Do You Feel Like Your Trauma Doesn't Count?

[Ronin]

Then there's a 'but if I fix my own stuff, I'll have a lot of spoons helping those people who got it worse' trace of thought. ;)

 

[MT Johnny]

There is a verse in a Duran Duran song, 'Ordinary World', that goes:

Papers in the roadside
Tell of suffering and greed
Here today, forgot tomorrow
Ooh, here besides the news
Of holy war and holy need
Ours is just a little sorrowed talk

For those unfamiliar, it's about despair after a romantic breakup. A "lesser" type of problem from the standpoint of the writer.

That resonates with me because, I often get into the "comparison trap" in my head. I think about what other people have gone through .. rapes, murders of loved ones, brutal wars, terrible natural disasters and accidents, and I think "my traumas were an abusive father and an incompetent psychiatrist" and they do seem like "lesser" traumas.

But I think that is part of the entire devaluation of the self that comes from being abused .. it's a continuation of the "I'm not good enough" internal diaglogue. One therapist told me that I shouldn't do that, my traumas are bad to me, my story is unique, and furthermore I have a right to tthose feelings of being victimized and traumatized, even if I diminish or dismiss them.

But it's still hard to accept at times. I've met people who have survived horrible things. I've personally met 6 Holocaust survivors, two of whom survived Auschwitz and one who survived Bergen-Belson, and one who was one of the Schindler Jews, and lost the entire family. I've met people with terrible diseases, and watched a dear friend die of ALS. All of that seems so much worse than what I went through ... and yet, I mourn and grieve and fear and detest my experience, and live with the fact it shamed me, and it altered me forever in ways, some good, some bad, I never would have imagined.

 

[PlainJane]

I often feel like it doesn't count. That I'm not entitled to have these feelings. I don't deserve to have a story. I don't deserve to be on this website. So many things...

 

[Sandstone]

I was talking about this yesterday with my therapist.Yes, there are lots of times when I think none of my trauma counts, which logically I know is me minimising

But I also think there are traumas in my life that are not Trauma for me. I used the example of a time when I spent six months or more in fear for the lives of myself and my children. That doesn't seem like a big deal to me now, it's just something that happened. Other things are much more distressing. She seemed to think I should count that time too.