#traumathings

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.

Do you have any advice for dealing with those? It always hugely throws me off and it takes a while to get back to what I was doing beforehand

YEP I know it lol

well, this is just my experience as someone who doesn’t dissociate very often.

to me it feels like a wave is pulling my attention/consciousness somewhere else. Most people have felt a minor form of it when you’re “spacing out” and then come back to it. That’s dissociation, it just lasts longer and it’s much harder to snap out of. You can’t really control it either. I’ve had various forms of it happening over time, but on the mildest, for me, it’s just this irresistible pull to space out. The difference is that even if you continue doing something, or idk browsing the internet or whatever, that feeling of being spaced out doesn’t fade. You can’t come out of it even if you try to focus on something. I often dissociate during class, and so BECAUSE I am specifically trying my hardest to stay present, it makes me feel really sleepy. It’s not real sleepiness, if the class ended that exact moment the sleepiness would disappear, it’s what happens to me when I try to fight my dissociation. Most of the time I just give in to it and wait it out.

I’ve had derealization exactly one time, and it was weird as hell, and depersonalization I felt right after one of my traumas happened.

Most of the time that I dissociate like, day-to-day is actually when I’m either in class, or when I see someone else dissociating and/or describing it very vividly. I’ve seen someone explain this as dissociation is a protection mechanism, and when you see someone else dissociating your brain goes “why are they dissociating, is there something I should be escaping/running from/scared of?” and then you dissociate as well, just in case lol

It can also happen when I force my hand on remembering certain traumas, or I linger too long on the memories for whatever reason, but that doesn’t usually happen cause I am running from my trauma memories like satan from the cross so

I think that because I’m also a maladaptive daydreamer I’m particularly susceptible to dissociation mentions. I once said that I thought it was the word dissociation, but it’s actually mentions of dissociation, not the word itself. I’m lightly dissociated just cause we’re talking abt it lmao

Well, normally I would advise to avoid the trigger, but since you literally can’t, then my advice is to try and re-signify the holiday to ease the triggers. Basically you need to try and attach some different meaning to Christmas, and with time, the positive meaning will be stronger than the triggering one.

A good way to do that is to create a personal tradition around that time. It can be whatever you want, it just needs to be positive and self-motivated. Start cooking yourself a huge dinner Christmas night with several days worth of planning. Plan an entire day dedicated to certain activities, like going out to get coffee, watching a movie, then playing some games. Whatever you enjoy doing and can be done every year is a good bet. Since it only happens once a year it might take some time for the tradition to stick, but once it does the trauma associated with that time will start getting less “air time” and you will have something else that is positive to focus on. Since you can’t really escape the Christmas theme, it’s best to re-signify the entire thing to mean something else.

hey there. well trauma reactions is just the term I created to describe some things, I’m honestly not sure it is “a thing” in real trauma psychology you know

but what I mean by that is when you’re talking to someone, maybe a new friend, a new crush, basically someone you don’t know well enough yet. And they say or do something that in some way, shape or form, reminds a part of your brain of your trauma. I’ll give you a real example that happened to me. 

I was talking to someone from tinder. We went on a date, but after that I wasn’t feeling like there were romantic feelings. It felt like a friendship. I thought that it would be best to let them know that, just in case they felt differently, since I still wanted to be friends.

However rejecting someone or telling them I am not interested triggered a huge trauma reaction because last fucking time I tried to do that, a traumatic event happened. So I spent days anxious, trying to mentally prepare what I was gonna say, trying to pass over scenarios in my head of what could go on, dreading the act of telling them. But the thing is, they never gave me ANY reason to believe they would react poorly to me saying this. It was entirely motivated by my trauma and nothing on reality, so I call it a trauma reaction. In the end it went alright, but I still reacted like it wouldn’t because trauma told me otherwise.

Another example of this is trying to explain to someone why you need them to go slowly on dating, and then tripping over your words and getting crazy anxious and giving way more explanations than you need, even tho the person hasn’t even asked for any explanations, because you’re used to having to explain every little thing you do and if it’s not a “good enough” explanation you won’t be listened to.

Another example is when you were berated growing up for saying no, so now instead of being to the point and just telling someone you don’t wanna do something, you beat around the bush and start going in circles trying to communicate something simple because you’re afraid of what the consequence would be to just outright saying no. There are a lot of examples, but I think this illustrates well.

Basically trauma reactions are anything you do motivated by past trauma instead of the current circumstance you are actually in. The best way to notice this is when the person reacts completely different than what you expected (because what you were expecting was abuse). Then the trauma reaction becomes very obvious. It might have another name lol But that’s how I call it

(2/2) I'm just very new to this, and don't know what i should and shouldn't do. I just want to understand myself and properly avoid things. Also unrelated but, it's a bit hard to read your description with the light background and text.

Hi anon, I’ve changed the font color, hopefully it’s a bit easier to read.

Alright, so I’m not a therapist. Like at all. I’m just a regular human being with a blog. I’m not even in the same realm as being qualified to process someone else’s trauma, that’s not something to take lightly. Here’s the thing. Trauma is a very pervasive thing. Sometimes you think it’s not affecting you anymore (or at all), to then realize it has changed the core way you interpret the world and deal with it so deeply you don’t even realize it because it is normalized. Specially traumas that happened very further back. 

If the trauma seems to not be affecting your life, digging thru it or trying to remember it may cause it to come back full force and that can give you a brand new batch of PTSD. Sometimes the reason we are “”non-affected”” (see no noticeable effects) by a trauma is because it has been suppressed. Trying to work thru a trauma by yourself or with someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing might cause retraumatization or it may cause the trauma that was suppressed to come back (the memories) and that is not something that should be done outside a safe, professional setting. A trauma that hasn’t been processed and is so suppressed you can’t remember it right can absolutely trigger PTSD if you dig enough that you actually remember it again.

So the reason people avoid triggers isn’t because having triggers by itself is a bad thing. It’s because triggers are incredibly distressing. They create a reaction that if strong enough, can last for days on end. They can usually cause flashbacks which are akin to reliving your trauma. They can trigger emotions such as fear and disgust and terror and people don’t usually want to deal with that on a regular basis. So they avoid their triggers. If you don’t even remember the trauma well, findings what triggers you have is gonna have to rely solely on the reaction you have to things, when that reaction doesn’t seem to match what caused it. It might not be that straight forward. It might not even be related to that specific trauma.

Basically, if you truly think your traumas aren’t affecting your life that severely (or that old one is), leave them alone until you can find a therapist or some kind of professional help. You shouldn’t try to mess with an old trauma unless you know what you are doing. Usually therapists are very good in uncovering to us how an old trauma might actually be affecting us now. The point in processing a trauma is so the triggers are diminished and the trauma causes less distress in the person’s life. If the trauma in question is not causing noticeable distress, then it can wait until you find a therapist to help you with it.

I’m gonna be honest, I don’t deal with my traumas at all. Most of my traumas are distressing enough that just remembering a small part of it can trigger me. The traumas I try to process on my own are exclusively the ones who didn’t give me PTSD (a.k.a the old ones who gave me C-PTSD instead lmao). Even trying to remember the details of my trauma that my brain has already suppressed would distress me to no end. I am legitimately waiting until we can go out again to go look for my new therapist to help me with this. I have no desire to look at my traumas on my own, I need help. Older traumas can merge into your brain’s regular operation so much you might be unable to actually tell them apart from yourself at this point. That’s why therapists are useful, they will point out to you things that you’re used to already but that are less than... healthy.

So basically, I encourage you to try and find a therapist. IF a trauma YOU FULLY REMEMBER is not too distressing to you or isn’t the culprit in a recent case of PTSD, you can try to journal about it, how it makes you feel or record a video of yourself talking about it (as if you were filming an youtube video) because that can kinda work as a mini therapy, to help you realize things about what you’re saying. Otherwise don’t touch it with a 10 foot pole lol

(that doesn’t mean never touch the trauma ever again, but preferably do it when you have access to a therapist)

Okay, so you’re gonna have to communicate with your SO prior to the trigger happening to be able to properly address it. Everyone interacts with their triggers differently, and so it’s important for you to discuss with them: 1) what they would like you NOT to do if they get triggered in general 2) what do they think would help them best in that moment 3) and then you do exactly what they told you. Because triggers are as plentiful as sand in the beach, there’s no unified advice I can give you other than ask your SO what they would like you to do at those times. Also because not all flashbacks are created the same, they might experience a type of flashback that any advice I offer isn’t good for. I personally never get body sensations as flashbacks but some people do, so you need to know how their flashbacks manifest.

Most of the time, removing the trigger if possible is best, and if not possible removing them from the situation to a calmer place/circumstance will help. I personally would not like to be touched if I’m having certain flashbacks but a heavy blanket or a jacket would actually help. So it’s important that you discuss what their most common triggers are, so you might be aware if you encounter them, and what would they prefer you do if they do get triggered.