When I first speak about trauma with my clients, one of the most common responses I hear is some version of “what happened to me wasn’t so bad – it’s not like I went to war or had a car accident”, or “other people had it worse.”
It makes sense that most people associate post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with war. After all, much of the work in recognising PTSD as an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was largely driven by the symptoms seen in soldiers returning from the Vietnam war. Most people understand the veteran returning from war and hearing a car backfire may experience flashbacks to their time in the war. But the impact of trauma is not restricted to returning soldiers or the survivors of motor vehicle accidents (MVA).
The reality is that almost anything can be traumatic, if it was something that felt overwhelming, and if you felt alone. These events may include being bullied at school, a difficult medical experience, a betrayal by someone you trusted, discrimination, or toxic workplace environments. It is your internal experience of the event and its impact on your nervous system that shapes whether an event is traumatic.
The idea that trauma may not look like a major disaster can feel like a particularly foreign concept for those who have spent their formative years in an unhealthy environment. It is difficult to identify when something is amiss about your environment, if that is the only world you have ever known. Unhealthy family dynamics or growing up in rigid religious or cultural structures can have deep impact on how someone understands the world, other people, or themselves, and at critical developmental stages. Therefore, the impact can be broader and more extensive: if you experience a MVA as an adult after a generally safe and happy childhood, you will have likely developed many more protective resources than if you have never known what it is like to feel safe at all.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study demonstrates that the greater number of adverse experiences you have before the age of 18, the more likely it is that you will experience negative physical and psychological health outcomes. This makes sense as the trauma experienced in childhood is typically interpersonal (that is, between people), and repetitive, and occurs in a critical developmental learning period with vulnerable brain structures, others and themselves. This repeated traumatisation can even create psychological injury that goes beyond PTSD into something that is more complex and encompassing, into what is known as complex PTSD (I will address the differences between PTSD and complex PTSD in a future post).
A child who is constantly criticised for example, can carry a profound sense of worthlessness with them into adulthood, that they may try to compensate for through perfectionism or perhaps by never trying at all. A child who suffers physical, verbal, sexual or emotional harm by an adult that should have been safe is likely to form beliefs about the untrustworthiness of people. They may also simultaneously believe they are responsible for the harm (e.g., ‘if only I was a better-behaved child’, ‘I was a naughty kid’, ‘it was something about me’) because it is often safer for a child to believe that the problem lies with themselves and not their caregivers: if it’s about you, then perhaps you can change in some way to prevent the abuse.
One lesser-known type of traumatising environment is a high control environment, characterised by factors such as the importance of being loyal to authority, acceptance depending on compliance to particular rules, and being taught to distrust your own agency. Whilst high levels of control may be found in all types of abusive environments, they can also be found in environments not typically considered abusive, such as religious structures.
Although religious belief has been demonstrated to often enhance psychological and emotional wellbeing, religious settings also have the potential to cause spiritual and moral harm. For example, fear of eternal damnation may drive chronic anxiety and scrupulosity, whilst those who have trouble reconciling their spiritual and sexual identities may experience intense shame, fear and internal conflict. Indeed, normal sexuality may become associated with intense guilt or disgust if strict standards of sexual purity are emphasised.
So, if you’ve ever caught yourself thinking “what happened to me wasn’t so bad”, or if you’ve ever compared your experience to someone else’s and found yourself thinking that you should be coping better, it might be worth questioning where that idea comes from.
It can also be genuinely difficult to accept that the environment that shaped you, the one that taught you what ‘normal’ looked like, was traumatising. That difficulty isn’t a sign that it’s wrong to notice it. Recognising this often means reconsidering your relationship with people, beliefs, or systems you were taught to trust without question – and that reconsideration takes time and courage.
Trauma comes in many different shapes and forms, and understanding this is a small but important step toward shifting the conversation from there is something wrong with me to I’m having a normal human response to a traumatic experience.