Thoughts about Recovery, Trauma, and Comparing Ourselves to Others

A little off topic but this has been on my mind lately.

When I really talk and listen with my friends it’s amazing to me how many of us have been raped or assaulted during our lives. So many of us are carrying around unresolved trauma.

What trauma can do to us when we keep putting off dealing with it is to start to invade our every day lives. Standing at the fax machine the old wound suddenly shouts “pay attention to me now!” At times the intrusions of the past into the present become too persistent and too painful to ignore any longer.

Often in speaking with my friends, someone will say that she doesn’t feel she deserves therapy because her experience was “not that bad.” She thinks that she should be able to “just get over it already.” People who express this view generally compare their trauma to what others have been through. They might concentrate on the worst stories on the news or the harrowing experience of a friend. They judge themselves adversely for being so troubled by something they keep referring to as minor.

On a small scale this might be helpful--realizing the world is bigger than us is a good thing, counting the ways in which we are fortunate is a good thing. But if this self-destructive game causes us to ignore our own hurts, then the result can be bad. Just as accidentally cutting a finger while cooking is nothing compared to someone who loses a limb in a car accident, the assault we lived through may have been less violent, less traumatic, less painful, etc than what others have been through. But like the cut on the finger if we ignore it, then it might get worse. It might become infected, it might fester, it might spread poison to other parts of our bodies or our minds.In a competitive and not always caring culture it's important to remind ourselves that we aren't in a competition with anyone else. We don’t have to live through the worst thing imaginable. We don’t have to prove we’re the strongest, toughest, or most resilient. Our experiences take us where we are, as we are, and we move on from there. To use the accident metaphor again, two people might be in identical accidents, but one might be more seriously hurt. Pre-existing conditions factor in. The help, support, and response immediately following a traumatic factor in. Some people get up and walk away from harrowing falls, another person might trip on the sidewalk and break a bone. Sometimes we won’t ever know why one person might suffer more long term trauma than another.

We are not required to be the best at anything in the world, much less to be the best at recovering from terrible things we never thought could happen. What we should require of ourselves though is to keep working at feeling better. And at some point if ignoring the issue isn’t helping us to feel better, we need to reassess our approach and get the right kind of help and support.

Further, the idea of “not as bad as” has some inherent flaws. While we can say the less the violence the better, usually, each situation brings unique problems. While someone raped by an acquaintance might not struggle with the same level of trauma that someone violently raped by a stranger might face, there could be other fears and other types of psychic injuries involved. One particularly difficult thing about being hurt by someone we know and trust, in some cases by someone we love, is that it can undermine many types of relationships afterward. The lesson contained in it is that we can't trust our own feelings. This means that we are able to love and believe in someone who is capable of purposefully hurting us beyond all imagination. We start to love and trust again, but a nagging voice inside asks if we aren’t being foolish, surely it's safer to not love again.That’s just one example of course, there’s all kinds of fallout from any type of trauma and we should not ignore our own pain. Ignoring the pain can limit our joy in life, it can limit our productivity, it can hold us hostage.