I hear some version of this in most early sessions. Sometimes it comes with an apology attached. Sometimes people say it before they have told me anything at all, as a sort of disclaimer, in case I am about to be disappointed by what they have brought.
Nothing terrible actually happened. It wasn’t that bad. Other people have been through much worse.
I want to take that seriously rather than just reassuring you out of it, because I think there are real reasons people arrive believing this, and being talked out of it briskly doesn’t tend to shift it.
Where the belief comes from
Most of us have absorbed a fairly narrow idea of what trauma is. Something singular, dramatic and identifiable. An accident, an assault, a war. Something with a date.
That idea is not wrong, but it is incomplete, and it excludes almost everyone I work with. A great deal of what does long-term damage has no date at all. It is a slow accumulation of ordinary days: a parent whose mood you had to track before you came through the door, a household where your feelings were an inconvenience, being the one who was always somehow at fault, growing up with someone who was warm on Tuesday and cold on Wednesday for reasons you never worked out.
None of that gives you an incident to point to. There is no single moment you could describe to someone that would make them say, ah, no wonder.
There is a second reason, and it is more uncomfortable. If you grew up being told that you were exaggerating, or too sensitive, or making a fuss, then you have been trained out of trusting your own account of your life. The doubt you feel about whether it counts is not a neutral assessment. It is quite often the same voice that told you it didn’t count at the time, still running.
The comparison problem
The other thing people do is measure.
It is entirely understandable, and it does not work, because suffering does not sit on a single scale. There is always someone worse off, which means the comparison never resolves in your favour and you never reach the threshold where you are allowed to be struggling.
More to the point, the comparison asks the wrong question. What matters clinically is not the size of the event but what it did to your nervous system, and those are surprisingly loosely related. Two people can go through the same thing and come out differently, depending on their age, their temperament, and above all whether there was anyone there afterwards. Being alone with something is often the part that does the damage. A child who is frightened and then comforted has had a different experience from a child who is frightened and then left with it, even if what happened was identical.
So when someone tells me it wasn’t that bad, I am not really interested in adjudicating that. I am interested in what it has left them with.
What actually brings people in
Rarely the history. Almost always the present.
They cannot relax, even when nothing is wrong. They are exhausted by other people. They react to small things with an intensity that embarrasses them afterwards. They have a running commentary in their head that would count as bullying if anyone else said it out loud. Relationships follow a pattern they can see clearly and cannot interrupt. They feel much younger than they are in certain situations, and cannot explain why.
Those things are not evidence of a weak character. They are what a nervous system looks like after it has spent years adapting to conditions that required adapting. And they are workable, regardless of whether the history that produced them sounds dramatic when said out loud.
You don’t need a diagnosis to come
You do not need to arrive having decided that what happened to you was trauma. You do not need to use that word at all, and plenty of my clients never do.
You are allowed to come and say that things are harder than they should be, and that you don’t know why, and that you feel slightly ridiculous being here. That is a completely reasonable place to start. Quite a lot of the early work is often just establishing what your experience actually was, without the running edit that says it wasn’t so bad.
I would say one more thing. In my experience, the people most convinced that their difficulties do not warrant help are frequently the ones carrying the most. That is not a coincidence. Learning that your needs were an imposition is itself one of the things that happens to people, and it does not come with a date either.
If you have been putting it off
Waiting until you are certain you qualify is a long wait, and I am not sure the certainty ever arrives.
You could just come and talk about it, and we can work out together what we are dealing with. That is genuinely allowed.
I am a BACP registered integrative psychotherapist working online with adults, specialising in complex trauma. If you would like to talk about whether we might work together, you are welcome to get in touch: shabnum@shabnumhasancounselling.com
