“But it’s Not Big Enough to be Called Trauma”
It’s the imposter syndrome of adverse experiences, and we hear it on repeat. “My experience isn’t bad enough to be called trauma,” they say. “Other people have it worse, and really mine isn’t even that traumatic.” For many people, the label “trauma” doesn’t seem to fit because they haven’t lived through a situation they (or rather, society) deems extreme enough. They may be showing all the classic symptoms of trauma, and yet they can’t approach that word, because in their minds, it’s reserved for something far worse.
It sounds noble, but at its heart is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of trauma. At best, it props up a false sense of coping, at worst it undermines the very diagnosis which is necessary in order to begin the healing journey.
Expanding our Understanding of Trauma
A lot of people don’t realise that there is not just one type of trauma. Like any human experience, there is depth and nuance. Typically, what people mean when they say their trauma isn’t bad enough is that they aren’t experiencing acute trauma. Acute trauma is the result of living through a time-bound experience which has left a lasting mark on our stress response mechanism. This might be a car accident, or episodes of violence. With acute trauma, we can point to a moment in history and say “that’s the problem, right there.” It can often begin and end quite rapidly, but lasts in our memories (and bodies) into the future.
But acute trauma is not the only type of trauma. There is another, more insidious form which lurks beneath the surface, wrecking its havoc and sucking us of our ability to function. It’s insidious because we often don’t even recognise it until it’s too late. We call this chronic trauma.
Picture a bucket beneath a dripping tap. Slowly but surely, drip by drip, the bucket fills and eventually it overflows. This is the form chronic trauma takes. If you were to walk past the tap at any given moment, you may not even recognise any thing is wrong - but sit with it for a while and you’ll grasp a the full story. This is the cumulative nature of traumatic instances. They may not be remarkable and newsworthy, but even the smallest stressors can cause the bucket to fill if not dealt with in a healthy way.
Given that all of us on planet earth are currently living through the turbulence of a global pandemic, it is safe to say that all of us have experienced the hallmarks of potential chronic trauma. Every time we have been hit with a piece of bad news; every time we’ve had to pivot; every class cancelled and zoom meeting booked; the stress of every cough, and the fear every time grandma messages (has she caught it?!); the funerals we haven’t be able to attend and the weddings postponed. All of these, on their own, would be manageable with our baseline coping mechanisms. But the cumulative nature is such that they add up. And the result? We end up with a type of trauma that we struggle to even name.
This type of trauma has a range of presentations. For some people, it is seen in the short fuse – we lose our patience far more than we used to. For some, it is oversleeping while for others it is struggling to get to sleep at all. For many, it is a general feeling of brain fog or fuzziness, forgetting important meetings and feeling as though we can’t give our best at work. For almost everyone at the moment, there is a general malaise – a resignation that things are not feeling what they should be. All of these are classic signs that our minds and bodies are struggling to navigate the chaotic nature of cumulative stress and is playing out in our trauma response systems.
So to those who are struggling to name their experiences as “trauma” because that word should be reserved for the really bad stuff, perhaps it’s time to expand our definitions. When we use the word “trauma”, we aren’t attempting to make comparisons between your suffering and someone else’s, nor are we assuming that your response is worse, or better than theirs. All we are saying is that, as Bessel Van der Kolk rightly claimed, the body keeps the score. Trauma lodges itself within us, and until we are able to label it as such, we won’t be able to move forward.
Wanna discover more? There’s an Ebook for that! I’ve thrown together some helpful thoughts on the nature of trauma. You can check it out here.
