I didn’t start therapy to process my trauma. I just wanted a peaceful marriage and not to feel like I was drowning in motherhood and, well…life! I didn’t even know my history could be labeled trauma. It sounded so dramatic! Clearly, my experiences were not worthy of such a heavy description.
All I knew was that I couldn’t function in the same way others did. What should come easily and naturally, did not. I was overreactive, oversensitive, quick to despair, irritable, and negative. I panicked when having to socialize. I couldn’t connect with my children…or anyone really.
Always overwhelmed, I just felt out of control most of the time. I couldn’t recover from an argument and found myself often slumped into depression. My fatigue was debilitating and it was becoming impossible to come up with reasons to keep living.
Did I relate any of that to trauma? Hell no!
Beginning Trauma Therapy
Four years ago, I began this healing journey by ending decades of secrecy and confiding some of my pain in a friend. This led to multiple counselors and numerous therapy approaches…CBT, DBT, EMDR, IFS, bioenergetics, somatic therapy, and group therapy…. I often questioned whether the process of healing my trauma was worthwhile. I walked into sessions shaking and my heart raced – I dreaded it! Sure there were moments or days of feeling lighter – some relief, but many days I felt more distressed than where I began. I often stayed in bed regretting what I started.
Minimizing My Trauma Gave Me a Sense of Control
In my last post, I talked about the ways our minds and bodies store trauma memories differently and how this slows the pace of therapy. Early in therapy, I was not aware that I minimized and downplayed painful memories. It took a long time before my body found this awareness so that my patterns could change.
Minimizing a painful past is not an intentional choice. I had no idea that my symptoms were tied to experiences from decades earlier. I gave no weight to the times my cousins explored my young body. My mind said it was no big deal, certainly not worth uncovering at this point in life! It was just a dirty ugly memory with stupid curious boys. It also wasn’t worth telling anyone about the boy in high school who pushed me onto the sandy beach and raped me. My mind said surely I somehow caused this. My mind instinctively knew how to rationalize it, keeping my memories at bay all my life as something shameful I participated in.
Although my minimizing was unintentional, it allowed me to choose the size of my traumatic experiences. It was as if this coping mechanism gave me some control over what I chose to remember.
Minimizing trauma allowed me to rewrite the story to one that seemed less shameful. My brain said “It’s no big deal” to ensure the memories would never be worth speaking aloud, thus all the shame remained secret. It was an unconscious strategy.
Surely these experiences should mean nothing since the people who learned about them and other abuse incidents did nothing in response. Nobody helped me handle my big emotions. Nobody reported the abuse when it was found out years later. Nobody suggested help was available and my pain was valid. Nobody even looked in my eyes…much less ever mentioned it again. Shouldn’t the lack of response from those I most trusted prove to a young girl that these experiences were nothing!?
I didn’t choose those minimizing narratives to explain away the horrible memories, yet my mind created them anyway. We minimize our trauma because it is how we cope and keep showing up in life. It is not a conscious choice, but our brains and bodies instinctively work to avoid pain and remain accepted by others. It is a beautiful strategy for survival, but eventually, it is not enough.
After traumatic experiences, “we are left with an inadequate record of what happened, no felt sense of its being over and little awareness of how we endured it. If we have immediate support and safety afterward, we may be left shaken, but the events will feel behind us. If the events have been recurrent or we are young and vulnerable or have inadequate support, we can be left with a host of intense responses and symptoms that tell the story without words and without the knowledge that we are remembering events and feelings from long ago. “
Janina Fisher, Ph.D., The Trauma Model
Minimizing Trauma Allowed Me to Avoid What Seemed Impossible to Feel
By creating an “it’s no big deal story”, we are able to convince ourselves to stay silent. It feels our shame will grow exponentially if others know the truth. Humans are biologically wired for community and the possibility of social rejection is felt by the body as a severe risk to survival. Thus our brains work hard to bury the trauma – hoping that eventually all will be forgotten.
Ironically, the body never forgets unprocessed trauma, and the longer it is buried, the more rigid and extreme the symptoms become. The body keeps the score.
It was over a year into therapy before I mentioned my childhood abuse experiences. Minimizing kept me from understanding that my trauma memories were still impacting every aspect of my life. Without accurate stories and language, the memories continued to bore deep holes in my heart and aching body. My burdens were heavy but were buried so deeply and subconsciously, that my mind was clueless they even mattered.
Yet the way I lived, my behaviors, overreactions, and all of my choices continued to be ruled and impacted by what remained out of mind and unprocessed in my body. It took years of therapy to come to terms with the weight of all the experiences I minimized.
Minimizing Avoids Feeling Anger
“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”
—Mark Twain
I never felt the anger towards my perpetrators until years into therapy. It felt wrong to feel anger and especially to express it. In childhood, I implicitly learned that anger should be controlled and shut down, as it was offensive to others. During my abusive marriage, anger was met with retaliation, which gave me further confirmation that it was both wrong and risky. It took years for my body to feel enough safety through therapy to begin feeling and expressing my anger.
Sometimes We Minimize Due to Fear
When there are real frightening consequences that may result from sharing traumatic experiences, our brains minimize the experiences in an attempt to find safety. For individuals still living in abusive situations, this is a real threat, and exposing secrets may lead to retaliation from a perpetrator. It also feels like others won’t be able to grasp the severity of what we are experiencing.
I spent a decade being secretive and minimizing the abuse of my husband because I feared further abuse and his rage. At times he described how he would kill me. Mostly he threatened to leave the country with our child and I had no doubt he was capable. How could I risk telling my secrets when these consequences loomed over my head? This fear was greater than any abuse I had to absorb and it kept me stuck in the marriage. Minimizing my abuse let me survive what could not be escaped.
Others Seem to Handle Similar Traumas Better
Why am I so damn stuck in my pain when I can see others have moved past their victimization and even grown wiser and stronger?
We each have incredibly unique reactions to trauma. These are based on genetics, generational traumas, the security of our prenatal and birth experiences, our attachment to caregivers in childhood, and the resources available to us for emotional support. The factors that determine our ability to move through trauma and find healing and even growth are incredibly complex. It is useless to compare our experiences. Rather, we must compassionately honor the need to heal our minds and bodies.
We Feel Shame Because Others Experienced Worse Trauma
Traumatized individuals obsessively compare their unique experiences with others. We pinball between feeling nobody could possibly understand how awful our experiences were to feeling ashamed of making a big deal when others have it worse! Minimizing prevents us from looking dramatic or ungrateful in comparison with worse traumas.
Our culture, our families, our friends, and our communities give us constant explicit and implicit messages about the importance of being strong and independent.
You gotta be strong. Just suck it up. Don’t complain. Don’t be a sissy. Others have it worse. Be grateful. You have to just get over it. You shouldn’t dwell on things. You should be enough the way you are.
Whether or not we are consciously aware of these frequent messages, they create internal beliefs that we are broken or dysfunctional because we need help to process the impacts of our trauma. We learn a distorted view of reality and continue to carry the burdens that ruin our lives. Someone else’s worse trauma does not change the pain I feel.
The Safety of Therapy Allowed Me to Stop Minimizing Trauma
I continue to come to terms with the immense negative impact of unprocessed trauma. I catch myself not allowing any emotion into my voice when I talk about memories, or avoiding eye contact as this triggers fear. Although I still have a tendency to downplay my past experiences, professional trauma therapy has shifted this tremendously. But it took a very long time.
Processing my trauma through EMDR and somatic-type therapies allowed me to comprehend the negative beliefs I created to explain myself and the multitude of ways trauma remained in my body and ruled my life.
Although I still struggle at times, I am changing the habits and patterns I built out of shame and fear. I frequently look people in their eyes now. My body no longer shakes when I talk about hard things. My heart doesn’t race quite as fast when I socialize. I actually show up to groups and events and feel I deserve to be included, enjoying those around me. I love going to therapy appointments now, even if there are still hard areas to tackle.
It has been a long road, this healing journey through trauma therapy. It has not gone at the fast pace I strived for, but rather a pace that followed my body’s unique ability to heal. Laughter, joy, play, and fun have re-entered my life after several decades without. I feel grounded and have a strong connection to my children, my husband, and my friends. I feel connected to God instead of just trying to feel it. And I feel connected to me.