Asteria

If you were traumatized by what happened, that impact is real even if it isn’t anyone’s fault. There are situations where everyone involved does their best with the information and abilities they have and someone still experiences trauma.

Abuse is not the only traumatic experience, just a common one. Not having your needs met for totally blameless reasons can be traumatic. Having your autonomy taken away by illness or other random chance can be traumatic. Many traumatizing experiences can happen when you’re utterly alone. Even ‘ordinary experiences’ can be traumatic in some contexts.

There’s no reason for trauma that’s ‘too silly’. If you’re traumatized, it’s not because you’re ‘too sensitive’ and it doesn’t automatically mean you’re minimizing other people’s experiences.

You’re allowed to acknowledge your trauma. You’re allowed to look at experiences you’ve had through the lens of trauma. You’re allowed to grieve and process your traumatic experiences even if you don’t understand why they were traumatic or if similar experiences didn’t tramautize others you know.

Cultural appropriation also causes a process known in anthropology as crystallization, where the tradition gets ‘frozen’ in time like a museum display and can no longer evolve according to the needs of the people in the culture, effectively taking it away from them.

There have also been cases where the appropriation of a tradition is misrepresentative to the point where the people in the culture are no longer allowed to do it without experiencing racism or discrimination, which also prevents the people in the culture from practicing their own traditions.

So there are various ways you can “steal” cultural traditions without physically taking them.