The comparison of trauma
yet again
It’s like comparing apples and oranges.
I was recently in a group therapy session and we were sharing about our triggers and our trauma(s). We all shared.
Afterwards, one of my fellow group members said, to me-
"I don’t think yours is any worse than mine.”
I had shared about two suicides in my immediate family and finding my father’s brains and she shared about feeling lonely as the oldest of three with a mother who drank.
I had never once compared our lots in life.
She made it a point to liken our affairs.
Quite honestly, I am of two minds on this matter.
A part me, truly, my ego, and desperate self in need of validation, as I recall it, wanted to retort with this—
“Really, REALLY? Seriously!?! Seriously. You want to compare that to 50% of my entire nuclear family taking their own lives and the trauma that results from finding the bloody brains and bodily remains, the gory aftermath? I WISH that your trauma was mine.”
But the truth is—
She is right. Or, could be.
I don’t know how her trauma affected her. And if I am honest and true to what I have always said—
We can’t compare one another’s trauma because trauma is not about the event itself but about what happened within the person, how their mind and body failed to integrate it, metabolize it, locate it in the past. So that, as a result, the person feels bodily and mentally stuck and unsafe, from that moment in time.
But in the moment, I didn’t let the ego get the best of me and I instead affirmed her experiences, but I also said this—
I never compared them. You did.
We shouldn’t do that or feel that we have to do that. We have every right to own our experiences to consider what happened to us. To validate them for ourselves, whatever traumas we have. We will never get anywhere if we deny them, and I believe that one way that we do so is through this constant game of comparison and evaluation.
We have every right to own our own experiences. To testify to them, to allow others to bear witness to them, to claim whether they were trauma for us/within us or not.
My most recent therapist said, “I always tell my clients that you are the professional on your life.”
This is true.
It doesn’t mean that we aren’t responsible for what happened to us. We are absolutely accountable to how we act and behave. We need to be responsible for our healing. That’s the really shitty and hard part. That while the wound may not be your fault, the healing is absolutely your responsibility.
Still—
It’s a privilege to be able to do so. To heal.
Even when it’s hard and I get tired of (having to do) it.
To heal means—I’m ready and willing to do so.
To engage in healing also implies that I can, that I have the brains and intellect and resources—financially, intellectually, emotionally/mentally, the capacity to do so.
I am re-engaging in Bodi workouts that offer modifications and bring together people with different bodies and abilities, at different levels.
And one of the things they frequently say, I also think applies here-
“You are not in competition with others, but with yourself.”
We would do well to remember that when we consider our own traumas and our own healing.
No one has a moratorium on suffering or ‘rightfully owns’ the patent on trauma.
Comparison is a hurdle, a stubborn roadblock, a detour, on your road to healing.