Not Everything is Trauma, But We’ve All Been Through Experiences

It is difficult to place your trauma in the context of an unaccepting environment. Imagine feeling so many emotions but having to pretend that you feel fine when you feel so much worse. It also makes us lose our ability to pay attention

to what we are genuinely feeling!

Traumatic experiences are diverse. It often gets difficult for me to tell people what trauma can actually mean. Undergoing trauma or having been traumatised is a genuine, rather common human experience, it is a natural response of your body to anything painful.  

We have all faced tough times or have at least witnessed pain closely. We usually mould ourselves to respond to them in the best way possible but our mind and body holds onto them in the form of physical memories or mental pain. Eventually, we force shut these feelings away because we have supposedly moved on or that is the ideal thing to do. 

Responding the best way possible to trauma and suffering is often understood as a way of growing stronger out of a tragedy. This strength however is never measured in terms of becoming better at identifying and regulating the very human emotions. And that is a mental health failure when we try to keep awareness of trauma away from us. 

The more I learn about trauma the more I realise how we have all been through some form of trauma. If not personal, then shared trauma! In a world where being anything is difficult - being a woman, being a man, being a trans, belonging to a broken family, being financially weak, belonging to a particular religion, belonging to a caste, having a certain body type, having a certain skin colour and so on. 

It is difficult to place your trauma in the context of an unaccepting environment. Imagine feeling so many emotions but having to pretend that you feel fine when you feel so much worse. It also makes us lose our ability to pay attention to what we are genuinely feeling!

Gabor Mate formulates that trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside of you. Trauma is thus inclusive of all kinds of changes that happen inside of you in the face of pain. In psychology, we define pain as a subjective experience that involves sensory, emotional, and cognitive components. It can thus be anything that fractures our sense of being. Viewing your experiences with compassion and a sense of inclusivity helps us acknowledge and validate our trauma