Trauma & “drama.”

There are many ways the culture tries, effortfully, to deny and disown the experiences of trauma survivors. 

One of the most frustrating of these ways is to refer to survivors expressing ourselves as “drama.” 

“Drama” is a radioactive word in our culture when referring to interpersonal dynamics. 

We all want to avoid being that “dramatic” person. 

We hear the word “drama,” and we are immediately exhausted and annoyed. 

There is this cultural narrative that some people are just “dramatic.” They make too big a deal out of things. They’re “oversensitive.” Everything is a a “thing” with them. 

Is it any wonder that the word “drama” gets flung at trauma survivors, if the goal is to silence or shame us? 

Here’s the thing: many trauma survivors have been through things that most of the world doesn’t believe actually happen. 

Many survivors have endured situations that most people assume only happen in movies. 

The actual, true stories of many survivors are, objectively, “dramatic”— not in the sense that they are overblown or pretentious, but in the realty that they involve stores of literal survival against daunting odds. 

It’s also the case that many survivors want absolutely nothing to do with being acknowledge for the courage, grit, or resilience they had to possess to just make it through. 

That is: we don’t want to be associated with the objective, heroic “drama” of our story. 

Thus, we are particularly sensitive to being associated with “drama.” 

Are trauma survivors sometimes highly sensitive or reactive? Absolutely. You would be too, if you were fielding the powerful fight, fight, freeze, fawn, or flop trauma responses that jack up our nervous systems 24/7. 

But people who don’t understand what trauma does to the human nervous system aren’t going to see that reactivity for what it is: an expression of injury, not a draw toward interpersonal drama. 

In addition to all this, trauma survivors often experience deep ambivalence about seeking support. We’ve often conditioned to conflate support seeking with manipulative attention seeking— usually by people who want us seeking neither support nor attention. 

Our abusers and bullies have often worked hard to keep us quiet about our experiences and our needs— thus they’ve quite purposefully tried to make us feel gross about seeking any kind of support. 

They know the very last thing we want is to be seen as manipulating or seeking attention— and they’re right. Thus, this conflation between support seeking and manipulative attention seeking is an extremely effective tactic to keep us from seeking any kind of visibility around our needs. 

All of which is to say: when people roll their eyes at the “drama” supposedly engendered by trauma survivors seeking support, they’re reinforcing a shame-based trope that keeps many, many survivors from reaching out for resources they deserve and need. 

I’ve never been fond of “they’re just dramatic” as a way of dismissing another person. 

Are there people out there who create interpersonal chaos for their own purposes? Sure. But if we’re going to call them out on that behavior, we can just call them out— we don’t have to feed into the cultural trope of the “drama queen” who shouldn’t be taken seriously. 

The more we stigmatize “drama,” the less accessible support and safety is for trauma survivors. 

Shaming “drama” plays right into the hands of bullies and abusers who count on our disdain of “drama” to keep us from listening to and supporting victims. 

Abuse survivors are less likely to come forward if they believe their experiences are going to be met with skepticism about whether they’re just “being dramatic.” 

If we really want to create a trauma informed culture, we should reconsider the use of “dramatic” as a pejorative.