the contemporary trauma-therapeutic industrial complex exists for the sole purpose of denying the knowledge and conversation with the Outside caused by trauma.
OF course, there is the contemporary physiological/psycological/neuroscientific view of trauma, involving an experience that is too extreme, too terrifying to cope wit in the moment, leading to a (mostly temporary) conditioned aversion to the traumatic stimulus, or things associated with it. Indeed, for most people, dealing with single traumas, this is the experience; something terrifying happened, eventually, though, it faded away, the trauma was "overcome" (forgotten, the behaviour extincted).
There is the old or "folk" view of trauma as some sort of cowardice, of a moral failing. One is traumatized because they are too weak, or because they lack a moral backbone. Trauma as evidence of a weak will, a lacking determination. But the record of the broken brave, dealing with the annihilation of sense, of reason, the eternal return to the moment of defeat (and often, of triumph) betrays this conception. Indeed, many urged on to great bravery, to great ambition, do so because of the seed of knowledge planted in them b early traumatic experiences. Without the goad of the vision of chaos, where would most the names of history be?
In Bataille's limit experience we have something approaching a veridical account of what trauma may be: an experience so beyond the expectations, so beyond the norms, so incomprehensible the blinders of stability, comprehensibility, and above all, language, are momentarily ripped off; the absolute incomprehensibility of reality and the ultimate impotence of the "self" made clear, in a moment of cruel insight.
Trauma as an ultimately aletheic experience, then. In a single moment, the doors of perception are flung wide, wide open, and the searing light of reality overexposes the sensitive film of the soul.