What happened to me wasn’t bad enough

August 12, 2018 5:44 PM

Wherever we go, we take everything we’re made of.

All the things that happened in our life are a part of us, and we carry them with us into the future, whether we want to or not.

Even the bad stuff. Especially the bad stuff.

And in fact, if we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re just average people with typical experiences and the things that happened to us weren’t bad enough; we might consider taking a second look.

Because everyone has trauma. Everyone has moments that rattle their emotions, create stress, cause nightmares and provoke anxiety.

As my shrink friend likes to say, most people come from some kind of chaos and bullshit.

The question is, why don’t we give full weight to the events that shaped us?

Any number of reasons. All of which are valid.

Maybe we were excited about it at the time and it didn’t register as traumatic. Or maybe what happened to us was so buried in the distant past that we have the tendency to minimize the effect it had on us. Or maybe we didn’t realize an event was traumatic because there was no music to inform us how to feel.

Or my personal favorite, maybe we feel guilty and inadequate about our lack of suffering when compared to the horrors other people have endured, so write off our little experiences as not counting.

But it all counts. It all affects us. None of us gets a free pass out of the bewildering chaos known as the human experience.

But the sooner we accept unique pain, the sooner we can heal, and the sooner we can use what happened to us to help others feel less alone with theirs.

LET ME ASK YA THIS...