I think 'whining' is probably one of the most toxic words for trauma survivors, since most of us were either explicitly told or tacitly instructed to 'toughen up' when material came into our lives that was destined to become intolerably destructive.
I spent the last three years until March suffering in a job where I was so miserable that I went home and drank myself nearly to death, in the end. After I drank myself into ER for the second time in six months, and became physically aware that I had about three weeks to live, I decided to redefine 'whining' in my own terms.
I've only just got here, and only browsed a few forums, but already it's obvious how many of us have incorporated shame into our condition. It's fairly central to mine, for sure. And there seems to be a really dangerous misconception that there's a straight and unvarying 'spectrum' of who had it worst, and that people who didn't dodge mortar blasts have x% less right to feel bad, etc.
It makes no sense. There are individuals out there who perhaps got no serious trauma from the battle-zone but maybe became alcoholic when their partners left; or who can handle intimacy with maturity and insight but can't get into lifts or enclosed spaces; etc etc.
An example from my life: I guess I score pretty high for 'trauma validity' because I was sexually abused, along with a sibling, by my family doctor when I was ten. But the truth is, that's not why I'm here. I lived that entire experience, never buried it, never forgot it, and when I grew up had fantasies about giving that son of a bitch a good kicking. I internalised and integrated that decades ago.
But what completely stopped my development was being brought up by a mother with full-on, all-symptoms schizophrenia who was so good at 'passing' in public (bright, witty, professional ad popular) that no-one would guess she sealed up the cracks in her radiators to stop 'strange men' crawling through them, or saw crystals in the sky. And it took forty years to actually hear a doctor finally make that diagnosis, and to 'out' that destructive family secret.
So long as we're doing something about it, we get to whine. And since we're trying to do something about it, we are the 'responsible adults' that, for many of us, were missing when the bad stuff came down. Whine away!
