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Why Traumatised People Aren’t Inclined To Tell You What’s Going On

Forgive us for not believing in a benevolent universe

By The Duffers DiaryPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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Why Traumatised People Aren’t Inclined To Tell You What’s Going On
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

(Originally published on Medium.com 13/05/2021)

Something I’ve found from my own experience of PTSD, is when you have mental health issues caused by trauma, and your struggles are finally out in the open, it can be a minefield trying to negotiate your relationships.

This is made harder when you’re trying to do the best for your recovery and deal with the backwash from your extensive emotional laundry now being visible to all.

There are several reasons for this, and unfortunately, it is the reactions and responses of others that drive me screaming back to my cave.

Alongside this, traumatised people carry an unbelievable and completely unjustifiable amount of shame about what happened to them, how they have reacted to what happened to them and how it’s influenced their behaviour and progress in life. When you are in the thick of it, it is absolutely paralysing, and because you’re in full defensive mode, you are trapped.

So, what is gets in the way?

People don’t believe you

I’ve found myself spilling my guts to people only to find that they don’t really believe you and then….

People diminish your situation

This is something I’ve heard said to a lot of other people in similar circumstances, as well as myself.

“I’m the one who has been assessed by professionals, and they have told me that they believe I have insert-condition here and I’m lined up for treatment for that condition. Because I am a horrendous dyed-in-the-wool nerd, I also tend to be very well informed about my condition and how to manage it, and the subsidiary effects it has on me.”

“It could just be such and such. Have you tried yoga?”

No, it’s not that, not by a country mile, that ship sailed an epically long time ago. I’d cheerfully hand over my left leg to you to just be experiencing the much less serious condition than that you’ve just mentioned.

People use what has happened to you to undermine you in some way

While some are simply thoughtless or disbelieving, some are downright nasty. Past trauma can be used to gaslight you.

For example, someone once told me when some therapy I’d been having had come to a natural end, that I clearly wasn’t fixed yet because I expressed some grief.

The assumption was that now I’d gone through therapy, I was no longer allowed to be sad that the person had died.

As a result...

We aren’t inclined to trust people

People who have been deliberately subjected to physical and emotional harm by other people tend to be rather suspicious of…people and their motives. In part, because they appear to be using your experience as some weird kind of entertainment or will weaponize your problems against you.

We aren’t here for your scintillation

The thing is, who wants to be a walking copy of Take a Break?

If you’re unfamiliar with Take a Break, it’s one of those gossipy weekly magazines found in dentists’ waiting rooms that has articles with lurid titles like

“My son sold my left leg to buy a donkey”

“My boyfriend had sex with my entire family — including the family goat”.

My pain does not exist for your entertainment.

It can sound like oneupmanship

You know the old joke about competitive or boastful people…

“If I said I’d been to Tenerife, she would have said she’d been to Elevenerife”?

It’s a bit like that, only with misery.

It’s boring

Oh god, do I have to trot this out again?

We don’t want to relive it

I know the platitude is “better out than in”, but if one is during a crisis or having a bad patch, it’s the last thing we want to do. We have more pressing matters in hand, like not having panic attacks, trying to calm the heck down, not lash out and not do something profoundly self-destructive.

The context in which it comes out is critical, and if you’ve blurted it all out while being a snotty hysterical mess, you aren’t exactly showing your good side.

We have highly developed defensive strategies that aren’t entirely under our control

This is particularly pertinent from a PTSD perspective. I have control over one of my defence mechanisms (humor) but not the other ones (dissociation and hypervigilance). On the one hand, my sense of humor is as dark as a raven’s wing and comes in handy for witty asides at parties.

Dissociation, not so good — losing all semblance of short-term memory so the information never actually makes it into your long term memory is a nuisance. Making some very peculiar decisions because your frontal lobe has gone on holiday is less than ideal. Losing hours of your life to god-only-knows blows.

We don’t want to upset people

So, we tone down our experiences to make them palatable to other people or even don’t talk about them at all

This does hark back to my earlier point about highly developed strategies.

When you talk to someone who doesn’t know you all that well, you trot out one of your neatly curated and humorous tales of your trauma, and they are clearly shocked and upset, you feel horrible about it. As a result, we trim our tales of woe so that people don’t think that we’re that badly affected and that we’ve got over it (whatever that means).

The issue with this is that it tends to backfire. Either because you downplayed it to such an extent that they don’t pick up on the trauma or because you just didn’t tell them.

When it blows up (in everyone’s face) people are like “why the hell didn’t you tell me this?” and are horrified and angry at the lack of trust you’ve shown towards them. This is not helped by stating “But I don’t trust anybody.”, believe me…

The Takeaway

For the non-traumatised, all I’m asking is that you’re gentle in your responses and remember that the person you are talking to is likely to be at the mercy of their nervous system. To a traumatised person, when things get bad or go wrong, everything is unsettling and unsafe at times, and their reactions and behaviours may not be in character or proportional to the situation. Therefore, good and prompt treatment is vital if you can get it.

Be patient, and we’ll trust you. But remember we’ve been living our lives like a wounded bear in a cave frightening off visitors by either growling at them or pretending that we aren’t hurt at all.

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About the Creator

The Duffers Diary

Hi, I’m Christine. TheDuffersDiary.com is my weird blogging love child that’s either warm and supportive, or annoyed, sweary and funny. Burnout, stress, motherhood, music, and whatever my brain vomits up on a given day!

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