When what happened to you “wasn’t that bad”
by Cassie Connor January 13th, 2025
One of the most common barriers to recovering from past traumas, in my experience working with people, is a denial of the impact our experiences have had on us.
It is now well-known in the trauma world, that trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens within us as a result of what happens to us (see: Gabor Maté if this is something you’d like to explore in more depth). We may feel that what happened to us “wasn’t that bad”, other people have it worse, we should be grateful. We are painfully aware of the suffering in the world and we feel we haven’t earned our trauma badge.
Do you know what the word trauma comes from? It comes from the word wound.
Surely, we can agree that we all have wounds. “~Nobody gets out alive~”, as they say. Living in this world of constant change brings loss to all of our doorsteps at one time or another. Yes, of course, there are some wounds more impactful than others. But we surely wouldn’t deny somebody the materials needed to clean and close a wound, telling them to come back when it is worse, would we?
Especially when these dynamics form in childhood persist, and just like most untended wounds or injuries, they fester. Perhaps, these wounds show up in our relationships, our dreams, our bodies, our thoughts and beliefs. Untended, our past wounds can become like a poison to our lives.
You don’t need to have a PTSD or C-PTSD diagnosis to work through your past hurts and how they may still be harming you, or those around you, now. You don’t need a catastrophic story. We need not engage in the trauma olympics 🙃. There is no scarcity to be had when it comes to healing.
Whatever size and shape, your wounds matter, and they deserve tending. And like all injuries, the sooner the better.
Why do we deny our own pain?
We may have been called dramatic, attention-seeking, or had our pain denied in other ways. The people around us may not have had the capacity to sit with us in the reality of the darkness we’ve experienced, and so we’re taught to seek the “silver lining”, to move on and get over it. We learn to “shut ourselves up”, so to speak.
Trauma stemming from assault, abuse or neglect has a way of making us believe at our core that we don’t matter. Thus, our pain doesn’t matter. We might learn to believe that nobody cares. Throughout our lifetimes, we collect experiences that reinforce this tempting lie.
We may not have had a safe and supportive environment, or the skills and guidance needed to heal and recover, so, brilliantly, our body blunts the reality of these hurts. This is a survival strategy that can be lifesaving. We may not have had time to sit and lick our wounds. We may have had to keep working, keep parenting, and keep holding things together in some way. Knowing that facing the reality of what we have endured would completely overwhelm us, our bodies can obscure these realities from us, tucking them away to be dealt with later. It is a kindness that allows us to carry on, but it is generally temporary and sometimes costly.
You can heal, and you are worthy of the effort that it takes
Usually, this material will eventually reveal itself to us again. In my experience, it comes back as if to say: “can you hold this yet?”.
It is a painfully ironic reality that very often when we have achieved relative safety, security and support that these old hurts show up on our doorstep, asking to be heard. It can be frustrating, because we have been through the wringer and we want so badly to enjoy the good moments. Of course we do.
And also — how intelligent of our bodies to know what we can handle? How caring of them to hold our memories for us, slowly feeding them to us when we have the stomach to digest them?
Working as a therapist, I bow humbly to the bodies own timing. When it comes to addressing past wounds or trauma, we need not “rip the bandaid off”. We build the capacity to hold what needs holding and we let the body reveal what it must. We ask internally what needs to be heard and we give the space for it to emerge in its own time. The gentle and responsive pace of the progress is often the antithesis of the traumatic experience, and that is an excellent first step. This gentle pace says softly: “I’m ready when you are”.
Returning to old memories can be painful, of course. We learn to listen. We learn to react with care. We learn to say to ourselves what should have been said long ago.
We say: I believe you, you matter, that should have never happened to you, you deserved better. We say: your pain matters here. Your love matters here.
In these times where the memories are coming, and we are spilling over with material to process — in general, these are times to let it move through us when we can handle it. Be angry. Be sad. We write it, move it, speak it, as many times as we need. We give it as much space as we can.
And, when this is too much (as it can be), we step out of it. We allow ourselves to focus elsewhere. We know we can come back. Healing can’t be rushed or forced.
Most importantly, it is a time to seek help from a mental healthcare professional. Somatic (body) knowledge about the nervous system is a tremendous resource for your therapist to have in this process, because trauma impacts the whole mindbody system.
However, the most important thing is that you feel seen, you feel comfortable, and you trust the person you are working with. The strength of the therapeutic relationship is the greatest predictor of treatment outcomes, so it’s important to keep looking until you find the person that feels right to you.
We are here to accompany you in the process, to hold with you what needs holding, to make steps towards healing one by one.