29/05/2024
A note on Trauma:
Trauma doesn't need to be something big. Sometimes it's as small as someone not understanding you when you really, really need them to. Sometimes, we can experience something shocking like a natural disaster and not have a trauma response. Trauma is not what happens to you; it's how you become affected by what happens to you.
So often, I get clients who tell me about a situation in which their needs were constantly not met, that they felt unseen and unheard and invalidated. They then say, "but it's not so bad, people have it so much worse than me." But life isn’t a game of comparison. Sometimes things just hurt. They hurt more than we believe they should. We tell ourselves we shouldn’t be so hurt, so we add shame of being too sensitive on top of the original wound.
Let me ask you something. Did it hurt? Notice I'm not asking you, "should it have hurt?" I'm simply asking, did it hurt? If it hurt, and it was hurting for a long time, and the ongoingness of that hurt rewired your brain to become less trusting of yourself and others, then no matter how trivial it seems, you still had a trauma response to that.
It's okay to admit it made the world a little less light. Once you admit that, then the next step is to process the pain. How do you do that? You sit with it. You don’t judge it, or tell it it's too dramatic. You simply let it be. You admit to yourself how much it made you feel damaged, even if you think another person wouldn’t agree.
If you need a Safe Space to talk about what hurt, and to be heard and seen, no matter how trivial you think it was, then I am a therapist here in Warrnambool, and can help you. To read more about me, check out my profile here: https://www.safespace.group/about-5-1
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