If Everything is Trauma, Then Nothing Is

Trauma, it is a deeply distressing or a disturbing experience. People will have something happen to them that hurts them for long periods of time and deal with it. Some people will now use it in casual contexts and downplay trauma. For people like me trauma is caused by keeping a secret for years and how getting close to exposing it contributed to it.

What people fail to understand is that trauma isn’t just a stunned reaction you have one day and the next day feel all better. It’s going through something one day and it still affects someone with different triggers such as bringing up something that relates to the trauma.

Keeping a secret has not only given me guilt and shame, but it has caused me to lie to people I love because the secret is something I cannot share. If I do, I’ll be exposed and that will just bring more trauma than I already have.

People aren’t educated when it comes to mental health. Even though it is preached around the world now more than ever, most people are educated on depression, anxiety, and trauma.

One way is that people will say people who have trauma are unfixable. This is simply not true as there have been many examples of people who have come back from their personal problems linked to trauma.

For me, I have been working to talk to people about my problems rather than hold it like I have been doing for many years. I have been masking everything and acting like everything is okay. That has made people assume that I am just this sweet, innocent boy when really I am a guilty mess.

This is what people seem to ignore. They think trauma is immediate and visible when really people who are going through problems are the best at acting. It is the only worry in their mind, so they have no choice to figure out ways to hide it.

Thinking trauma can be about anything is just false. It is a specific problem that hits you deeply that doesn’t change you for a day, but for years. It is something that just sticks with you like a band-aid and in this case it takes years to rip it off.

Now what does this all stem from? It is people watching movies, reading books, and other forms of fiction where they only see the drama and then the problem being resolved in a movie, especially when someone is overexposed.

When someone is overexposed, the sadness, depression you see in fiction all starts to blur together and become the same thing. Overexposure causes people to not recognize the twisted situations a character goes through or when it comes to real problems, not recognize what they’re going through.

People will see a character go through something for two hours in a movie, see them reveal a secret, and see them recover. It looks easy and then they see that many times, they start to believe that process. Well, there is a reason why it is called fiction.