#dearevantransen

Like I know I went through stuff and I have severe trauma, but sometimes I just feel like what I went through "wasn't enough" or like I don't deserve to feel the way I do. Is that normal? I hate these feelings, but are they justified?

The “my trauma wasn’t enough” is literally the single most common thing I’ve seen abuse victims say. Every single one, without fail, have some iteration of “but that shouldn’t have felt this bad”.

Let me tell you something about how trauma happens. Trauma occurs when something that overwhelms your brain’s ability to handle and process stuff happens. Have you ever seen someone or tried yourself to “choose” what your brain can or can’t process? Have you ever chosen what your brain can or cannot “handle” at any given time? I don’t think so. Because those are not “choosable” things.

Basically, whatever your brain can’t cope with, it can’t cope with. Whether that is someone pushing you in the playground or someone stabbing you. If something isn’t “bad enough” to overwhelm your brain, trauma simply does not happen. It is processed and handled like any another memory. Not to say that it can’t be bad or heartbreaking. But trauma is a specific thing. If trauma exists, then what happened was bad enough to cause trauma. Had it not been, no trauma would be there.

The real gag is that people’s perception of “bad enough” is not factual, it’s simply cultural and societal. We think some things are bad enough, and some things aren’t, and we expect our brain to follow those neat guidelines of what is an acceptable thing to be traumatized over. You can be traumatized that someone kicked you into the ground. You can’t be traumatized that someone bumped into you. You can be traumatized that you lost all your money. You can’t be upset that a penny fell into a sink or something. The list goes on and on. But at the end of the day, our brain doesn’t care abt societal conventions. It doesn’t care that it “should” be able to handle losing a penny, or that it “should” be able to cope with being bumped into; it simply does what it CAN, and if it can’t cope with losing a penny then goddamn it can’t cope with it.

Things that come from trauma, along with ptsd and cptsd and a myriad of trauma related disorders and reactions are so specific and distinct from “healthy” and “neurotypical” that you can’t deny trauma’s existence, and if you can’t deny trauma’s existence, you can’t deny that what happened was damaging enough to cause it in the first place. Because if it wasn’t bad enough, well then, there would be no trauma to talk about.

Anyway, this is a convoluted way to say that yes it was 100% bad enough, there’s trauma, that’s all your proof. This feeling of “was it bad enough” is incredibly common, because abuse victims tend to blame themselves for their abuse. It’s not true. You need to validate your own trauma, because its very existence proves that your brain couldn’t handle what happened. And I for one am not someone to disregard what people tell me upsets them. Let alone what traumatized them. And you deserve to pay the same kindness and understanding to yourself.