TRANSCRIPT
I would like to talk about the difference between trauma and adversity in our modern world. These two concepts get mixed up profoundly sometimes, blurred to the point that people don’t even know the difference between them. And yet, they are different. They’re very, very different.
So, I’d like to see if I can tease out the distinctions between the two: between trauma and adversity.
What is Trauma?
Trauma, what is trauma? In brief, trauma is something that happens to someone that is so overwhelming emotionally that they can’t deal with it. They can’t work through it. They can’t process it. It’s too painful, too horrible, too awful. There is no solution to it. They can’t speak about it. They can’t even live with it consciously. So, they have to emotionally shut down to be able to cope with it. Maybe not shut down in their whole personality, but in the parts of them that get traumatized. They have to shut down their emotions around that experience, dissociate from their emotions, split off from their feelings in that part of them that gets traumatized.
Some people get so profoundly traumatized across the board that they have to shut down most or all of their feelings. Even those are the people who become so-called schizoid—being split, split from the Greek “skits,” split so far from their feelings. It’s just because they’re so traumatized because of the horrible things that happen to them, the horrible and unprocessable things that happen to them.
But some people get traumatized in not so many profound ways. But every trauma, even a trauma that may only affect a certain small part of our personality at any given time, even that is profound and is horrible, awful, terrible, and unprocessable. And incidentally, trauma is extremely common. What I have observed is everyone I have ever met, to one degree or other, literally gets traumatized. And I use the word literally because what I mean is everybody goes through that process, to one degree or other, of facing things, often very early in their childhood, of things that are too awful to be able to process. They have to shut it down, even forget about it.
That’s sometimes part of the most extreme version of traumas: not even remembering how we were traumatized. Or if it happens when we are young enough, when we’re babies or one year old, before normal sort of conscious memories are even formed, the people don’t even know that it happened to them. They have no idea. Their behavior will express it in one way or another, often metaphorically, but consciously they have no idea that they’re even traumatized. So, that’s trauma.
What is Adversity?
Then there’s adversity. Adversity is difficult things that we face in our lives that we actually can process, that we can handle, or we have to try to handle. If something is very, very, very difficult that we face in our lives and it causes us so much overwhelm, so much emotional overwhelm, then we cannot process it, that it actually beats us, then it’s not an adversity. It’s actually a trauma.
So, actually, something that starts as an adversity can become a trauma. But then there’s the flip side. Sometimes when people face a trauma, something that overwhelms them, and later in their lives, often years or decades later, they can figure out how to process it. They can bring it up and exhume it and heal it through the grieving process—a very long, painful, difficult process.
Trauma, I believe—maybe this is a little risky for me to say, but I can say that trauma can actually then convert into something that was a delayed adversity. But I think it’s much more common the other way around. Adversities are so difficult for some people, often because they are already so traumatized in their lives that what might be an adversity for someone else who has more resources becomes a trauma for someone else.
Misconceptions About Trauma
Now, a big part of why I brought up this video is I recently heard someone say a phrase that I’ve heard many, many people say over time: that is, children need traumas in their lives to grow strong. I grew strong from the traumas I faced in my life. It makes people tough. It makes people ready to face the world. And I say totally, absolutely wrong, not true. Trauma does not make people strong. Trauma makes people brittle and weak. Trauma makes people shut down parts of themselves. It makes people less functionally able to handle the next adversity that comes in their life. Trauma rips off parts of people. It makes them often more conventional, often more normal, but it takes away their strengths. It takes away their gifts.
Some people, yes, are able to function in other ways in spite of their traumas. Other sides of them may be strong, but traumas never make people stronger. Conquering adversities makes people stronger. Think when I hear it, that’s what people are talking about. It’s usually people—when people say, “Oh, trauma’s made me stronger,” traumas make everyone stronger. Children need traumas. Those people have no idea how traumatized they actually are.
This is another thing that’s really key. A lot of people say children need traumas to be able to grow strong. That’s why I spank my kids and raise them tough and strong, blah, blah, blah. A lot of people don’t want to feel the feelings of the horrible things they went through in their childhoods. They don’t want to remember, and for a good reason. It’s so painful, it’s so horrible, and it calls into question the goodness of their primary love objects from long ago—their parents. And so they don’t acknowledge how traumatized they are. They can’t. It’s just too painful.
So what they do is they—how do we call it?—they tell a fictional narrative about their childhoods. They say, “Oh, it wasn’t so bad. I wasn’t traumatized. I just had to face a lot of adversities.” And they pretend they did overcome those adversities, but they didn’t really. They were traumatized by them, but they don’t know this. So what they do is they say it was good what I went through, even though it wasn’t good what they went through. It was horrible what they went through. Many of the terrible things—beatings or rejections or psychological torments, all sorts of abuses, even sexual abuse that people went through—oh, it was good for me. I’ve heard so many men say this: “Oh yeah, I was, you know, had sex with a teacher, or I had some older woman come on to me, or my mom did X, Y, and Z, but it was good for me.” And the porn that they gave me, this was good for me. No, it messed them up. It confused them, even traumatized them. But they say it was good.
And the beatings that they suffered—this made me strong. It was good. But they don’t empathize with the child they were. But what this does is it gives them justification to do these exact same things to the people over whom they wield power. And who do they wield the most power over? But their children. So they do exactly what was done to them unto their children, and they traumatize their children. And they say, “Oh, this is going to make my child strong. This will make him into a man when he grows up.” But really, it makes him into a broken child. It makes their child into a person who becomes a broken, partially dysfunctional adult who is so wounded and overwhelmed inside but has to hold it inside forever, potentially. And it’s not good.
It is important for parents to let their children face real adversities in life and not to shield them from adversities, but instead to give their children the tools to be able to tackle life’s adversities. And how does a parent give their child the tools to tackle adversity, be able to process it and handle it well? It’s actually pretty simple: love your children, respect your children, honor your children’s boundaries, nurture them, spend a lot of time with them, listen to them, care about them, teach them.
And also, probably as important as any of these things that I’m saying—probably more important, because this is the way for a parent to be able to do these things to their children, to give them this love and caring and attention—is to first, before they ever even have children, give these things to yourself. Love yourself, nurture yourself, heal your traumas. You want to be a good parent? You want to be able to create a resilient child who can handle adversity? Be a parent who is less traumatized—a less traumatized parent.
Begets a less traumatized child. Traumatized parents create traumatized children. No surprise, because they pass on what’s been done to them that they haven’t dealt with.
So this is what I could say in the world. And I don’t know, I’ll just end this video by saying it for myself. The best way in my life that I have learned how to be able to prepare myself to handle the adversities that come my way—and these adversities are everywhere in our crazy, difficult, competitive modern world—the way that I can handle these adversities best is to heal my historical traumas.
And the more I heal my historical traumas, by grieving them, by grieving them, this allows these split-off, dissociated, broken parts of me to get fixed. And suddenly, I become stronger. I become wiser. I become more insightful. I can self-reflect better and know myself better. And I can also see the world better for what it is, see others better for who they are, and therefore I can navigate the world better.
I know how to navigate life’s adversities better. So by healing my traumas, I become stronger, and this sets me up to be able to face the world in a stronger, more functional way. It’s true for when parents raise children in a healthier way, and it’s true in terms of how I, at 51 years old, am continuing to raise the hurt, partially traumatized little child who still lives with inside of me.
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