It’s not uncommon for my clients (and people in my real life too) who have trauma to initially reject the label “trauma” for themselves.
This personal distancing has probably been reinforced by the current ubiquity of the word. This has been fueled by a mix of social media misinformation and oversimplification, the shift in mental health treatment trends toward somatics and nervous system regulation, and famous old white dudes like Gabor Mate making the unsubstantiated claim that ADHD is caused by trauma. “Trauma” is everywhere.
If everything is trauma, then nothing is trauma, right? So, let’s start by actually defining what trauma is.
What Is Trauma?
Trauma is the impact of one or many distressing experiences, in which the negative emotional experience is so overwhelming that the brain and nervous system cannot adequately cope, return to safety, or appropriately digest and process the experience. Classic trauma examples include the impact of war events on veterans of combat, or surviving a severe car accident.
But trauma – that overwhelmed, unprocessed distress – is not just relegated to those types of experiences.
Trauma comes in various types and varying degrees of severity, and the result depends on many factors, including the nature of the incident(s) and the methods of coping and processing available to them at the time. Let’s consider two types of traumatic experiences:
- One big incident: e.g., someone who survived a terrifying house fire, with high threat and material loss
- Trauma by a thousand “paper cuts”: e.g., someone who was berated and insulted every day of their entire childhood
Those who have the second type of experience are the ones who tend to reject the label of trauma. Why is this?
We Don’t Call It Trauma Because “That’s Just How It Was”
The answer is fairly simple. The way you grow up feels pretty normal to you. In fact, the more sheltered and isolated you are in a family, religious community, or any other type of social bubble, the less likely you are to have any perspective on your upbringing. If everyone in your family or your religious community was routinely and repeatedly spanked with inanimate objects, you’re going to see this as very normal. It might feel as normal as the language that you speak in your household. In the context of religion, it might even be framed as the superior way to live. And if everyone around you (siblings, religious community members) is experiencing it, how can it be “trauma”?
If you are in a less insular community, you might start to notice in adolescence that your family’s way of operating is not as “normal” as you thought. For others, this may not happen until young adulthood, or when you start deconstructing and/or deconverting from religion. In these stages of life, we start to recognize that many people live differently, and that our family’s way is not as standard as we may have thought.
But even with this knowledge and contrast, you might minimize your experiences with a shrug and say, “That’s just how it was.”
We Don’t Call It Trauma Because It Wasn’t THAT Bad
People also often disregard the severity or impact of their traumatic experiences because they know of, or can imagine, worse things happening. Somebody who was emotionally abused throughout their entire childhood may say, “My parents fed me, clothed me, made sure I did well in school, and never laid a hand on me. How could I possibly have childhood trauma?”
Emotional abuse is the easiest to minimize, but I have noticed that people with more obviously traumatic experiences like severe and persistent physical abuse, sexual abuse, or serious neglect can minimize those experiences by pointing out the bad things they didn’t have to endure. “Yes, my parents hit me, but at least they were paying attention to me and feeding me!” Or, more simply, “It could have been worse.”
But other people’s experiences of terrible things don’t make our experiences less terrible or traumatic. It doesn’t work that way. Trauma is not a competition where only the most severe situations yield a title. If I get punched in the nose, and someone else is stabbed in the gut, I’m still in a tremendous amount of pain (and probably suffering a couple of black eyes).
We Don’t Call It Trauma Because It Was Part Of Our Religion
Indoctrination and thought control are generally part of high-control and fundamentalist religious environments. These can inflict complex trauma in an insidious manner, and the residual effects can go undetected for years. Many of my clients come to me having intellectually deconstructed their belief system, but are still suffering long-term religious trauma effects like internalized homophobia, conflict avoidance, and persistent feelings of guilt about almost everything.
For example, if you were raised in purity culture, you might be experiencing issues in your sex life, or wrestling with acceptance of your sexuality or gender identity. In purity culture, saving sexual activity for (straight) married couples isn’t just a suggestion or guideline. It is an absolute conviction installed in your brain (probably before you understood anything about sex). It was mandated as a serious moral obligation to avoid all sexual activity as a single person, lest you ruin yourself if you didn’t remain chaste. And, if you were having “impure” thoughts about (or behaviors with) someone who wasn’t the opposite gender, you were sinful, evil, and probably going to literal hell.
This creates an impossible internal bind for many people that is extremely distressing. You can’t help the thoughts and feelings that are naturally coming up for you, but you’re existing in a belief system where your natural tendencies are sending you to eternal damnation. It’s terrifying. This experience can wreak havoc on your brain and body, and that impact isn’t always resolved just by a logical shift in beliefs.
A combat veteran with PTSD knows they’re no longer at war, but they still can have involuntary reactions to triggers like sudden, loud noises. Similarly, the complex PTSD of religious trauma can have long-lasting effects, even when we are clear that we no longer believe.
We Don’t Call It Trauma Because We Don’t Want To Throw Our Parents or Mentors Under The Bus
It can be hard to see how flawed our parents, pastors, or other attachment figures actually are. And there’s a reason for that. As a child, you don’t have a choice whether to be dependent on these people. You can’t just choose other parents, find another community, rent an apartment, or get a job to fully support yourself when you’re 5, 10, or 15. You require someone to care for you physically and emotionally, and you need these adults to do it.
So, you are wired to over-value the good in these people. You emotionally accommodate and overlook their transgressions. You have to see them as doing the best for you in order to survive. You may keep trying to figure out how to be better so they won’t harm or neglect you. You love them, and you desperately need them to love you. And this way of seeing our caretakers can linger long after we are literally dependent on them. It’s hard to love and depend on someone and also see them as someone who can be cruel, violating, or neglectful. It’s easier to see ourselves as the problem.
Even as an adult, you’ve probably had the experience of being in a situation and not realizing the full impact of how taxing or awful it was until after you’d left it. This can happen with jobs, relationships, and more. When we are emotionally attached, financially dependent, or both, we end up doing some serious mental and emotional gymnastics in order to cope through the situation. We are the meme of the dog in the burning pub: “This is fine.”
We also, as adults, come to understand that it’s hard and complex being a grown-up, and we gain some empathy for our caretakers’ own struggles (“My mom worked three jobs,” “My parents didn’t choose their fundamentalist religion either,” etc.) or the relative impact of the abuse they also suffered as children (“My dad was beaten every day, and he barely touched me!”). While this understanding of generational trauma cycles can be informative and useful, it can also be misused to minimize one’s own childhood experience.
Both things can be true. Your parent was abused, and you were also abused. As noted previously others’ experiences don’t neutralize the trauma you’ve experienced. Even if they were your parents.
We Don’t Call It Trauma Because We Blame Ourselves
It’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault.
Even if someone said it was, it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t choose these things, or and you didn’t do anything to make or deserve them to happen to you.
Especially as an adult looking back on childhood trauma, it’s so important to grasp this. People often look back at their childhood through the filter of their 25/35/45 year old brain. The implication is that they should have known better. To this, I often remark, have you been around a 5/10/15 year old lately? Do they seem like they “should know better?” The answer is always no.
You and I are no different. We were just kids. It’s nearly impossible to remember what it’s like to have a 10 year old brain when you’re 40, but I promise you, you didn’t have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex, and you didn’t have the agency that you have now. The adults around you were responsible for caring for you and keeping you safe, both emotionally and physically.
It wasn’t your fault.
Are you ready to dig deeper and get the support you need and deserve? Schedule a consult call today.