--- - |2 Abstract The principal accepted models of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are based on both memory processing and biological/brain changes occurring when one's life or well‐being is threatened. It is our thesis that these models would be greatly informed by community studies indicating that PTSD is predicted to a greater extent by earlier life experience and experiences that occur distant from the threatening event. These findings suggest post‐trauma responding is best conceptualized through the lens of the self‐in‐context, as opposed to imprinting that results from a given event at a given time. Moreover, studies of non‐Western populations often do not express trauma as PTSD, or at least not primarily as PTSD, which argues against specific neural or memory encoding processes, but rather a more plastic neural process that is shaped by experience and how the self develops in its cultural context, as a product of a broad array of experiences. We posit that fear and emotional conditioning as well as the ways traumas are encoded in memory are only partial explanatory mechanisms for trauma responding, and that issues of safety and harm, which are long‐term and developmental are the common and principal underpinnings of the occurrence of post‐traumatic distress, including PTSD. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. - Journal of Personality, Volume 0, Issue ja, -Not available-.