Why You Didn’t Learn Shit from Your Trauma

Forget Toxic Positivity Narrative and Focus on the Situation

The article discusses trauma and physical abuse.

From not recognizing mental health issues to acknowledging it and start healing ourselves, the world has now reached the weird place of ‘Toxic-Positivity’. This means that people feel they need to live with a positive outlook on life. they are always optimistic and chilled, with no bitterness and worries.

Some people consider toxic positivity in trauma, which forces a positive spin to shit. Here’s an article that argues that trauma is just trauma, you shouldn’t aim to learn something from it or coming out a better person from it. Your primary goal when dealing with trauma is to survive.

Why do people confuse others with fake positivity? Are there actual insights from suffering? What’s the right way to deal with pain? I’d like to add my two cents to this grand topic.

The trinity of trauma

I think the best way to see trauma in relationship to ourselves is through the metaphor of the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. They are both one united thing and three separate beings. God the Son seems to be a visible, tangible entity (Jesus), and the other two are big concepts and transparent.

Stay with me, I know you think I’m crazy right now. Trauma is the same, it’s a trinity of “humanity”, “trauma the situation” and “trauma the spirit”. They are all one united thing and three separate things. We can see and feel the “trauma of the situation”, but not so much the others. I think the point of trauma is for us to get through the situation and to see the meaning of trauma/suffering to humanity.

Let’s start with this: When you deal with the trauma, like going through therapy and other treatments, you are dealing with “trauma the situation”. It’s very true that when you’re dealing with that, your goal is to come out of it alive.

I get it, I was physically abused as a child and I had bulimia as a teenager and generalized eating disorder over the past 10 years. When I was trying to suppress the urge of binge eating and then stick my finger in my throat to puke, I had no room to deal with anything else. I really didn’t want my life to be like this forever, I wanted to come out of it healthy and happy.

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

But when you manage to win, which you will with your inner power and strength, please don’t just leave the trauma behind. You will see that behind “trauma the situation” lies “trauma the spirit”.

Why the heck do we have to suffer? Why the heck do we have to learn from suffering?

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Because the spirit of trauma is a neutral situation. “Trauma the spirit” provides the meaning of suffering.

We suffer because we react to a situation with pain. When we say this, people might get upset because it’s unfair. It wasn’t me who chose to be beaten up, it wasn’t me who chose to be racistly treated (speaking from personal experience). But it’s our choice as to how we react to this unfair situation.

Most people react with anger and pain, so much so it became a trauma that we need to heal from, this is only natural.

We are left with a lot of pain even after we manage to survive from the trauma, a broken vase put back together is not the same as a perfectly intact vase.

That’s the spirit of the trauma, how do you overcome the fact you are a broken vase, how do you improve your quality of thinking through traumatic experiences. We have to believe there’s a lesson to be learned, and there is always a lesson.

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

What “trauma the spirit” does, is to help you transcend through your emotional response to suffering, and become whole and healed within yourself. You become stronger and more resilient. You know how to help others when they are suffering. You learn it’s okay to say no. You learn that you are totally loveable.

The big picture

Lastly, if you are on the route of spiritual awakening, you might see the even bigger picture of trauma, and that’s humanity. Human is connected, one’s trauma and pain affect another person. My mum’s trauma from her mum made her beat me up the way she did. Racism to our forebearers made us suffer until today. This is humanity, a group of people united not by being homo sapiens but have shared trauma for whatever reason.

If you get to the stage in life to see this limb of the trauma trinity, then you will definitely be able to be positive. Only with this level of clarity, can positivity towards any pain be natural and not forced. In fact, when we get to this point, positive is a non-point, it’s irrelevant.

Between negativity and positivity

I definitely don’t agree with toxic positivity, in fact, I can’t care less about it. Between negativity and positivity sit a very smart philosophy, and it’s called stoicism.

Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophy that existed in Athens as early as the 3rd century BC from Seneca. I’ve scattered the insightful quotes from one of the key writers of stoicism — Emperor Marcus Aurelius throughout this article.

The primary message from stoicism is to expect the worst will happen and then realize logically that even if the worst has happened, you can still survive. In most circumstances, there’s always a solution. But if the worst is that bad that you can’t survive, then that’s really it, no? The beauty of stoicism is its both positive and negative, and neither. It’s factual rather than opinionated, it’s rational rather than emotional, and it replaces fear with ease.

It might seem very pessimistic from the outset. But as I’m going through my anxiety disorder treatment now, I find relief in diving straight into the worst-case scenarios. I think about the worst-case scenario that will happen to me. I feel absolute tragedy, loneliness, and a sense of failure. By placing myself truly there, rather than just a vague fearing of it, I suddenly and strangely feel very well. If that’s the case, it’s sad, but that’s just that.

I think sometimes therapists do the same thing. They help us to depict the layers of negative emotions, like an onion. When you get to the core, you realize it’s nothing, it’s so manageable.

Here’s a great video on stoicism:

Trauma, or any mental health issues, are complex matters. It links to the pain of so many people over generations, that caused unconscious actions that hurt us badly.

A baseless positive mindset is not helpful, and to an extent toxic. But to believe there’s a bigger lesson to learn behind the traumatic situation is a logical assumption. The question is not what, but when do you learn the spirit of trauma and the truth about humanity.

The best way to survive a traumatic situation is perhaps through a more stoic attitude to life. Explore the grey area between the extremes of pessimism and optimism, and become realistic about the worst outcome in your crisis.