02/10/2025
So true!
It takes years of work to rewire the nervous system after being in safe relationships, and unfortunately can be reversed in days of a dangerous relationship.
Find your safe people, as healing happens in safety.
**Trauma doesn't make people stronger.** It damages their nervous system. It hijacks their digestive tract. It keeps the person in a constant loop of hypervigilance.
To tell someone they are stronger because of trauma is to deny what it has cost them to survive.
When we romanticize trauma as something that “builds character” or “creates resilience,” we ignore the unseen toll it takes on the body and mind. Trauma is not a gift; it is a wound. It is a disruption to a person’s sense of safety, belonging, and self. It is the body being forced into survival mode long after the threat is gone. The heartbeat quickens at the sound of a slammed door, the stomach tightens at an unexpected text, sleep becomes fragile and shallow. This is not strength — this is survival physiology, a nervous system stuck on high alert.
Trauma often lingers in silence. The outside world might see someone who looks “resilient,” someone who continues with daily life, goes to work, raises a family, or shows up with a smile. But what is invisible are the migraines, the digestive issues, the exhaustion, the anxiety, the numbing, the dissociation. These are not the marks of strength gained; they are the scars of a body forced to adapt in ways it was never meant to sustain.
To say “you are stronger because of what you’ve been through” is to skip past the grief, the anger, the reality of what was lost. It risks silencing the person who longs to say: *this hurt me, this changed me, this took something from me that I will never get back.* Strength, if it shows up, is not a gift of the trauma — it is a testament to the human spirit that endures *despite* the trauma.
True healing begins not by glorifying suffering but by acknowledging the cost. It requires a safe space where pain can be named without being minimized, where survival can be honored without being mislabeled as strength. People deserve to be seen not just for how they’ve endured but for how much it has taken from them to endure.
Trauma doesn’t make people stronger. People are strong already — and trauma only shows us the devastating lengths they’ve had to go in order to survive.
