Fuck the little 't'

Ranking our traumas

I frequently hear people reference and read of people referring to their “little t trauma.”

This used to disturb me. And I didn’t know why.

I grew weary of it.

Now it just plain pisses me off. I have a visceral response to it. I want to yell when I hear this….

Not because I am not immune to thinking of someone’s experience, what they label as ‘traumatic’ with an internal scoff and a suppressed eye roll.

I do. I have censored myself with that knee jerk reaction.

I am not proud of this.

But I think—your trauma was—-A divorce? A grandparents’ death? A loss of a job?

That’s IT?

You are so fucking lucky that that is your trauma.

But there are two truths to this—

1—It certainly IS their trauma. Full Stop.

(Also, not to sound patronizing, I am glad it’s not worse for them.)

But most importantly, I can’t/shouldn’t…quite frankly, I don’t have the permission to….minimize their embodied experience by relegating it to “not traumatic enough” to be considered a capital ‘T’ trauma. No one knows what it is like to be in another’s body and to experience this thing as they have experienced, and if their mind and body can’t make sense of it to process it through immediately. Such is the definition of trauma.

2—I am jealous.

That’s the biggest truth. Number two. I am.

Because I wish that those events above, all of which I have also experienced, were my traumas, even little ‘t’, but—

Those ones though don’t even hold a candle. They don’t even make the top ten.

Still.

I don’t hold a moratorium on all the pain and suffering and I’m not the judge or jury on what constitutes trauma. I am tempted to say that many others have had it far worse, but then I would be what I am cautioning others against.

Instead, I propose this:

We listen. We have compassion. We show empathy.

And we do this by not fucking ranking traumas.

I too have to dial back the judgment because it stems from a raw place deep inside of me that is still wounded, that still hurts from my grief and trauma and losses. That still thinks that [my] life is just not fucking fair.

But that is my lesson in life—

To have endured two suicides in my immediate family, to have complex PTSD, amidst that suffering has taught me substantial lessons in compassion of others and honoring their experiences.

Despite imposter syndrome and often quantifying and downplaying my own trauma, I want to say this:

If my words may have any impact on the world at large, I implore you all.

This is want I want:

Stop fucking categorizing, making hierarchies of your trauma, comparing them to others. Allow the experiences to be what they are…to you. For you. As they are in your body.

If categorizing little ‘t’ trauma helps you to rank them among your own traumas, in some helpful way that I can’t conceive of at the moment, fine—you do you.

But—

Make sure it is not a comparison game of minimizing your little '‘t’ trauma to other peoples’ big ‘T’ traumas.

Fuck the littles and the bigs.

Own your experiences and the impact they had on you. Don’t lie to others, and most importantly, to yourself.

And if others share with us their traumas: can we please just hold space and honor people’s stories of their trauma, because they have entrusted them to us?

I don’t hold a ‘how to’ guide book on how to educate about trauma.

But I do know this: I have my own trauma and my body carries the scars and wounds from it in physiological ways. And it is real to me—as is others whose trauma looks very different from my own but is no less authentic.

The one thing that my experiences and all of this somatic, healing work has taught me is this:

Listen to your body, the wounds it holds, the stories it tells. Honor them for what they are.

No more rubrics comparing your little ‘t’ trauma to another’s capital ‘T’.

Burn those arbitrary capitalization distinctions to the fucking ground.