You did not “choose” your trauma.

You did not “choose” your trauma. 

You did not choose to be abused. You did not choose to be neglected, physically or emotionally. 

You did not choose how your trauma impacted you. 

And you do not choose the symptoms and struggles you experience today. 

You’re going to run into plenty of people who will feed you some version of “you chose that” and/or “you’re choosing this”— but it just ain’t so. 

If we truly could “choose” what happens to us and/or how it impacts us, don’t you think we would choose something very, very different? 

We absolutely would. Every time. 

Yet, the “you chose that” myth refuses to die. 

It mostly refuses to die because our culture has a highly conflicted relationship with control. 

We love control. We kind of worship control. 

Who do we consider to be awesome in our culture? Those people who can “control” themselves. 

We worship physical fitness in our culture, largely because we associate fit bodies with “control” and “self discipline.” We assume people who are fit are able to “control” their appetite and their behavior in specific ways. 

We worship wealth and celebrity, at least partly because we assume millionaires and celebrities experience a degree of control over their lives that most of us don’t.

Conversely, we absolutely scorn people we perceive to lack “control.” 

We scorn poverty, at least partly because we assume poor people must lack agency and control, over themselves and their destiny. 

Every time we brand someone a “loser,” what we’re really saying is that they lack control. 

We scorn addicts, because we assume they must lack control over their cravings. 

We are f*cking obsessed with control here. 

We’re so obsessed with it that we fantasize that we have control over things we couldn’t possibly have control over— such as how we were treated and related to when we were young or otherwise vulnerable. 

We hate— absolutely hate, hate hate hate— the very idea that things could happen to us and impact us that we have zero control over. 

Of course, everybody reading this blog knows the truth about that. Things happen to us and impact us all the time, that we have literally zero control over. 

But the culture doesn’t like that. The culture doesn’t accept that. The culture is in deep, deep denial about that. 

The culture FEARS the basic lack of controllability of the human experience. 

So they project that fear and hate toward survivors of trauma. 

Hence, the victim blaming that saturates our culture at every. F*cking. Turn. 

You need to know: none of this is about you. 

This is entirely about “them,” and their refusal to see what they see and know what they know. 

You are not “choosing” your symptoms and struggles. You ARE choosing to understand them, manage them, and recover from them. 

You did not choose what happened to you once upon a time. You ARE choosing to develop skills, tools, and philosophies that decrease your vulnerability NOW. 

Do not get up in your head about all these f*cked up messages the culture floods us with, about control and “choice.” 

You look for the little pockets of choice and influence you DO have, in your everyday experience. 

Look for the wiggle room. 

That’s where your agency is. That’s where your recovery is planted and grows. 

Breathe; blink; focus.