“But other people have experienced so much worse.”  

It seems true when we say it even though really it’s “comparing apples to oranges.”  If you find yourself wondering if your trauma “counts” as much as other people’s, you’re not alone. As we hear about the experiences others have endured, we can give ourselves a hard time over something we don’t believe should have been traumatic. 

When you attempt to push through this way, you’re buying into two problematic ideas. The first is that, “it wasn’t that bad,” identifies trauma as being in the event that happened in your past. The second is it gives too much weight to the idea of “Big T vs little t” trauma.

Shifting focus from the event

“Trauma is not what happens to you; it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you” Gabor Maté

I know this pattern in myself: we can shame ourselves over “what happens inside” as if we could simply change our reaction through will power or some imagined internal-fortitude. We can get angry or impatient with the symptoms in our body or the resulting patterns of behavior that we’ve developed after a traumatic experience: chronic pain, issues with posture and coordination, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, dissociation, obsessive thoughts to name a few. 

“We orient, dodge, duck, stiffen, brace, retract, fight, flee, freeze, collapse, etc. All of these coordinated responses are somatically based- they are things that the body does to protect and defend itself. It is when these orienting and defending responses are overwhelmed that we see trauma.” Peter Levine

What’s happening inside is a natural reaction and very probably was the most intelligent solution you had available to you at some time in the past. Trauma can be thought of as an ongoing pattern of response to threat. Telling yourself, “I shouldn’t feel this way” is an attempt to squash your system’s natural response for attempting to keep you safer.  When we try to suppress our system’s natural responses, they tend to build up pressure inside and come out other ways. Telling ourselves, “it wasn’t that bad,” may help us push through in the short-term, but we will likely pay later (and with interest.)

Big T / little t

I tried all the above strategies out over the years and still fall into them on occasion. Even as I was working with the difficult experiences of my childhood I resisted the word trauma as overstating the case. I was buying into the idea that there are different levels of trauma that simply correlate with “Big T” trauma experiences, vs. “small t” traumas. 

“Big T’ are the kind of experiences most people in our culture wouldn’t hesitate to call traumatic, an accident, attack, abuse, etc. What constitutes a little t trauma depends on who you ask and how much weight they give to bullying, difficult medical interventions, a pet dying, etc. Of course, there are differences, but it doesn’t help us to compare our traumas to others because, (at risk of repeating this too many times) trauma is not in the event. You may surprised (relieved?) to learn that repeated “little t” traumas can be as impactful or more on individual people’s lives than single “Big T” ones. 

“One of the most overlooked aspects of small ‘t’ traumas is their accumulated effect. While one small ‘t’ trauma may not lead to significant distress, multiple compounded small ‘t’ traumas, particularly in a short span of time, are more likely to lead to an increase in distress and trouble with emotional functioning.”  Elyssa Barbash P.h.D. Psychology Today 

Relief 

I’ll invite you to read Gabor Maté’s quote again. “Trauma is not what happens to you; it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.”  What do you feel in your body as you read this idea? You may experience a whole host of things, but one thing that I and many clients have found in this idea is some measure of relief. The events of your past  need not be evaluated to see if they measure up to real trauma. Perhaps you too can find some relief as you begin to put down the minimizing, holding, tensing, shaming, that comes with this way of thinking/acting that isn’t serving you any longer. When we put down those self-punishing patterns, the space to work on healing opens up further.