The Trauma of Ordinary Girlhood

And how trauma research gets it wrong

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Photo by Louis Galvez on Unsplash

Much of what we know about trauma explains what happens when something terrible happens to you once. Many girls, however, are shaped by what happens to them a thousand times.

“Men invented standards they could meet and called them universal.” That line by Rebecca Solnit captures centuries of authority disguised as objectivity—and it describes how we came to understand the body.

In a world calibrated to men’s needs, bodies, rhythms, and social roles, girls’ and women’s experiences often disappear into the background. In a materialist world where science equals what is visible and measurable, we repeatedly fail to understand girls and women.

Across disciplines, the template for what counts as “human” has historically been male and continues to exert influence.

Heart attacks are still culturally imagined as chest-clutching emergencies, which is why women presenting with nausea and crushing fatigue are sent home with antacids or anxiety diagnoses—sometimes hours before a cardiac event.

Medications have been tested on male subjects and prescribed at doses that lingered dangerously in women’s bloodstreams. It took until 2013, and only after next-morning car crashes, for the FDA to lower recommended doses of Ambien for women.

Speaking of car accidents: crash-test dummies long modeled a 170-pound man, while women absorb the injuries. Even when female crash dummies are included now, they’re often just scaled-down male forms, not biomechanically female bodies. The different pelvis shape, neck strength, muscle distribution, and posture in pregnancy aren’t represented. Oh, and they’re usually placed in the passenger seat rather than the driver position.

Diagnostic criteria for ADHD and autism prioritized disruptive presentations more typical in boys, overlooking girls who mask or compensate. The ideal worker is still imagined as endlessly available, presuming someone else performs domestic labor. Office temperatures reflect metabolic calculations from mid‑century men in suits, and leave many women shivering at their desks.

We study men, call the findings neutral, and recast everyone else as deviation.

The male-coded trauma paradigm

The same pattern holds for trauma.

Modern trauma theory was revolutionary because it reframed symptoms as survival responses that lived in the body. Flashbacks, hyperarousal, dissociation — these weren’t weakness. They were a protective nervous system bracing for danger long after the event was over.

Van der Kolk, Levine, Porges and others helped us understand that when a body mobilizes to fight or flee but cannot complete the action, the energy remains stuck. Healing, in this model, means helping the body finish what it couldn’t do — through movement, breath, sensation, and shaking — so it can return to safety.

But much of the research that made up early PTSD diagnostic criteria were heavily shaped by Vietnam vets (men) and by watching animals escape predators.

Think of a gazelle tremoring vigorously after escaping a cheetah. Think of your dog shaking after being petted, bringing her body back to baseline. Those who can’t escape and feel truly helpless need to find a way to release after the attack or accident.

This framework privileges acute, life-threatening events over chronic, relational threat, and identity-based trauma—forms disproportionately experienced by women. Trauma is viewed as something that happens to a body, not something that unfolds within attachment systems, power hierarchies, and gendered expectations.

For many girls and women, the shaping force is not a single catastrophic event but years of evaluation, accommodation, and relational vigilance inside relationships they cannot simply leave—families, schools, peer hierarchies, workplaces.

Instead of preparing to overpower or outrun, the nervous system learns to monitor, soften, anticipate, and appease. Contemporary clinicians often call these freeze or fawn responses. The body learns to scan constantly for the moods, needs, expectations and danger signs of others.

Hypervigilance here is not a reaction to one event; it becomes a baseline operating system.

A few researchers recognized what the dominant paradigm missed. Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy recognizes that the body encodes repeated interpersonal patterns, not only shock. Judith Herman’s concept of complex PTSD (C-PTSD) describes the psychological consequences of prolonged powerlessness—disrupted self‑concept, shame, emotional dysregulation, and relational difficulty—that don’t map neatly onto classic PTSD.

These frameworks attends to the subtle, chronic adaptations—the slight forward lean of someone trained to anticipate others’ needs, the held breath of someone who learned early to make themselves small, the frozen smile of someone who survives by remaining pleasing.

Yet despite Herman's work dating back to 1992, C-PTSD still isn't in the DSM. The research that gets funded, the treatment modalities most widely taught and reimbursed, the frameworks that shape diagnostic criteria still center acute, event-based trauma. Recently though, the World Health Organization did formally add C-PTSD to the ICD-11.

When trauma is defined primarily as acute threat, the adaptations to chronic social pressure are easily misread as personality pathology, anxiety, or psychosomatic distress rather than survival strategies.

Women seeking somatic therapy may look for a single buried event to release and find none, or "just" a million smaller incidents. The problem isn’t the absence of injury; it’s that the injury never stopped happening. The problem is a system that hasn’t considered women’s lived experiences.

When the Model Doesn't Fit

How do you shake off years of managing everyone else’s comfort and calling it harmony when it was actually self-erasure?

How do you release the tension of a nervous system trained to track everyone else’s mood before your own— influenced by real stories of violence and countless hours watching depictions of women raped, beaten and killed on screen?

How do you sigh away decades of scanning parking lots and sidewalks at night?

How do you tremor out the chronic swallowing of your anger?

How do you discharge a lifetime of smiling when it wasn’t kind or funny?

A lifetime of being interrupted or ignored then accused of overreacting when you get frustrated?

Of relinquishing yourself bit by bit without realizing what you were giving up?

How do you unwind a body trained to be looked at more than lived in?

Somatic therapy for many women is less about releasing a single event and more about a slow rebuilding of trust in their bodies and a recalibrating of their nervous system through gradual re-connection to themselves.

The Nervous System Under Surveillance

From early girlhood, many learn that being seen is inseparable from being evaluated.

We learn from our mothers that choosing what to wear involves something far more essential than comfort or self-expression. We learn to dress as though an invisible audience is there observing and judging; that some undefined authority can determine whether we are Right or Wrong in how we, as girls, present to the world. Don’t be yourselves, we learn, because you’ll inevitably be found lacking.

Then there’s the beauty industry inundating us with messages that our bodies are fundamentally flawed and need fixing. The relentless evaluation is an assault on our nervous system that must constantly scan itself for Wrongness. Girls take note approximately every thirty seconds of whether their hair’s in place, their legs are in proper position, their shirt is sitting right and on and on.

We comply with the demands made on us and they call us vain. It’s not vanity. It’s a nervous system we can’t power down because the surveillance never ends.

One of the most maddening discoveries I made when writing my book, Sexism & Sensibility, was just how bad self-objectification—not just being objectified by others—is for girls. Girls who self-objectify increasingly experience shame and anxiety about their bodies, putting them at risk for eating disorders, depression, and sexual dysfunction. But the consequences extend beyond mental health.

Self-monitoring consumes cognitive bandwidth, interfering with concentration and performance. It disrupts interoception—the perception of internal bodily states—making hunger, fatigue, pain, and even your own heartbeat harder to sense. You lose the “biological compass” necessary for basic survival and emotional health.

This then can lead to self-neglect: failing to eat, rest, or seek medical attention until a state of crisis is reached. It also diminishes capacity for emotional regulation since emotions are deeply rooted in physical sensations. And it’s associated with poor decision-making, since we’re detached from that “gut feeling”—things like changes in heart rate or skin conductance that help us quickly assess the risk or value of a decision before conscious reasoning even occurs.

The Body Keeps the Score—Differently

The body does keep the score. But for women, that score is often written in chronic pain, autoimmune conditions, and “medically unexplained symptoms” that doctors dismiss as stress or anxiety. Our symptoms are our witness.

Women are more likely than men to experience chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, IBS, migraines, and TMJ disorders. Many of these involve central sensitization, where the nervous system becomes hyperreactive to stimuli. The alarm system gets stuck in the “on” position and the body habituates to a baseline of tension that eventually becomes pathological.

Research consistently finds that chronic social-evaluative stress—including discrimination, relational vigilance and objectification—alters cortisol regulation, immune activity, and pain processing. Women’s bodies, then, are literally shaped by the demand to be perpetually accommodating, perpetually monitored, perpetually managed.

Women are told it’s “just stress” as if stress were something separate from the body. As if the chronic activation of a hypervigilant nervous system weren’t itself a form of ongoing harm.

What Trauma Models Miss

Traditional trauma assessment asks: What happened to you?

But for many women, the more relevant question is: What has been happening to you, continuously, since you were a child?

The answer isn’t a single story. It’s thousands of micro-adjustments and millions of psychological papercuts. A lifetime of monitoring your tone so you don’t sound “shrill.” Making yourself smaller so you don’t seem aggressive. Managing men’s egos and emotions at the expense of your own. Of walking to your car with keys between your fingers. Of saying “sorry” when someone bumps into you. Of being told you’re “too sensitive” when you name what’s happening.

Because these experiences are everywhere, they are nowhere. They are ordinary. Because they are social rather than physical, they appear intangible. Because they are chronic, they don’t register as trauma.

Yet the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a predator in the savanna and a world that constantly evaluates, corrects, and constrains you. Both demand vigilance. and prevent the system from ever fully settling.

The difference is that you can’t shake off a society. You can’t tremor out decades of gendered expectations. You can’t outrun a culture that’s inside your own head.

When stress is woven into the fabric of girlhood itself, when it shapes your nervous system before you even have language for what’s happening, its effects become nearly invisible.

The gazelle shakes and walks away. The girl learns to stay pleasant, attentive, accommodating—and calls it growing up.

We call it maturity. We call it being good.

We call it ordinary girlhood.

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