Important discussion on how Indigenous trauma is a form of settler capital.
Tag: trauma
You don’t have to be grateful that it isn’t worse.
read that.
read it again, and again, and again.
somebody, somewhere, always has it worse than you. there is one person on this planet that has it the worst of all, and that person is NOT the only person allowed to be unhappy with their lot.
if things are bad for you, they are bad for you. period.
This goes for trauma as well. A lot of times survivors get trapped in a cycle of minimizing/diminishing their trauma because “other people have it worse” – but there is no hierarchy of trauma. There is no ranking system for which traumas are “better” or “worse.” Your trauma is valid. Period.
IMPORTANT TRUTHS.
As a therapist, lemme just say: almost every trauma survivor I’ve ever had has at some point said “But I didn’t have it as bad as some people” and then talked about how other types of trauma are worse. Even my most-traumatized, most-abused, most psychologically-injured clients say this.
The ones who were cheated on, abandoned, and neglected say this. The ones who were in dangerous accidents/disasters say this. The ones who were horrifyingly sexually abused say this. The ones who were brutally beaten say this. The ones who were psychologically tortured for decades say this. What does that tell you? That one of the typical side-effects of trauma is to make you believe that you are unworthy of care.
Don’t buy into it, because it’s nonsense. It doesn’t matter if someone else had it “worse.” Every person who experiences a trauma deserves to get the attention and care they need to heal from it.
“one of the typical side-effects of trauma is to make you believe that you are unworthy of care.”
SO true.
A note on the topic of trauma that I personally found helpful in accepting the idea that I am a trauma victim is that one of the most widely accepted facts in the field of trauma research is that abuse is often not the common factor in whether somebody will develop ptsd.
Many people can go through awful things without developing trauma based disorders as long as they receive compassion and support in processing those events as they happen. The most common factor in developing something like ptsd is emotional neglect. And emotional neglect on it’s own can be enough.
Whatever you went through was enough I promise, you’re not overreacting. Abuse and neglect are traumatic at any level, you don’t need to have gone through the worst possible experience you can think of to develop ptsd. If it hurt you then it hurt you.
…..oh.
My mom is from New York City. She was taking the subway alone at the
age of six. As a young woman in the ‘70s, she went gallivanting God
knows where until God knows when, and she (obviously) lived to talk
about it.At that time, as she tells it, the vanguard of
women’s advancement was on her side. Go West, young woman! Get out there
and seek your fortune. Dance all night and flirt with strangers – and
if you want to do more than flirt, that’s no one’s business but yours.
Ambient “everything is terrible and you’ll definitely get raped”
messages were a relic of her Catholic parents and the associated Old
Guard. They were framed, explicitly, as regressive, as part of
the patriarchal structures that kept women’s heads down and their hands
busy with housework. Defying them was what young Boomer womanhood was
all about.….This essay goes a little wrong, but please read it anyway.
I’m not a woman, but…. for what it’s worth, I’m a survivor. I agree with every bit of what funereal-disease has to say here. The idea that Trauma Is The End, it is the Worst Thing and if you’ve had it you are Collapsed Forever- it’s the worst thing. It’s the thing that’s kept me from recovering more than anything else.
Reblogging partly for that very important point.
I have dealt with other trauma. But, one thing that really struck me when I was in my early teens and had some other things badly misinterpreted as signs of a very specific trauma history? The repeated insistence that feeling dirty and damaged is only normal and to be expected. It was hard not to feel under pressure to respond that way.
Or to get too far away from the idea that this might also be projection from the people who kept bringing it up, unprompted. They were obviously thinking about that so much more than I ever would have on my own. (Beyond some of the rest of the actually harmful regressive ideas there.)
Not to go off on too much of a tangent here, but that does still seem to be such a common attitude, particularly dealing with people affected by certain types of trauma. No matter how good people think their intentions are, messages of brokenness are just not likely to be helpful.
In that particular example, I can only imagine that the whole experience would likely have been way more actually damaging for someone who was also trying to deal with the presumed Horrible Life-Warping Trauma in reality. It messed me up bad enough, and I was afraid of what kind of reception talking about real traumatic experiences might get after that for too many years.
More commonly, repeated abuse is not actively sought out but rather is passively experienced as a dreaded but unavoidable fate and is accepted as the inevitable price of relationship. Many survivors have such profound deficiencies in self-protection they can barely imagine themselves in a position of agency or choice. The idea of saying no to the emotional demands of a parent, spouse, lover, or authority figure may be practically inconceivable. Thus, it is not uncommon to find adult survivors who continue to minister to the wishes and needs of those who once abused them and who continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or limits.
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery
(via thatdiabolicalfeminist)
(via thatdiabolicalfeminist)
Why does trauma (especially long term) cause
anxiety and paranoia that seem completely illogical? a theoryA lot of us have
experienced severe anxiety in paranoia in seemingly normal circumstances,
simply by being around strangers or in public places, when we’re required to
socialize, when we’re trying to do a task or strive towards something we want
to achieve. We consciously know these circumstances are most likely not
harmful, and our fear seems illogical or greatly exaggerated. When the
circumstances are somehow connected or similar to our trauma, then it’s
explained, but sometimes it can go so far that 90% of activities are impossible
to do, there are places we cannot go, there are experiences we can no longer
have, to the point where it’s alienating, isolating, and sabotaging our life.So why does this
happen, how does trauma affect us to cause all this?1. Brain learns from experiences.
Your own, personal
experiences, not other people’s, and it will take your experiences into account
way above what other people say or what is considered normal. If trauma has
happened in certain circumstances to you directly, it no longer matters that
other people consider it safe or feel there is very feeble possibility of
getting hurt, for you these odds have been turned into 100% danger and threat,
and that is a very strong learning experience. Your brain has learned in very
painful way both that you can be severely damaged in certain circumstances, and
that what people have said about it not being dangerous, isn’t true anymore.2. Traumatic experiences which are not fully
remembered, nor fully processed, not fully analyzed, understood, put into
perspective, and have leftover feelings to be expressed from, cannot be fully
learned from.So, your brain doesn’t have a full, clean,
clear and conscious record of an experience, but what it does have is a record
of danger, terror, threat to survival, pain, possibility of death, connected to
partial memories, partial circumstances, vague situations. Brain’s job is to
keep you alive, and from this memory, your brain has detected threat to
survival, but can’t really process it or decide in which situation this threat
applies, and in which it doesn’t, so what does brain do in the meantime, while
it processes and analyzes the situation correctly? Mark every single thing that
connects in any way to the trauma, as deadly. And this is the right thing to
do, only way to survive, becuase your brain is not wrong. Some of the circumstances and situations you avoid could
potentially be deadly, maybe it’s 2% of what you’re scared of, but in current
state you cannot safely analyze which out of those are truly dangerous, so your
brain makes sure you avoid them all. Your brain will not take into account what
is socially acceptable, what others consider safe, what should be logically
safe, because that no longer matters once you’ve ended up in life danger
believing in those social pointers. All of that no longer matters, your brain
is developing your own system of recognizing danger, and it’s safest to assume
everything is danger until you acquire more precise information.This is why processing trauma and getting a
clearer picture of what happened helps more than exposing yourself to
environments that feel dangerous. You can go and force your brain to learn from
new experiences and to check by exposing yourself to danger to see if you die
or not (which is torture), or, you can gather more information, avoid the
triggers and dangerous places until you know for sure what happened to you and
what allowed it and how in the future to prevent it, wait until your memories
are more full and connected and some of the perceived threats will clear up,
also for the sake of putting the danger into perspective, you’ll need statistic
of actual amount of people who got hurt in these environments, and under what
circumstances, your brain needs references to put your trauma into perspective,
and it is comforting to know that you’re not the only one. Take the time to
gain some recovery from your own situation until you are sure that if the same
thing repeated, you would be able to recover from it, and wouldn’t die. And
then, you can decide if it’s worth exposing yourself to these environments
again. Sometimes, it is not. Recovery doesn’t have to mean you can again go all
places without feeling fear. It can mean you now know where the danger is, and
you know better than to expose yourself to it.*when I say “life danger” it doesn’t
only apply to situations where you could be killed or injured by another
person, it applies to situation where you could go thru such painful experience
you end up wishing you were dead and thus in danger of commiting suicide, it’s
a psychological death danger and a very real threat.3. Your
instincs are not as wrong or illogical as society perceives them.You’ll notice that when you’re in a more
vulnerable, distressed, triggered or otherwise sensitive state, the amount of
anxiety and paranoia will increase. This is not you just being even more
illogical, these instincts are in the right place. Current society isn’t
adapted to care about not harming people who are vulnerable and sensitive, and
will not treat an individual with compassion and care when they appear distressed or in need of understanding and safety, it is likely that people will trigger
and hurt you, invalidate your struggles and make you feel much worse than you
initially felt, among with impressing their social opinion that all of your
instincts and fears are wrong. That is the last thing you need when you’re
already feeling awful. So, if you have the urge to spend a week (or month, or
year) inside of your room, not speaking to anyone, that most likely is what
would be the safest course of action for you, and would enable you to process
your experience without someone inflicting their own opinion or judgment on
you.If your instincts get alarmed whenever you’re
faced with a person of authority, because you’ve suffered abuse from people who
have power over you? You are exactly right, people with power and authority
have proven to be harmful in endless occassions, it would take further research
to see in which circumstances they cannot allow themselves to be harmful, and
until you know for sure, all of them are going to be scary.If you’ve been living in long term abusive
environment your brain has been wired to survival mode and has learned to
perceive the world as a dangerous place in order to keep you alive, it would be
insane to expect you to re-wire it, without getting reliable information of new
sets of dangers, and, there are always new sets of dangers.I feel the bigger problem than people feeling
anxiety, paranoia and danger in certain circumstances, is that society insists
they should stop feeling that way, or that their fears are illogical. This
seems to stem from the conviction that it would be bad for people to
acknowledge the existence of danger and potential threat, because it isn’t very
comfortable to know that there are dangers even in most common places. It is
upsetting that the safety of traumatized individuals is being dismissed, and
instead, requirement for them to act socially acceptable, for their feelings to
be convenient, easy to handle and in order with social norms, is being forced
on them. If there was truly no danger,
nobody would be getting hurt or traumatized. We are the proof that the danger
exists.
long term effects of emotional abuse:
- a distrust in your perceptions
- a tendency to be fearful or on guard
- self-consciousness or fear of how you are coming across
- an inability to be spontaneous
- a distrust of people and in future relationships
- anger that bursts out unexpectedly
- sensitivity to anyone trying to control you
“everyone’s been through trauma!” no, no they haven’t. hardship ≠ trauma.
trauma is described by the dsm as “outside the normal range of human experiences”
OUTSIDE. THE NORMAL RANGE. OF HUMAN EXPERIENCES
that’s… an unusual definition, because trauma to many people includes family dying for example and most people… probably have experienced something like that?
and i mean even if it’s not most people there are millions of people who have trauma so to say that’s “out of the range of normal human experience” is weird, and i also don’t understand the purpose of saying that
OP… your post legit only applies to like financially stable people in positions of power socially…
Sexual abuse, domestic violence, parental neglect, psychological abuse, sexual assault, etc. are traumatic no matter how you spin it, but for disabled people, people of color, lgbt people, poor people, etc. Those are completely normal experiences. They are average. A large amount of people who fit those categories go through them or witness them happening to someone close to them.
For whole groups of people, trauma is entirely normal.
Abuse and assault are normal. Being poor is normal. Bigotry and Discrimination are normal.
Maybe if you come from a middle class family in the suburbs trauma isn’t normal but otherwise: it’s normal.
The kids on tumblr you’re convinced don’t know what real trauma is have probably actually gone through some real violence and terror in their lives.
One maladaptive coping mechanism that turns very toxic when you’re
not defending against abuse is to read any uncomfortable situation as a
deliberate personal attack, and sometimes extrapolate one incident into a
whole pattern of malicious intent.Examples:
- “Hey, I have a headache, could you please lower your voice a little?”
– “FINE I guess I just won’t say anything at all!”- “Hey thanks for inviting me, but I’m not feeling well, so I’m sorry but I can’t make it. Maybe (x day) instead?”
– “Sorry for asking! I guess I’m just too needy for you!”- (Someone forgets to call you back.)
– “Yeah I don’t think we’re friends anymore, she acts like she hates me.”- “Hey, what you just said about me was literally not true. Why did you say that?”
– “Right, I’m just a piece of shit who should never talk at all I guess!”- “I don’t really feel like sex tonight.”
– “Sorry I’m so repulsive to you!”- “You really hurt my feelings. Why did you do that?”
– ”Go ahead and just break up with me, I know you’ve been wanting to.”This kind of response escalates an interaction from a two-way conversation about a specific problem into a fight about your own self-worth. Instead of reponding to what’s actually happening or interrogating whether an attack was intended, this response immediately changes the conversation into a defensive argument where the only relevant question is if you’re an okay person that people care about.
Like I get feeling this
kind of reaction, I get having a knee-jerk response of fear and shame
and self-loathing. Sometimes when you’re feeling vulnerable it is very,
very difficult not to read super far into anything negative. Sometimes
it just reflects off all your internal fears and amplifies inside of you
until a polite “no” feels like everyone you’ve ever liked is telling
you they hate you.But it is possible, with some work, to
separate your feelings from your actual knowledge of the situation. It’s
possible to feel one thing in your heart and still recognize with your
mind that the reality is different. You can learn to notice the
difference between someone actually attacking you and something just
feeling like an attack because you’re extra vulnerable.You
can also learn not to react based solely on your feelings. You can learn
to take another person’s actual words and actions into account and
respond based on what you think – not just feel – their intent actually was. That work is
as necessary as it is difficult.People need to be able to tell
you things that aren’t overwhelmingly positive without you making them
feel guilty for saying anything and treating their concerns as an
attack.Otherwise, you wind up in a position where they can’t be honest with you. They can’t say no to you, can’t tell you when something you do hurts or scares them, can’t point out worrying things as
friends do to take care of each other, can’t bring up their own needs without the conversation devolving into comforting you again.This habit interacts especially badly with
the way many other trauma survivors are terrified of upsetting anyone –
when your reaction to them bringing up problems or saying no is consistently disproportionate, they may
find it easier to just do what you want even against their own will.It is possible to deal with those awful feelings and get the comfort you need without resorting to lashing out when you feel bad. It’s okay to be honest about the fact your emotions don’t always line up with reality so people know what you’re going through. It’s okay to just ask for the emotional support you need or for confirmation that they mean what they say.
You may even find that when you make a continuous effort not to treat these uncomfortable experiences as crises, they deescalate and you wind up feeling more secure each time.
Look, this coping mechanism, like many forms of manipulation, is a useful survival tool in the context of an abusive relationship where you really are being attacked insidiously, and where you can’t just ask for comfort and expect to get it. But if you are no longer in that kind of situation, it’s time to reevaluate the usefulness/danger ratio and figure out what other strategies might be better for you and the people you love.
i have people in my life who act like this and i know they have valid reasons to do so but it’s also so, so stressful to deal with!!!!!
PTSD is your brain trying to make sure you DON’T DIE.
Humans are really good at adapting so that we don’t die. That’s kind of our whole *THING*. We adapt.
If something BAD and SCARY and DANGEROUS happens, your brain tries to teach you to react better next time. If the Bad Scary Dangerous thing happens a lot, that’s reinforcing it. With CPTSD, the Bad Scary Dangerous thing happened often enough and frequently enough that your whole psyche developed around it.
You learn to notice the tiny things that signal the Bad Scary Dangerous Thing might happen – even if you don’t consciously know that you know that – so that you are braced to react and defend yourself. They become triggers so that you are primed to respond.
Hypervigilance? Better to panic unnecessarily than to get dead because you didn’t recognize a threat in time, right? It’s uncomfortable and a waste of energy but you’re not dead.
Nightmares about the Bad Thing? Dreams are PRACTICE. You are trying to learn how to react better or faster or more effectively next time.
Avoidance? Dissociating is better than just completely breaking and shutting down entirely.
The thing is, even if you are not in that situation anymore, your brain did not get the memo. It is trying! But it takes a lot of work to convince it that “No really, it is safe now!”
I guess what I’m saying is cut yourself some slack. You are doing your best and you’re not dead. ❤
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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