You may feel guilty when you think about or talk about your experiences as “trauma.” While this can come in the form of many different reasons, they can be categorized into six groups.
Comparison
You may feel guilty calling it trauma because you compare your experiences to people who experienced more obvious or severe forms of trauma. When you focus on what you did not experience, it can be easy to overlook the impact of what you did experience.
Invalidation
You may feel guilty calling it trauma because you were taught that your experiences were not important. If you were repeatedly told you were overreacting, too sensitive, or making a big deal out of nothing, you may have learned to doubt your own perceptions.
Attachment and Loyalty
You may feel guilty calling it trauma because doing so seems disloyal to people you care about. Acknowledging trauma can sometimes require recognizing that important people hurt you, failed to protect you, or were unable to meet your needs.
Misunderstanding Trauma
You may feel guilty calling it trauma because you have a narrow definition of what trauma is. Many people assume trauma must involve physical violence, life-threatening events, or PTSD, when trauma can result from many experiences that overwhelm the nervous system.
Avoidance of Painful Realizations
You may feel guilty calling it trauma because doing so can bring difficult emotions to the surface. Recognizing trauma may involve grief, anger, sadness, fear, or acknowledging losses and unmet needs that are painful to face.
Trauma-Related Unworthiness
You may feel guilty calling it trauma because trauma taught you that your needs, feelings, and suffering did not matter. For some survivors, acknowledging trauma feels selfish, dramatic, or wrong because it requires recognizing that what happened to them mattered and that they deserved better.
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?
- Why Trauma Survivors Minimize What Happened
- Common Ways Trauma Survivors Minimize What Happened
- What Counts As Trauma?
- Why Do I Blame Myself for what Happened?
- Why Do I Believe My Pain Doesn’t Matter?
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