You might feel like you are exaggerating your past because compared to people who grew up in less traumatic environments, it may sound exaggerated. That doesn’t make what you experienced exaggerated or less true. It simply means the contrast between your experiences and those of others is noticeable and perhaps startling.
You may feel like you are exaggerating your past even when you are stating facts and telling the truth because your experiences were consistently minimized or gaslighted by others as you were growing up. To name something for what it was can seem like you are exaggerating if you’ve always been told “that wasn’t a big deal.”
You may also feel like you are exaggerating simply because you are describing your experiences more accurately than you have in the past. When people move from saying, “My parents were strict” to describing specific behaviors and their impact, the description often feels more intense. The events themselves haven’t changed; only the accuracy with which they are being described has changed. What feels like exaggeration is actually you no longer minimizing what happened.
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
- 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
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