wounds, it was adopted in psychology to describe deep emotional wounds caused by shocking events.
The word 'trauma' originally meant a physical wound, but psychology borrowed it because psychological injuries from terrible events create scars just as real as physical ones—the metaphor became so accurate that we use 'trauma' for both.
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