9 Things I Learned as a Trauma Survivor to Help the Next Generation

What if healing was all you needed to do to change the world?

It took a year of my life to be able to say that I had just left an abusive relationship. I used a lot of other words during that year — words like toxic, unhealthy, and incompatible. It took twelve months to articulate that the relationship wasn’t just bad; it was emotionally abusive.

For many people, admitting to past trauma is challenging. We make excuses to explain it away. We’re reluctant to define a portion of our lives in a negative way. We find a narrative we can live with, and we try very hard not to see it any other way.

But trauma leaks through the cracks.

It shows up in our relationships. It pops up when we least expect it. Time truly doesn’t heal all wounds. It just buries them. But our emotions won’t be stopped, and the things we bury slowly rise to the surface.

9 Things I Learned as a Trauma Survivor

Part of the problem is that human beings are apt to compare traumas. We think we don’t have the right to own our trauma or work on our recovery when other people have had it so much worse. What we forget — or never knew in the first place — is that trauma isn’t measured by how bad the thing was that happened to us. It’s measured in how much it impacts our lives. It’s not comparable. Rather, it’s deeply personal.

1. All Feelings Are Valid

One thing I’ve learned, and I’ve tried to teach my children, is that all feelings are valid—even the ones that don’t feel good or don’t seem to make sense. How we feel matters. What seems like an overreaction to some people likely has deeper roots that need to be examined.

I tell my children that crying is okay and anger is a normal, valid human emotion. Emotions don’t result in disciplinary consequences, but actions sometimes do. Part of teaching what I’ve learned in healing my trauma includes understanding that I’m a lot older than they are. I can’t hold them to my same emotional depth or maturity. What I can do is make space for them to safely feel and express their feelings at an age-appropriate level. I can teach them how to cope with what they’re feeling in healthier ways. I can also teach them that seeing a therapist to get help through those feelings is a normal and healthy thing to do.

2. Recognize Triggers vs. Glimmers

I can also help younger generations understand triggers versus glimmers. We didn’t have the vocabulary for this when I was younger. Triggers are the emotional landmines that set us off. They are the things we react to — and may seem to overreact to at times. Glimmers are the opposite, in a way. Glimmers are the good things in life — the things that make us feel safe, comforted, and happy.

It’s important to understand what sets us off, but it’s equally important to understand what soothes us. This information can help us better manage and regulate our emotions. It can help us navigate relationships more easily. It’s also an essential part of self-care.

3. Boundaries Are Essential

My first therapist gave me a book by Henry Cloud on boundaries. It was my first introduction to the idea. I’d grown up in a family that had many rigid boundaries but also some loose ones thrown in. The signals were mixed, and I didn’t learn to develop healthy boundaries in my relationships. I didn’t even know what that would look like.

Boundaries are something we talk about in my house. I explain consent, privacy, and personal space. But I don’t just keep the conversation to the realm of physical boundaries. We discuss emotional ones, too. My children are allowed to have boundaries as much as I am. We do our best to respect each other and to respect other human beings, too.

This isn’t just about learning healthy relationships. Boundaries can also teach people how to avoid or reduce unhealthy interactions. My children are learning that they don’t have to people-please or be a doormat. They are learning that they get to say no, they can speak up and share how they’re feeling, and they don’t have to tolerate people who ignore their boundaries.

4. Rest is Productive

Another lesson trauma survivors can teach future generations is that rest is productive. Rest is healing. I sometimes feel like my entire generation was sold the lie that rest is lazy. Even on a day off with hours of leisure time, I still sometimes feel bad for not being productive or “making myself useful”. It’s so deeply ingrained that I have to stop myself from feeling guilty.

The biggest lesson came for me with a chronic illness. It wasn’t just trauma that made me tired. Having a chronic illness meant that I needed more sleep and recovery time when my symptoms flared. I had to learn to take things at a slower pace and to give myself more breaks. I learned that rest was essential to healing, and it was not, in fact, a waste of my time.

5. Privilege is Real

At the beginning of my healing journey, long before trauma therapy or developing a chronic illness, I thought everyone was equipped with the same bootstraps and could pull them up at any time. It was only later, as I learned about privilege, that I could see that I had white privilege along with health privilege for many years. I didn’t earn those bootstraps. I lived in a world that was made for them. I didn’t realize other people didn’t have the same opportunities.

When it comes to trauma healing, it’s important to understand that not everyone has the same access or ability to afford healthcare — mental or physical. My trauma therapist was expensive, and I was fortunate that I had the funds at the time to cover it. My medical care for a chronic illness wasn’t cheap either, and I was lucky enough to have insurance that covered most of it. Many people have trauma. Not everyone has the same access to addressing it.

6. Practice Makes Progress, Not Perfection

My children are the ones who go around correcting teachers who still say “Practice makes perfect” because they know it doesn’t. Perfect doesn’t exist. Perfect is an illusion. But practice does make progress. We can learn. We can improve. The point isn’t perfection at all.

Perfectionists generally aren’t happy people. They’re hard on others and even harder on themselves. Perfectionism often develops out of trauma. We learn that we need to be “perfect” to be loved and accepted. We see our value as something we have to earn. And it’s not healthy. What is healthy is teaching others that perfection doesn’t exist and isn’t required. Progress is enough.

7. What Didn’t Kill You Makes You Funnier (Probably)

I’m not a fan of the saying what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It does make us funnier though. My funny bone got sharpened on the things that happened to me. I choose to see the hilarity in challenging situations. If I’m honest, I’d rather laugh than cry, and humor gives me an outlet to deal with the absolute dumbfuckery (excuse the accurate language here) of my life. When everything goes wrong, I can at least see the humor in it.

My strength didn’t come from my trauma. It came from me. Frankly, I’d like to learn future lessons from softness and safety, from love and kindness. I’m really over-learning things the hardest way. So, I stopped crediting trauma as my strength, but I’ll still give it a nod of acknowledgment for my humor.

8. Healing Isn’t Linear

I’ll go for months thinking that I’m healed, and then I’ll trip and fall over some trigger I didn’t realize still existed. The process of recovering from trauma isn’t linear. Healing isn’t either. We don’t just go from A to Z. It’s three steps forward and four steps back sometimes.

We learn to make peace with it. We try to give ourselves some grace for not being over things we feel like we “should” be over or that we already got over a long time ago. We start accepting that some of the things that impacted us the most are just going to keep coming up.

Trauma therapy helped with this. I learned to integrate my past experiences in a way that stopped most of the triggers. But sometimes I miss someone I feel like I should have already gotten over. Sometimes, I’m reminded of events that broke my heart. I know I’ll spend the rest of my life healing from the experiences that make us human, and that’s okay.

9. Closure is an Inside Job

One lesson learned on my trauma healing journey has been that I can’t sit around and wait for other people to bring me closure. People from the past likely aren’t going to apologize — or even acknowledge the wrongs done. It’s not about them. Closure is an inside job — so is healing.

Other people can’t heal us, and life is too short to wait for other people before we choose to get better. Instead of waiting around for validation or apologies, I began to dive into my emotional experiences. I focused on my own triggers and how they developed. I healed, and I stopped looking outside myself for answers, reparations, or closure. I knew I didn’t need them.

Apologies and validation might be appreciated, but they aren’t necessary for healing. All that’s necessary is for us to own our emotional experiences and begin to take responsibility for our healing. The closure we’re looking for is something we can gift ourselves when we’re ready.

Trauma Recovery Continues

What’s interesting about trauma is that it usually happens in cycles. We pass down our experiences and our unhealed trauma to the next generation whether or not we mean to do it. It’s an emotional legacy that keeps going until someone decides to heal. Healing breaks the pattern and allows future generations different experiences and opportunities.

Looking back, I can see the intergenerational patterns of trauma. I understand how I inherited them, but I also understand ways to heal them. I do my part every time I work through my feelings and teach my children to acknowledge and work through theirs. We can hand down trauma, but we can also pass down healing.

It’s not just something we do with our families either. Even those who don’t choose to have children can pass along the benefits of their healing in every single healthy interaction and relationship they have. We live by example, and we bring teachable moments into tense situations with how we handle our own triggers and how we recognize and manage triggers in others. Even the smallest steps toward healing can do untold good.

Of course, we’re perfectly within our rights to deny that we ever experienced trauma or have things in our lives we haven’t healed. We can keep going the way we always have because it feels easier. It’s familiar anyway.

But trauma sneaks in through the cracks, and one day, we might be forced to face the thing we haven’t even acknowledged to ourselves. When that day comes, if that day comes, I hope you’ll be brave enough to heal even though you have to walk through the hurt to do it. I hope you’ll find the courage to do this one thing to make the world a little bit better.