Yes, you may experience an event as traumatic even if other people believe it wasn’t. This is because trauma is individual. What one person experiences as traumatic may be experienced by another person as unpleasant or awful, but not traumatic. Trauma occurs when the nervous system is so overwhelmed by an experience that it cannot cope with or process it.
Sometimes a community or a family will consider a particular action as “normal.” Perhaps it was normal to shut an upset child in a dark closet until they calmed down. Adults who think that is normal would never imagine they are inflicting trauma upon the child. But that child was emotionally distressed and instead of helping the child to cope with their emotions, the child was isolated and locked into a small dark space. Many children’s nervous systems would be overwhelmed by this and experience trauma. Some children, perhaps older children, might experience it as awful but not traumatic.
The fact that a behavior was common, accepted, or normalized does not tell you whether it was traumatic. The more important question is how your nervous system experienced it.
This page is part of the What Counts as Trauma? section of the CommuniDID site, which explains how trauma can occur without obvious violence and why survivors often doubt or normalize what happened to them.
Explore more:
- Questions about What Counts as Trauma?
- The guide What Counts as Abuse? helps readers evaluate past experiences and understand why confusion about abuse is common.
- What Counts As Trauma?
- Why It Can Be Hard to Recognize Your Own Trauma
- How Do I Know If Something I Experienced Was Traumatic?
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