One Person's Trauma is...

What is Trauma anyway?

The word “trauma” can bring with it a lot of complexity, confusion and connotation, but trauma is actually quite simple and subjective.

I might feel traumatized by an event that, to you, was only embarrassing or uncomfortable. You might be traumatized by something that another person experienced as a healthy challenge. Maybe I experienced a traumatic moment when I was laughed at in school for peeing my pants but when YOU peed YOUR pants, you laughed at yourself and moved through it.

Your neighbor might soar through a natural disaster, finding strength and grit within, while you, experiencing the same disaster, find it difficult to put one foot in front of the other.

One rape victim might find courage to prosecute and seek justice, which allows her to “fight back” and heal, while another rape victim finds that the only way to survive is to tell no one, to “stuff” the memories deep down and to try to forget.

One person’s trauma is simply that: ONE person’s trauma.

There is no comparison. There is no “this is trauma, but that isn’t.” No person on earth can say to another, “Nope. That wasn’t trauma.” It is an individual experience.

But what makes it so? What makes something traumatic?

Simply put, trauma is anything that was too much for the person at the time. That’s it. It was too much for them to move through adaptively and, as a result, they suffer NOW what happened THEN, even though the actual moment is in the past. Their body may have moved through it- they may look fine on the outside- but some part of them got stuck, left behind in that event. That’s trauma.

And that’s where therapy can help. Good, trauma-informed therapy can help unfreeze those frozen parts, unstick the stuck parts, reclaim the left behind parts of us. The bad stuff does not have to have the final word in our lives and I find this SO hopeful! A new path CAN be found.