Comparing your trauma to someone else’s is almost always a trap.
I can tell you from experience, that juice is almost never worth the squeeze.
It’s true that sometimes hearing others’ stories can be validating. It can help us understand that we’re not alone in what we endured. That there really were other families that functioned (such as it is) the way ours did. That there really are other people who are still alive after life tried to kill them.
But it’s also the case that hearing others’ stories can get in our head about the validity or severity of our own experience.
Many trauma survivors already struggle with feeling that we don’t have “permission” to feel what we feel.
We often struggle with feeling like our experience wasn’t “bad enough” to produce the symptoms and struggles we face now.
We’ve often been told that it wasn’t the situation that was bad— but rather, we were “weak.’
Some of us have been told that we didn’t really experience trauma— we just have a “personality disorder.”
A fair amount of the work in trauma recovery is unwiring and rewiring feelings and behavior that stem from what we were told.
We don’t need to add to that task by comparing and contrasting what we went through or how we responded to it, with what someone else went through, or how they’re handling it.
I find it useful to remind myself that, no matter what I learn about someone else’s past or trauma, I’m almost surely not hearing the entire story. I’m hearing what they remember, and/or what they’re able to express right now.
I also find it useful to remember that, no matter how someone seems to be handling their trauma, what I see is almost never the entire picture.
In the end, just like nobody knows our entire story or experience except us, we truly don’t know all the contours of somebody else’s story or experience.
Not that this fact stops Trauma Brain from trying to get us to judge the living sh*t out of ourselves based on what we do hear about others’ stories.
Trauma Brain— the internalized voices of our bullies and abusers— will almost always use someone else’s story to tell us we didn’t REALLY have it “that bad.”
Or, sometimes, Trauma Brain will play against type, and use someone else’s story as “evidence” that what we went through was SO bad, there’s no POSSIBLE way we can “recover”— so we might as well not try.
What I want you to notice about that is, Trauma Brain doesn’t actually care about how our experience stacks up against someone else’s.
It just wants us to judge and hate ourselves, and give up on recovery.
Be mindful when you’re exposed to others’ stories of trauma and survival and recovery.
Remember that, no matter what anyone else endured, you still absolutely have the right to feel what you feel and need what you need.
Your injuries are your injuries. They don’t change because someone may have had it “better” or “worse.”
Trauma survivors very often end up bonding over our shared experiences of pain (which is not a “trauma bond,” by the way— that term refers to what happens when a survivor is coercively bonded to an abuser on whom they are dependent). And it’s true that some of our biggest supports in this trauma recovery can be other survivors.
Just be careful Trauma Brain doesn’t sucker you into competing in the Trauma Olympics. That is a very reliable recipe for a spiral.
Breathe. Blink. Focus.
And remember your recovery truly is YOUR recovery.
