When you think about what kinds of events might constitute a psychological trauma, what sorts of things come to mind? Broadly speaking, most of us would agree on the major ones — childhood abuse, sexual assault, a catastrophic accident, and witnessing or being victimized by violence. But your freshman psych textbook probably did not list “a presidential election with an unexpected and undesired outcome” as a potential root of trauma — at least, not unless it was published after November of 2016, when it rapidly rose to the top of the list of things many of us had to discuss with our therapists.

We all have a horror story from that night. We all remember the feeling of impotent despair as the electoral college map filled in more red than blue, the sputtering befuddlement of states being “too close to call” that we hadn’t even thought were questionable, our anticipatory optimism crumbling into a rubble of shock, rage, grief, and fear.

Then, we had to try to sleep, to try not to torture ourselves with what ifs, or with wondering how we would explain this to our children.

Then, we had to get up the next day and figure out how to move on with our lives as if our paradigms about our country, our fellow Americans, and our lives hadn’t been apocalyptically turned on their heads the night before.

Then, at several weigh-stations along the path that led to now — inauguration day, Charlottesville, the Mueller Report, all things Putin — reality absconded with our capacity for hope.

For a professional in the field, it took me a surprisingly long time to recognize my own reaction to the election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land as a normal, healthy, and even stereotypical response to a traumatic event. It had elements of my reactions to other traumas I’d experienced — the denial of my sexual assault, the shock waves of my father’s unexpected death, the feelings of abject hopelessness after a sudden job loss. Personally, professionally, and academically, I’m well-versed in trauma — but characterizing a presidential election as traumatic, even in my head, sounded hyperbolic.

The psyche, of course, doesn’t care about what sounds hyperbolic. It just reacts. Vigorously.

That trauma wasn’t just limited to the left, either. Good faith Trump voters, who were turned off by his racist and sexist rhetoric but believed his presidency might bring them economic prosperity, were traumatized when his administration turned out to be one dominated by racist and sexist rhetoric and economic prosperity limited only to the wealthy. “Reflex-action” Republican voters, who perhaps did not follow politics all that closely but cast their vote for the Republican candidate out of habit, were traumatized by seeing what they had tacitly endorsed. Third party voters, as well as centrist and left-leaning voters who could not bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton, were traumatized for a similar reason. And all of us, regardless of our position on the political spectrum, compounded each other’s traumas by pointing fingers at one another, saying they were directly and specifically to blame for the brushfire that was unleashed when Donald Trump became the president.

We are a nation in crisis. We are a nation with acute, ongoing trauma.