Trauma versus Stress

Not all stress is traumatic.

All trauma is stressful.

Physical and/or emotional stress isn’t traumatizing UNLESS it makes you feel less, or smaller, or more limited than you were before and that feeling persists. Things in our daily lives may be distressing, upsetting, and painful without ever crossing the line into being traumatic. These stressful events may, however, trigger a traumatic reaction but unless it leaves us feeling less free than we were before the event happened, it is not trauma.

Maté gives the following checklist for determining if an event is NOT traumatic

·       It doesn’t limit or constrict you, nor does it diminish your capacity to feel, think, trust or assert yourself, to experience suffering without succumbing to despair or to witness it with compassion

·       It doesn’t keep you from holding your pain, sorrow and fear without being overwhelmed and without having to escape into work or self-soothing/self-stimulating

·       You aren’t left with the need to aggrandize yourself or efface yourself, just to gain acceptance or justify your existence

·       It doesn’t impair your ability to experience gratitude for the beauty and wonder of life

The presence of any of these chronic constraints represents trauma’s shadow, the presence of an unhealed emotional wound (Maté.The Myth of Normal.2022).

Do any of these constraints resonate with you?