Time and Trauma
How the past nests itself in the present
Introduction – Time doesn't stay behind us
There is a persistent misconception: that time heals all wounds. That the past lies behind us, neatly stored away in fading memories. But anyone who lives with trauma knows better. Not all time flows. Sometimes it stands still. Or circles back and settles, uninvited, into the here and now.
I have known moments when the clock kept ticking, yet my body locked up. When words seemed to belong to the present, but old wounds were torn open once again — with the same intensity, the same breathlessness, the same paralysis. As if the past were happening all over again, not as memory, but as reality.
In her book Kairos, Joke Hermsen approaches time from another perspective: not as linear progression (chronos), but as a charged moment of meaning. Kairos is the unexpected instant when everything tilts. When insight, change and encounter become possible. Hermsen calls this time inner, qualitative, more existential than what the clock can capture. And it is precisely this experience of time that is essential when we want to understand — and heal — trauma.
For trauma does not obey chronology. It lives in fragments, in frozen images, in a body that cannot distinguish between then and now. Time becomes no line, but a loop. A repetition, an echo. And so the past is no closed chapter, but an unspoken presence in the present.
In this essay, I want to explore what time means for those who carry pain that does not remain in the past. What it asks of us to live with an inner clock that deviates from the outer world. And how, precisely in those kairos-moments — those unexpected openings in the fabric of time — healing can occur.
For perhaps it is not time itself that heals, but our relationship to it. And the willingness to listen to what still resounds outside the reach of the clock.
The Linear Myth – Why Clock Time Falls Short in Trauma
The modern world is ruled by the clock. Time has become measurable: divided into hours, days, weeks, schedules and deadlines. We plan, structure, organize — as if time were a neutral stream we can control. This is what the ancient Greeks called chronos: measurable time, the time of calendars of progress and continuity.
Within this logic, everything seems to move along a straight line: past, present and future. And so trauma is quickly approached as something that lies behind you.
Something that, with enough time, should naturally fade away. A scar that eventually ceases to hurt. The expression “time heals all wounds” is a symptom of this — well-intentioned, yet dangerously misleading.
For those who live with trauma, time is rarely linear. It is fragmented, jolting, unreliable. The body does not know that the clock has moved on. A smell, a glance, a word — and the system goes into alarm. Not as memory, but as reliving. The pain is not re-enacted. It is still happening.
The American trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk writes: “The body keeps the score.” The body lives outside the logic of chronos. It knows nothing of so much time has already passed. It knows only the immediate experience: safe or unsafe, threatened or held. Time as sequence, as distance from the past, does not matter. What counts is inner reality — and that reality can still be filled with what once was.
The psyche is no different. In Schema Focused Therapy, we see that old pain does not neatly remain in the archive of memory. It lives on in modes: the Vulnerable Child, the Angry Child, the Inner Critic. These voices do not speak in past tense. They are active now, precisely when something in the outside world triggers an old script.
The linear view of time overlooks this depth. It places a ruler over an inner landscape that is jagged, cyclical, sometimes completely frozen. To relate to trauma as something that should be over risks abandoning the other once more — by denying space to what is still unfolding.
Time is not neutral. It carries ideology, expectation, tempo and pressure. And within that pressure arises shame: Why do I still feel this? Why am I not over it yet? Why is my inner world not in sync with the rhythm of the outer world?
The truth is: it doesn’t have to be. The clock may tick equally for everyone, but the inner world has its own time. And it deserves to be acknowledged — as reality.
Kairos and Inner Time
Not all time is the same. Some moments carry a weight that cannot be measured in minutes. They carve themselves into consciousness and leave an imprint that does not fade. Whether it is sudden loss, an unexpected encounter, a confrontation with truth or the touch of love — there are moments that shift everything. That set in motion what had long lain still.
The ancient Greeks had a word for this: kairos — the time of the right moment, of opened time, charged with possibility. Unlike chronos, the time of the clock, kairos is qualitative. It is not about how long something lasts, but about what happens. In her book Kairos, Joke Hermsen describes this time as the ground tone of inner life — the time of change, sudden insight, and inspiration. She calls kairos a form of time in which we are truly present, with our whole being.
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But for those who live with trauma, the wrong kairoi are possible too: moments laden not with healing, but with petrification. Experiences in which time does not flow but freezes. Moments when disaster strikes, when trust is broken, when the body shuts down. These too are kairos-moments — but as scars in time.
The body recognizes these moments, even years later. A voice, a scent, a word can open a kairos that does not renew but repeats. The charge returns, without the possibility of transformation. And here lies the crux: trauma not only holds time still — it also disrupts access to transformative kairoi.
Jung understood that time in the unconscious works differently. For him, time was not linear but cyclical. Repetition, in his view, is not a sign of failure but of meaning. If something returns, it may want to say something. In dreams, symbols and synchronicities, old themes resurface — not to torment you, but to bring something into awareness.
In this sense, kairos is also an invitation. When old pain presents itself in the present, it is not proof of failure but a sign that the psyche is ready to look. To feel. To heal. But this is only possible when there is space — inner and relational — to truly inhabit that moment.
Kairos breaks in. It cannot be scheduled. It demands attention, openness and slowing down. In a world driven by chronos, it takes courage to take this form of time seriously. But those who dare discover something the clock will never reveal: that healing does not depend on how much time has passed, but on what happens in the moment that opens.
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Time and Trauma in Psyche and Body
Trauma does not live only in the mind. It lives in the body, in the nerves, in muscle tension and in the breath that falters. It's not merely a memory but an experience that repeats itself — again and again, as if time has not moved on. As if the past keeps overwriting the present, without your consent.
In Schema Focused Therapy, we see this phenomenon in modes that do not move along with the calendar. The Vulnerable Child, the Angry Child, the Inner Critic — they speak from a time that is still psychologically active, even though the factual moment lies far behind us. An unsafe upbringing, a moment of humiliation, or a lost glance from a parent — the inner child does not live these as memories, but as an ongoing reality.
These inner parts are not rational. They know nothing of years, of growth, of distance. They react from the moment when the pain first arose and they remain there waiting. Waiting for recognition. For protection. For holding. For someone or something to say: I see you, now at last.
We see the same in the body: time does not automatically move forward there either. In his work, Bessel van der Kolk describes how trauma embeds itself in the nervous system. The autonomic system goes into overdrive or shuts down. Fight, flight, freeze — responses designed for acute danger, yet with trauma they remain switched on, even long after the danger has passed.
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The body knows that something happened, but it does not know that it is over. And as long as the body does not know, the experience continues to circulate: beneath the surface, invisible, but all-determining. A simple situation — a comment, a silence, a glance — becomes a doorway back into an old, unprocessed time.
Jung understood this timelessness of the unconscious. For him, the inner world was not an archive but a living field where everything once repressed returns — not to destroy, but to become visible. What is not integrated returns as fate, he wrote. And that fate often takes the shape of repetition, a pattern, an inner time loop that calls for awareness.
Healing therefore requires not only talking, but being present with what the body and psyche still repeat. It asks for slowing down. Allowing. Breathing. And above all: the recognition that time in the inner world is not a straight line, but a winding landscape in which everything that still lives has a right to exist.
Time in Eastern Philosophies
In the Western experience, time is something that moves forward. The line from birth to death, from cause to effect, from past to future. We are expected to grow, to process, to look ahead. Yet in that drive to move forward — that urge to press on — the present often becomes empty. And the past lingers as an invisible shadow.
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Eastern philosophies tell a different story. Time is not seen as linear progression, but as a flow. A continuous movement in which past, present and future are not separate phases but merge like seasons within a single breath.
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In Buddhism, the now is the only real moment. Everything you experience happens here, in this body, in this consciousness. The past lives on in memory, the future in expectation, but only the present moment is accessible for healing, insight and presence.
This focus on the now is not meant to reject the past — on the contrary. It asks us to stop fighting what has been and instead stay with it — precisely where it resurfaces. As sadness, as bodily tension, as resistance. In this sense, Buddhism is radical in its gentleness: what you live now is what is here now and it deserves care.
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In Taoism, the notion of time is even subtler: as a kind of undercurrent, a rhythm you can attune yourself to. No struggle, no control, but moving along. When we try to overcome trauma, we often move against that current — wanting to go faster than our system can follow. The Taoist path is one of listening: what does this moment want to say? What does it ask? And can I move with it, even if slowly?
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Whereas in the West time is often measured in productivity and performance, in the East it is approached as the quality of presence. And it is precisely here that a key to healing lies. For the inner world does not follow a clock, a schedule or a line — but rhythm, breath and circulation.
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Trauma does not want to be forgotten, but recognized. That calls for a sense of time in which the past is not pushed away, but carried — into the now. Not to remain stuck in pain, but to create space for something new. As Joke Hermsen writes:
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“Kairos is the moment in which the old loosens and the new has not yet settled. An in-between space — and in it lives the possibility of true transformation.”
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Healing as Time-Consciousness – Love as the Force that Opens Time
There is no universal clock that measures healing. No fixed path, no map that leads you from fracture to wholeness. What healing asks is not more time, but a different relationship to time. A willingness to be present with what arises — even when it is old, distorted and painfully familiar. Especially then.
Healing begins the moment we stop trying to control time. When we no longer say: this should have been over long ago. But instead dare to ask: what is still alive in me, right here, right now? Not to dissolve into it, but to allow it — and from there, to learn to move again.
When we recognize our inner world as a place that follows its own rhythm, space opens. Then the past no longer needs to be banished, but can be woven into a greater whole. Re-membered, rather than repeated. Seen, rather than ignored. Carried, rather than suppressed.
And precisely in that space, something happens. Something the clock cannot know.
A softness.
A shift.
A reversal.
A kairos.
Love plays a key role here. Not the fleeting, romantic kind, but love as a sustaining force. As the ability to stay, to listen, to acknowledge. Love opens time. It makes the past no longer a prison, but something that can unfold. It makes it possible to look yourself in the eye — not with judgment, but with compassion.
In the embrace of love, time can be rewritten. Not by erasing the past, but by including it in a larger story — a story in which you are no longer trapped, but moving. In which you do not fall back, but return. To yourself. To your body. To the current within.
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Healing then is not an endpoint, but a way of living in time. A time that circles, sings, silences, sinks. A time you do not have to outgrow — but may inhabit. Here and now.
