Trauma's Great Paradox

Photo by Dynamic Wang on Unsplash

You know what I find so interestingly contradictory about trauma -

It’s great paradox, if you will?

It is simultaneously grossly overused and under-utilized.

In that - people accuse others - often times the younger generation and snowflakes of overusing this word - of being ‘triggered’ or ‘traumatized’ by everything -

So much so that one may wonder if the word has lost some of its meaning - since we use the same word for those with brain damage and neurodivergency resulting from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

And yet - also -

So many people minimize their traumas -

I know because I’ve done it - Even though I lost two family members to suicide and my father’s bloody violent remains - you would think it would be enough to warrant the title of ‘trauma’ - would you not?

And yet - I thought the term reserved only for those who knew active combat, had survived a genocide or holocaust - a violent attack - a sexual assault.

I have also shared my story enough to know that many others minimize their own hardest thing - their point of overwhelm (a synonym of trauma) because they think it pales in comparison to trauma.

And don’t misunderstand me -

I’m not saying this because I’m guessing - they outright say so -

“What I went through is nothing compared to you….”

That doesn’t serve me - or them.

I am not the trauma police -

And neither are those who survived active combat - military vets or those who survived other heinous and violent attacks.

But - so - that’s the interesting thing about trauma -

It’s both grossly overused - according to general commentary and both grossly underused.

Or, so they say.

But - here’s the real catcher -

Both are horseshit.

Seriously, they’re judgments made from people outside the bodies and minds of another.

I am yet again brought back to the simple truth that the world would be a much better place if we had the humility to center that we simply have no idea what it is like to exist in the mind and body of another.

Their reality - their lived embodied experiences.

And, as such, we don’t know what their mind could process and what it couldn’t, what it didn’t.

That’s important because - at the heart of that - it distinguishes those who metabolize the trauma from those who don’t/can’t -

The reparative work that happens afterwards, so that the stress, the overwhelm, doesn’t continue and then the person is stuck - and it becomes trauma.

It doesn’t matter what’s my trauma - and what’s his or hers or theirs -

It’s their hardest thing and we can’t understand that, not they ours -

It’s useless and reductive to compare traumas -

To hold them up to some metrics that we get to decide what is bad enough to constitute a trauma.

Yet - so many people try to do so.

However - I will say also the unfortunate thing is that -

Trauma is very common -

Dr. Gabor Mate calls it the universal human experience -

Hardly any of us get out of this life unscathed.

So, it’s far more likely that it is something most of us can understand - at least- we all share our own hardest thing.

And sometimes - our hardest thing changes -

Another one happens.

It gets worse -

Sometimes our hardest thing from 10 or 20 years ago seems laughable now.

But at that time - it was our hardest thing.

Sometimes our traumas are so commonplace in our everyday lives that they blur together, and become this amorphous blob and not a single event - one death or rape or war - or other traumatic single event.

All traumas regardless of what exactly happened may be equally valid.

Only we get to decide.

We’re the ones that have to live with the experiences - the imprints on our bodies and minds, souls and spirits-

Today, I sit quietly and think - how much better the world we be, and how much better we would treat each other - if we could only remember those above simple truths.

If only.