Stop Thanking Your Trauma: Focus on Resiliency Instead

Every day, we see posts on social media of graphics and stories of people who thank their trauma.

If I had never gone through this, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today.

I am so glad that I had to experience the verbal abuse from my wife. Because of her, I learned to be strong.

I just want to say thank you to the baseball coach who molested me when I was seven. Thanks to you, I am a better man than you ever were.

At first, we agree with these statements. We find joy in them - that someone could overcome their trauma and find something positive from the negative. That, even in the midst of their darkest times, trauma survivors have seen the light and come out stronger than their abusers or those who inflicted trauma. That therein lies the problem.

You should never thank your trauma.

Trauma is not good. Nothing about trauma is positive - its effects last from the moment of occurrence to the end of time. Trauma inflicted on one individual doesn’t just affect that individual - it causes a variety of negative effects in anyone who interacts with the survivor.

Effects of Trauma

Mentally, trauma affects an individual’s neurobiology. It can alter their brain chemistry as well as physically alter parts of their brain. Neurons fire at different speeds, and individuals who are exposed to trauma are more likely to suffer from serious mental illnesses and other mental ailments later in life.

Physically, trauma can affect an individual in a variety of ways. In some cases, it literally manifests physiologically - lost limbs, cuts, bruises, internal bleeds… Sometimes those physical traumas appear later, such as in cases where broken bones that never healed properly cause permanent nerve damage.

Emotionally, trauma creates scars that last forever. Individuals who experience emotional trauma tend to have a more difficult time trusting others, are slower to react to situations or appear desensitized from violence or catastrophe. The scars emotional trauma creates can last for decades, if not a lifetime. It can create dependency issues in relationships as well as outward expressions of anger.

No matter what, individuals who experience trauma experience life differently than those who do not. For many, these experiences can ultimately cause many issues in different areas of life.

However, in the circumstances where people learn from trauma - red flags in relationships, how to determine if a child is being abused, etc - people tend to think of trauma as positive. Let’s be clear, though: learning from something doesn’t make it good. In fact, things can remain bad and still retain their educational classification. For example, think of a child who touches a hot oven door (even after their parent has told them no). The child learned that touching a hot oven door hurts, and it’s bad - the fact that the oven door is so hot it can burn skin doesn’t suddenly become good because the child learned something from touching it. The oven door retains its ‘badness.’ The same goes for trauma. Trauma retains its ‘badness’ even when someone learns how bad an experience was.

So, then, how can we positively approach trauma in a productive way?

Enter Resiliency

Resiliency, known around the neurobiology field as the phenomenon that determines how people ‘bounce back’ from traumatic experiences, has only been discussed after the mid-90s. In fact, prior to this time, many people didn’t understand how trauma even affected the brain (we still don’t know everything, but we have learned much more in the past three decades than most people would assume). It’s important to understand resiliency because this is how we come out strong from trauma, not the other way around. We are not resilient because we go through trauma. We are resilient prior to trauma, and our resiliency gets us through that trauma and is responsible for how we cope after it.

However, we don’t just have an abundance of resiliency. It takes time and intentionality to build. Most philosophical and psychological associations indicate a set of ‘pillars,’ or rules, that are essential to building resilience. For the APA, those four core components include connection, wellness, healthy thinking and meaning, whereas the DLA uses mental, physical, social and spiritual. Whatever your pillars may be, they are all essential to building a strong sense of resiliency. Within these pillars, we build a platform within ourselves that we can lean on in times of need.

What does that mean for people who grow up without being introduced to resiliency? There are hundreds of newborns that are thrown into orphanages each year, and there are even more children who grow up in abusive or toxic households that do not foster a productive sense of resiliency. How do people who’ve never been exposed to resiliency make it through traumatic experiences and still come out ‘on top’?

That’s an interesting question, right? We have to understand - we are born with the keys to resiliency. And, in some ways, we develop it through trauma. We only have to look at the Romanian orphans during the Soviet Union to understand that. At various times of trauma during early developmental stages, the brain develops differently. This, of course, means that our brains develop resiliency based on our needs during that traumatic experience. For children who grow up in toxic or detached households, the parts of their brain that focus on survival techniques develop faster than the other parts of their brain. In some ways, these developments aren’t good, causing other developmental needs to take a back-burner. We saw this most often in the Romanian orphans eye muscle function. While children who grow up in toxic households might not have positive development in the areas they need, they have positive development in other areas. Their resiliency develops much differently - and much sooner.

Manifesting Resiliency

Resiliency manifests itself in healthy coping mechanisms.Those coping mechanisms include creating strong personal networks, attending counseling and exercising regularly. Individuals that strengthen healthy coping mechanisms after experiencing trauma build stronger resiliency. From there, they can look back on their traumatic experiences with strength rather than resentment. It is not the trauma itself that creates strength.

Unhealthy attempts to deal with trauma include a lack of emotional control and substance abuse. These attempts sometimes create more trauma for an individual to experience - individuals who have a lack of emotional control might not be able to hold a steady job, thus forcing them into homelessness. Those who turn to substance abuse as a coping mechanism typically end up in the prison system for possession. And, in serious cases, individuals who experience trauma that never attempt to establish healthy resiliency end up dead.

Counseling is one of the best ways you can develop resiliency. Counselors provide you with tools you need and help you analyze situations you’ve experienced. For individuals who’ve experienced trauma, this can be difficult - but we’ve seen what happens without it.

No matter what, we need to remember that trauma is not the source of strength. Resiliency, when nurtured, can get us through the toughest of times. Focus on that, not the trauma.